[headquarters]

Originally Posted by Jason Weiser

As the board's resident Jew...or at least the only one that I know of....

The tradition really doesn't have any clear origins. I always thought sociologically that it was a case of well, in the mideast, there isn't a whole lot of flowers, because any piece of land that grows anything is going to be used to grow food, so, in that basic human need to remember the dead, we left stones instead, and even after the diaspora, the tradition stuck, even if we'd forgotten why.

A way of caring for the grave and the remains - at the same time a way of honouring the memory of the ones that are gone .