Charnel house

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A charnel house (Med. Lat. carnarium) was a place for depositing the bones which might be thrown up in digging graves. Sometimes, as at Gloucester, Hythe and Ripon, it was a portion of the crypt; sometimes, as at Old St Paul's and Worcester (both now destroyed), it was a separate building in the church-yard; sometimes chantry chapels were attached to these buildings.

Viollet-le-Duc has given two very curious examples of such ossuaires (as the French call them), one from Fleurance (Gers), the other from Faouet (Finistere).

A Charnel House is also a structure commonly seen in some Native American societies of the Eastern United States. Major examples would be the Hopewell cultures and Mississippian cultures. These houses were used specifically for mortuary services and although they were much more expensive to build and maintain than a crypt, were very popular. They offered privacy and shelter as well as enough workspace for mortuary proceedings. These precedings included cremation (in the included crematorium) as well as defleshing of the body before the cremation. Once the houses had served their purpose they were burned to the ground only to be covered by earth creating a sort of burial mound.

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