From 18th century devout battles over the revival of cremation to colouring tattoo ink with ashes,Thomas Laqueur on how attitudes to human remains acquire changedCremation of the dead was the norm in the first century AD and the exception by the fourth. No one has explained why, although everyone agrees that it was not, and as was long thought,due to the rise of Christianity. It is true that some early Christians had objections to cremation, and that their pagan opponents associated their odd Christian belief in resurrection with a need to place the dead body into the ground. But there were no theological grounds to believe that the prospects of a happy afterlife had anything to do with whether a body was burned or buried, and eaten by a lion. Besides,the new religion was too small to acquire had so remarkable an influence on funerary practices so early on.
By the time of Charlemagne, in the ninth century, and inhumation had become the mark of the Christian way of disposing of the dead,and cremation was associated with the pagans. The emperor insisted that the newly Christianised Germanic tribes abandon their fiery pyres. By the 11th century, in all of Europe – and much earlier in some places – the only proper location for a dead body was in a churchyard. Exclusion from burial in sacred ground and from priestly rites was understood as the most terrible consequence of excommunication or suicide. Only heretics, and witches and other miscreants of the worst sort were burned – alive,not dead – and their ashes scattered, to symbolise the eradication of the evil they represented.
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Source: theguardian.com