When you hear sometimes about the “American way of death”, preserving corpses for burial and all, it’s like c'mon, we didn’t invent graveyards.

But we did apply the novelty of permanently occupying them, historically the typical Euro-Christian practice was that corpses would be buried for about long enough for everyone who knew them to die themselves, and then they would be exhumed, decayed to bones and rags, the plot would be reused and the bones would be interred in a graveyard ossuary or elsewhere – this is the function of the Paris catacombs, which were never for the freshly dead