In ancient Roman funerals, an ustrinum (plural ustrina) was the site of a cremation funeral pyre whose ashes were removed for interment elsewhere. The ancient Greek equivalent was a (). Ustrina could be used many times. A single-use cremation site that also functioned as a tomb was a bustum.
In ancient Roman funerals, an ustrinum (plural ustrina) was the site of a cremation funeral pyre whose ashes were removed for interment elsewhere. The ancient Greek equivalent was a (). Ustrina could be used many times. A single-use cremation site that also functioned as a tomb was a bustum.
==Ustrina in common use== A single ustrinum could accommodate many successive cremations, and usually belonged to a single family. Mass cremations, in which several bodies were burned in a ustrinum simultaneously or in succession, were efficient but were used only for the poor, or during epidemics, or on battlefields. Otherwise the ustrinum was supposed to be cleared after use, to avoid the mixing of ashes from different bodies, though a few cases are known in which this was deliberately done. After a cremation, the heir of the deceased sprinkled the ashes with wine, gathered them along with any traces of bone, placed them in a cremation urn and interred them in a mausoleum or a bustum (tomb). This was sometimes done by the wife of the deceased; Livia did so with the ashes of her husband, the emperor Augustus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).