As settlement patterns change, both traditional cemeteries and Memorial Parks are impacted. The choices made in selecting locations for cemeteries change through time and are subject to changing social conditions. Attributing cemetery abandonment to one factor with a simple and generalized explanation is a misrepresentation of complex changes in settlement patterns, life ways, and world views. Because settlement patterns (and cemeteries) are situated in space and time, location, timing and social data are essential for an investigation of traditional cemetery abandonment.
To understand the sometimes bizarre placement of traditional cemeteries as well as the more modern Memorial Parks as we see them today, we must view the placement of burial locations within the context of changing/evolving cultural concepts towards “a place for the dead” through time.
Places for disposing of human remains are designated in accordance with the culturally accepted concepts about death at a particular time and place, and those concepts will evolve with the changing views of the society and its culture over time. And just as there are culturally accepted viewpoints for finding “a place for the dead”, in every society there are also culturally accepted methods of abandoning cemetery landscapes (though in modern societies it is frequently unpopular to consciously recognize these cemetery abandonment processes). These cemetery abandonment processes, too, will evolve through time as a result of changing social cultures. By recognizing these changing social attitudes and behaviors towards cemetery location designation and abandonment as they change through time, the intertwined relationships of earlier infrastructures and evolving attitudes toward “a place for the dead” can be unraveled.
The call for place-based analysis now rings widely from the sustainability sciences to post-modern humanist scholars. Though differing in their ultimate aims, these calls emphasize the need to situate the problem of finding “a place for the dead” and the processes that have influenced these placements through time within the space-time scales in which they operate in order to understand the variations in the seemingly random and bizarre locations for cemeteries that we see today.
Understanding such variation, in turn facilitates an array of interests, from analytical perspectives seeking to deconstruct the “average” or offer insights from “different voices” to decision and policy making. A deconstruction of spatial, temporal and social factors that adversely impact traditional cemetery landscapes, facilitates the reconstruction of the role of cemetery placement or “a place for the dead”.