When we hear the word cremation, we usually picture the modern funerary rite or perhaps the Greco-Roman practice, with ashes carefully gathered in a single urn and placed somewhere meaningful by loved ones. But this funerary rite is far older and diverse than we thought. It was already practiced thousands of years ago in what we know as Prehistoric societies of Europe.
For decades, archaeologists knew that cremated remains were part of prehistoric rituals in northern Europe, in well-known sites like Stonehenge (England) or Newgrange (Ireland). In the Iberian Peninsula, however, the story seemed different. Until recently it was thought that cremation appeared there only in the Late Bronze Age, around 3,300 years ago, with the arrival of new people from central Europe known as the Urnfield culture.
Recent discoveries at the cemetery of Los Milanes in Abla, Almería, have overturned this assumption. Archaeologists have shown that the first cremation rituals in the region date back 4,800 years—around 1,500 years earlier than previously believed.
The cremated remains have been studied through a combination of analytical approaches: a detailed anthropological study to interpret the burning patterns, infrared-spectroscopy (FTIR-ATR) to study burning intensity, isotopic analysis (Carbon, Oxygen and Strontium) to explore burning and pre-burning conditions, and radiocarbon dating to establish absolute chronology.
Los Milanes is a megalithic cemetery in Abla, Almería (Spain), composed by at least 18 collective tombs. Since 2023, three of these tombs had been excavated: Tomb 12, which had been looted in the past, Tomb 18, containing multiple inhumations, and Tomb 8, where. during the first campaign in 2023, an exceptional find was made. Inside the chamber of this tomb thousands of cremated human remains were uncovered. After two years of careful anthropological study, we know that Tomb 8 at Los Milanes contained nearly 28,740 bone fragments and over 1,209 teeth fragments belonging to at least 21 individuals, both males and females, and including three children under twelve years old.
The anthropological and chemical analyses revealed distinct burning patterns, Fire had affected the left side of the skeletal remains in a differential manner, indicating a deliberate lateral positioning of the bodies on the funerary pyres. Furthermore, the presence of a chemical compound known as cyanamide in the calcined remains suggests that the bodies may have been cremated while wrapped with some type of shroud. The burial was used as a place of interment for several generations over a period of no more than 200 years, chronologically dated to the early centuries of the third millennium BC.
Taken together, these clues reveal a complex, deliberate funerary practice: the selection of individuals, their placement on the pyres, the use of textiles, the careful gathering of burned remains, and their final collective deposition inside the megalithic tomb. The whole process had to occur not long after death, and the chamber itself served as a collective tomb for a period of two centuries, spanning several generations.
This discovery implies a reconsideration of funerary rituals in Late Prehistory. It demonstrates that different funerary rites—inhumation and cremation—were practiced by the same communities within the same burial spaces, revealing a far more complex and ancient story of the use of fire for the disposal of dead.
PhD candidate in Archaeology from the University of Granada (Spain) and Tübingen (Germany). Her research focuses on funerary practices in Late Prehistory Iberia, mobility studies in megalithism and collective cremation analyses.