How you were disposed of at death in Bronze Age Britain depended upon who you were and what your family and community believed. Burial practices also changed with time and region. It is possible that only a fraction of people were given formal burials that we can recognise in excavations. It is easy to be distracted from this point by the spectacular funerary arrangements of some graves.

Individual crouched burials accompanied by a ceramic Beaker or Food Vessel and sometimes ornate objects such as metalwork, jewellery and fine stone objects, are known throughout Britain from 2500-1600 BC. The tradition of cremating bodies and placing the ashes in a pot for final burial is known in several variations. These involve Food Vessel Urns and Collared Urns from at least 2100 BC, Cordoned Urns from around 1900 BC and Deverel-Rimbury and similar wares from 1700 BC. Towards 1700 BC there is a fundamental shift from a complex mix of inhumation and cremation burials to cremations only. From 1200 BC, cremated bone fragments are found in settlements and ditches. River burials are also thought to have occurred during this time. The construction of mounds over many of the earlier burials led to some landscapes being dominated by remains of the dead whose presence would have helped shaped the lives of the living.