I prefer cremation, not because it's a foretaste of my afterlife (as Mark Twain wrote), but because it's clean and takes up little earth. Actually, I'd like to placed on top of all my possessions, my wife by my side, on a dragon ship, and send blazing out to sea. My wife objects to this for some reason I just can't fathom.

I believe that the Jaines put corpses on the tops of towers called "Towers of Silence" where the bodies are eaten by buzzards. Many American Indian nations besides the Choctaw put bodies in trees or on platforms. Others, such as the Navaho, would sneak the bodies out and place them in fissures or hidden places, doing their best so that the chindi, or ghost, wouldn't be able to find its way back.

The last is related to the custom in some European cultures of taking the corpse out through a window or through a door backwards.

Suttee was practiced in India (and rumor has it that it still is, sometimes).

Lots of death customs....

I've read that Jenghis Khan's tomb was hidden and that everyone that took the body there or knew where it was was killed. Supposedly, the epitath reads, "Many would be unhappy if I were still alive," but I wonder how they know?