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. Gloucester (pronounced ) is a city and district in south-west England, close to the Welsh border. ... There are several places named Hythe: In England: Hythe, Kent (a large village) Hythe, Hampshire (a town) Hythe End a village, now part of Staines In Canada: Hythe, Alberta (a village in Canada) This is a disambiguation page — a navigational aid which lists other pages that might otherwise share the... Ripon is a small cathedral city in the Harrogate borough of North Yorkshire, England, 214 miles NNW from London. ... Crypt is also a commonly used name of water trumpets, aquatic plants. ... St Pauls Cathedral is a cathedral on Ludgate Hill, in the City of London in London, and the seat of the Bishop of London. ... The city of Worcester (pronounced ) is a city and the county town of Worcestershire in England. ... Chantry is a term for the English establishment of a shrine or chapel on private land where monks or priests would say (or chant) prayers on a fixed schedule, usually for someone who had died. ...

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). Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc (Paris, January 27, 1814 - Lausanne 1879) was a French architect, famous for his restorations of medieval buildings. ...

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. An Atsina named Assiniboin Boy Photo by Edward S. Curtis. ... Hopewell culture is the term used to describe common aspects of the Native American culture that flourish along rivers in the northeastern and midwestern United States from 200 BC to 400 A.D. At its greatest extent, Hopewell culture stretched from western New York to Missouri and from Wisconsin to... The Mississippian culture was a mound-building Native American culture that flourished in the Midwestern, Eastern, and Southeastern United States from approximately 900 to 1500 CE, varying regionally. ... Look up mound on Wiktionary, the free dictionary. ...

References

• This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.