Just go to Babbel.com and use promo code Tides. That's B-A-B-B-E-L.com code Tides. The shift to cremation happened all over Europe, and it happened rapidly. Over the course of anywhere between one and four generations, depending on precisely where we're talking about, sometime in the mid to late 2nd millennium BC, again, depending on the specific location. The archeologists, Marie-Louise Stig-Sorensen and Katarina Rebe Salosberry, whose excellent recent book, Death and the Body in Bronze Age Europe, I'm drawing on throughout this whole section, put it like this. Quote, burial practices were fully changed from an inhumation ritual focused on the wholeness of the body to a treatment of the body that dealt with it as fragmented, containable, and contained in an urn. This wasn't just a matter of fashion. Fundamentally changing the way in which a society deals with its deceased members speaks to some much, much bigger issues. Those issues include not just what bodies are and what they mean, but also how people interact with forces greater than themselves. The relationship between the body and the soul, broadly speaking, and the relationship between the present and eternity. But exactly what was happening when people decided to start cremating rather than burying their dead, varied a great deal from place to place. The introduction of the new burial rite fit itself into a patchwork of Bronze Age societies that spoke different languages, practiced different systems of belief, operated with different subsistence patterns, functioned at different scales and organizational levels, and had different attitudes toward hierarchy and leadership. The same thing didn't happen everywhere at the same time, and that's why we can't really speak in terms of a quote unquote, urnfield culture, much less urnfield people whom we might be tempted to identify as proto-kelts. Middle Bronze Age Europe on the cusp of the urnfield phenomenon wasn't a homogenous place. In the Carpathian Basin, in the east, the mostly flat plains sandwiched between the Alps and the west and the Carpathians, we can see a distinct settlement hierarchy, with everything from large, nucleated towns with hundreds of inhabitants down to single-family farmsteads. The Alps were characterized by lakeside villages and occasional large fortifications, probably associated with metal mining and trading operations, and the elites who controlled them. Most of the rest of Europe, by contrast, lacked large sites and fortifications. People tended to live in either small villages or on isolated farmsteads, quite often in large timber long houses that contained an extended family of perhaps ten individuals, so not just a nuclear family, but also uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents. That's what we would call a dispersed settlement pattern based on the kin group and household, but that doesn't mean that people were totally isolated from one another. They traded specialized tools, bred their livestock, married with another's children, and occasionally came together to build monuments such as large burial mounds. Longer distance connections came in the form of the metal trade, wandering storytellers and metal workers, and of course warfare, raiding, and slave trading. We honestly don't know much about how bronze-age Europeans conceived of their identities, or even what languages they spoke.