According to this wikipedia article as of 2/20/10 there are around 6.8 billion living people on earth. It is estimated that there are 100 to 115 billion people who have ever lived. In other words there are a LOT more dead people than alive people.
I can’t speak for the rest of the world because I have not traveled there, but I have been to almost half of the United States, the south and midwest. I have visited urban, suburban, and rural areas of these states…and let me tell you that I see waaaay more live people than tombstones. Looking at graveyards themselves on a map, they take up a lot less space than the “live sectors”.
So where are all of these dead people? I know there’s cremation, but that isn’t a very popular death custom in the U.S. and never has been, right?
They also recycle the space in cemetaries. Not in the USA so much because we have a lot of space, although there’s a lot of it here, too, but in Europe and for all I know the rest of the world they regularly disinter and remove the bones of the graves previous occupants to make room for new ones (because by that point they have been reduced to bones.)
How many people who lived 1,000 years ago still occupy space in a cemetery? (or the equivalent like a burial mound) Very few. Their bodies have been recycled, and nothing marks where they were buried, except for an elite few.
Ever see a slave graveyard? There are a few here and there, but most were stuffed into unmarked graves and quickly forgotten. Sticking to the African American theme, some graveyards were themselves buried and reused.
For locations outside of the US, “Today overcrowding is still a problem in England and Wales, even though 70-80% of the dead in the UK are cremated. In some African countries, cemeteries are nearly full; cremation is becoming the only option for most. New Zealand and England face similar overcrowding, and may permit the lowering of older graves so that new bodies can be buried above them. In China, a People’s Daily article complains that “the haphazard placing of tombs occupied a large area of cultivable land, causing a rampant waste of farmland, a heavy financial load on the living and serious soil erosion.” Over 100 million old tombs have been leveled, according to the paper, in order to free up 6.7 million hectares (roughly 16.5 million acres) of arable land. In Greece, the bereaved are forced to rent burial plots for just three years because the demand has driven the price of a burial plot to 150,000 euros ($179,000 USD). In March 2006, the Greek government passed a law permitting cremation to ease the crisis.”
In the US, I’d imagine a combination of a relatively young country, combined with the sheer size, results in a low dead to living ratio.
Now that the question has been answered in a serious manner…
They were yummy.
No really, bodies don’t stick around. They decay fairly rapidly if steps are not taken to preserve them or the place they are buried isn’t one of those rare spots where they won’t rot.
Add to that the number of people cremated, the number buried in catacombs underground, the number whose bodies have been completely recycled through time. In some places, bodies are buried in the same graves as other bodies - stacked like cordwood.
And anyway, we’re not talking about a lot of space here. A typical burial plot takes up about 32 sq ft (4’ X 8’). A square mile can therefore hold 871,200 graves. If you had to bury 100 billion people today, giving each one a standard plot, you could do so in an area about 340 miles on a side. The entire population of the Earth today could be buried in an area of about 80-100 square miles - which is about the size of Toledo, Ohio.
If you really needed the space, you could bury them vertically and cut the area needed by at least half.
Or think of it this way - a dead person uses up 32 square feet. An average city lot occupied by the living is 100 times that size, and a live person might use up a couple of hundred feet at the office, and use up a percentage of public spaces like roadways, shopping malls, and parks. Dead people aren’t as demanding.
Honestly, I think the people of the future will look back at this time period with our embalmed corpses sealed in elaborate rot-resistant coffins and think that we had a very bizarre view of death and the dead. The speculation of archeologists will probably be wildly inaccurate and extremely humorous.
I happen to know that some 87,000 people are buried in the 16 acre General Cemetery in Sheffield(65,000 square metres) giving some 1.3 metres squared per person – or somewhat less taking into account paths and the two chapels. This isn’t the whole story of course, paupers were generally crammed in together in greater density. One grave in particular is thought to hold 80 or 90 people. They were not all buried at once but in batches separated by a couple of decades, giving time for the earlier corpses to have collapsed down into a smaller space. It should be noted however that many of them would have been infants or young children whose bodies, as well as being smaller in the first place, decay at a faster and more comprehensive rate due to their smaller and softer bones.
So, even in the crowded conditions of a Victorian industrial city, the dead took up considerably less space than the living. Nonetheless the cost of land does make cremation an attractive option these days.
*Edited to add *that I hadn’t seen Sam Stone’s post which makes similar points from another direction. I would add though that most burial plots contain several family members.
In your food and water, among other places. The human corpses that are wholly or even partially confined to cemeteries set apart from ordinary use by living people mostly date from the last few thousand (and mostly the last few hundred) years.
Most very early humans have been, as Sam Stone noted, recycled into their environment, and most of the molecules in their bodies are now part of the earth, water, and other substances that we use today.
The assumption is that they are where they are supposed to be. I worked with a guy who lived across the street from a cemetery. One summer morn ,4 am or so, he heard a back hoe digging. He walked across the street and saw the workers dumping a bunch of caskets into a huge hole they dug. He called the cops and it was a major story for quite a while. The workers of course said it was the first time they did it. The owners of course knew nothing about it. The cemetery was sold soon after.
In terms of the human species, those who get special one-person graves and who have headstones are very much the minority.
Most people live in poor places, where very few people end up with a cemetery plot or permanent memorial. Bodies or ashes straight into a hole in the ground: pretty soon, nothing remains but dirt.
Leeds Beckett Street cemetery is 16 acres, and has 180000 interments.
Which is an even higher density than that of Sheffield - due partly to the practice of using double sided gravestones - the houses and the graves in Leeds were back to back. I don’t imagine that most Americans would get that little attempt at black humour.
If you look at the Leeds Cemetery company, the graveyard there holds around 93000 burials, yet you can walk around the border of it in perhaps less than 15 minutes, it is quite a lot smaller than Beckett Street cemetery.
Its also worth noting that this was actually considered a higher standard than the Leeds Parish Church.
If you look at the older maps of most UK Victorian cities you would find many churches long gone, the the populations having moved and many graveyards have been developed, mostly into industrial and retail parks, or road widening schemes.
Think of all of those battles in England, or the wars in which it participated, and then wonder where all the dead were buried.
I have seen estimates that put the total number of war, and consequential deaths and various repressions for the 20thC alone to be 140 millions.
In the Battle of Towton Moor in Yorkshire there were more battle deaths in one day than at any time in British history - even more than the first day of the Somme, and yet, despite over 28000 there have only been a few dozen remains of the dead found, no-one knows about the rest, maybe they are waitning to be discovered, more likely they were set to a huge pyre.
Oh, that’s gross! Careful clicking on that link. I thought perhaps it was caskets or tombs that were on display… wasn’t ready for the mummified baby picture.