In modern times, the use of charnel houses is a characteristic of cultures living in rocky or arid places, such as the Cyclades archipelago and other Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.
The site lies at the foot of what some believe to be the biblical Mount Sinai where Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe Moses received the Ten Commandments.
The difficulty in establishing a large cemetery in the rocky ground notwithstanding, relics are also gathered for temporal and spiritual reasons: a reminder to the monks of their impending death and fate in the hereafter.
Anthropologist William F. Romain in Mysteries of the Hopewell notes that these charnel houses were built in the form of a square, and their diagonals could be aligned to the direction of maximum and minimum moon-sets both north and south.
Because they were associated with the Catholic Church, using charnel houses fell out of practice after the Reformation to the point that modern people barely knew they had existed.
"[5] During the 1950s reconstruction of St. Bride's Church in Fleet Street, a medieval charnel house was uncovered, "containing an estimated 7000 human remains organised in a chequer-board pattern.