Hello friends, thanks for joining me again! I haven’t had too much time to write fun blog posts recently, as I’ve been working super hard trying to get all the edits completed on my dissertation! I’ve got some fun travel coming up this year though, so I’m hoping to plan some posts around that! Today’s post isn’t about travel or fieldwork though…it’s another publication announcement!
Yesterday, I met with Boulder Books to go over and sign my book contract to write a guidebook to cemeteries and burial sites in eastern Newfoundland. I’m so excited! Boulder is an amazing local publisher here in Newfoundland and Labrador who publishes amazing local guides, memoirs, cookbooks (the Grounds, anyone??), history, and more, and I feel super lucky that they had heard of my work with cemeteries around the province and were interested in going into this project together.
Goats (and a sheep) of New Perlican, at St. Augustine Cemetery #1 (photo by author 2022). Continue reading →
Exciting news, friends! I’m pleased to announce the release of my second book, “Daisy Wheel, Hexfoil, Hexafoil, Rosette: Protective Marks in Gravestone Art“, with Berghahn Books! It’s now available for pre-order, with publication in September 2024!
Pre-orders are now available through Berghahn’s website, click the link HERE to check it out! Just like with novels if you follow any authors online, you’ll know that pre-ordering a book is really important if you want to support that author because it lets the publisher know that there are people out there excited for the release and gives them an idea of demand and of the book’s success. You can also support the book (and me) by requesting that your library order a copy!
The cover of my upcoming book, provided by my editor at Berghahn Book!
A huge thank you to my editor, Caryn Berg, for reading my abstract for the 2020 SHA conference talks and reaching out to me with this project idea. I have been so thrilled to turn what has really been a huge interest for many years into something more tangible, and to have the opportunity to explore it in depth. Protective marks, aka apotropaic marks, can be found throughout many parts of the world, from Rome to Egypt, and England to North America and Australia. They were likely used to provide protection, like a lucky charm might, and can be found everywhere from churches to homes, to gravestones. The purpose of this book was to explore their use in a mortuary context throughout history, with a survey of colonial gravestones in North America that constitutes the first study of its kind of these symbols. It has been noted in gravestone research for decades that hexfoils and whorls are present in gravestone art, with a nod towards their apotropaic history, especially in the UK, but no further work had been carried out, and I hope with this volume that I’ve added a little to that conversation!
It has been a while since we’ve gotten to update the Dead House Database (click here), but we have an exciting addition to make! My internet friend and journalist, Warren Schlote, messaged me recently with a drawing of an octagonal dead house posted to instagram by the ‘History Hound’ Richard MacLeod of Newmarket, Ontario. This drawing, done by his grandfather George W. Luesby Sr. (who ran a memorial making business), shows the dead house located in the Newmarket Cemetery, north of Toronto. In this post, we’ll discuss this site and the architect who designed the structure.
Happy New Year! It’s probably time for another blog post, right? I’ve spent the the last year working non-stop of my dissertation, writing and editing, and now the whole document has been compiled and is with my supervisors for another run through! Then I’ll have more tweaks to make before it goes off for committee review, and then sometime in the spring/summer I’ll be defending! In the meantime though, I’ve been writing a public-facing article on counter-magic use in Newfoundland (keep an eye on the NQ Magazine), being an editor for a book volume I’m collaborating with a colleague on, scrambling around planning a trip to Scotland with my parents, and peer-reviewing other peoples’ work. And sleeping til like 9 am everyday.
Before I finished compiling my behemoth of a dissertation, however, we flew to Arizona for the Christmas holiday to visit my husband’s parents and revel in the fact that there was not rain and snow blowing horizontally across the horizon for a week. It was very relaxing, we mostly read, played games, drove around the neighbourhood in a golf cart, and drank wine watching the sunset, but I did manage to sneak in a little history exploring while we were there as well!
The front of Henry Wickenburg’s last home, made from adobe (photo by author 2023).
At the end of October, I had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Mexico City with my husband, and our friends Katie and Mike, for the wedding of our dear friends, Mariana and Ramon. It was a magical experience, and none of us had ever been to Mexico before (except for the newly weds, who are in fact, from there). What a gorgeous place! We were there over Day of the Dead (Dia de Muertos), and were able to do some touristing on our trip thanks to the guidance of our local friends, and learned so much about Mexican culture and tradition surrounding Day of the Dead, as well as some archaeological sites! Lets dive in.
Reconstructed tzompantli at the Museo el Templo Mayor.
Hello friends, apparently it has been a little while since I did a blog post! It’s been quite a busy summer, so I’ll do my best to fill you in. Last post I talked about the presentation I gave in New Perlican at the end of May, about my fieldwork and that portion of my dissertation research to the community, and we had a lovely time! Since then it has been a whorl wind of activity! My brother and sibling-in-law visited, my husband’s parents came out to visit, my parents were here visiting, and between everyone in our families being in the house, we did a lot of fieldwork for Black Cat, and even managed to squeeze in a little camping trip to Terra Nova National Park with some of our friends, which was a lovely break! Also of course, there was a lot of writing happening in there too, which is mostly what I’d like to chat about today.
Lovely fall pumpkins at Lester’s Farmers Market (for ambience) (photo by author 2023).
Hi friends, we’re back! This past Saturday we went out to New Perlican so I could give a little presentation to the community on my research in their burial grounds! It’s important for public archaeology that you actually tell the community you worked in about your research, so I was very excited to show off the maps and conclusions about my fieldwork surveys from the past 2 summers. I put together a little presentation showing the maps of the sides as well as several gravestone examples from each site to show everyone, and was able to tell them that we are going to be back in September to attempt GPR survey around St. Mark’s Cemetery to try and location the first Anglican church that was built in New Perlican. Stay tuned for that!
The purpose of my fieldwork and studying of these burial spaces was to take a closer look at the development of the burial landscape within a singular community, and how it has grown and evolved over the years, reflecting the community’s relationship with these spaces and mortality as a whole. We’ll also see some larger trends in burial spaces organization that are reflections of what we see in the rest of North America in the late 18th and 19th centuries. I also wanted to map these sites for the community, so that they would have a better record of gravestone location and site boundaries for future research and development.
View of New Perlican from Bloody Point (photo by author 2023)
We’re nearly through April suddenly, friends, and as I look out my office window at the snow drifts covering the old wooden boats in my neighbour’s backyard, which is slowly melting away, I decided to do a little update on how my dissertation writing is going! Lets start with a summary of what I’ve been up to, and then how I’ve been structuring my work and project going forward!
I think this picture encapsulates how excited I was in Boston during my research trip.
My blog has been all conference travel and research trips recently, and I feel like it’s been a very hectic last few months. In September 2022, we attended the Death & Culture IV conference in York (& went on our belated honeymoon), then in October I visited Halifax, Nova Scotia, to do some research at the provincial archives and so a site visit out in Annapolis Royal where I had a great meeting with Parks Canada and Mapannapolis staff! In November, I was doing research at home, and then we travelled to Arizona to visit my inlaws and their new house, and we got to see a few very interesting 19th-century burial grounds in the desert! We didn’t go anywhere in December, but I was frantically finishing my 2nd book manuscript which is now with my editor, and resting over the holidays. In the first week of January, we were packed back up and off to Lisbon, Portugal, for the Society for Historical Archaeology’s annual conference and a few days of exploring post-conference! Portugal was amazing, Ian and I both want to go back asap.
Finally, I had a second research trip in February to Boston, Massachussets and the Hudson River Valley, New York! I went to the Boston Public Library’s Special Collections which was just an amazing experience (both for research and for seeing cool archives), and the Mass Historical Society’s archives while in the city, then site visits to Sleepy Hollow and Albany, NY, as well as a meeting with the archaeology staff at the New York State Museum in Albany. Travel is done for the next little bit, and I’m pretty excited to not be in the Toronto airport for a few months!
Last September 2022, My husband Ian and I went on our very-belated honeymoon to Edinburgh and the Orkney Islands. One of the sites that we visited that we were totally in awe of was St. Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, the largest town on Mainland Orkney. The original cathedral was constructed in the 12th century, when the islands were under Norse rule, and was named for Magnus Erlendsson, Earl of Orkney. It was constructed in the Romanesque style with examples of Norman architecture as well, and was built with local red sandstone from Kirkwall and yellow sandstone from the island of Eday (where the memoir ‘Close to Where the Heart Gives Out’ is set. Here is an interview with the author!).
We had the chance to visit the cathedral twice, and I still don’t think we saw everything! There were amazing examples of late and post-medieval funerary sculpture throughout the church, with beautiful memento mori designs throughout. On our second visit, I noticed that some of the ledgers that had been set upright against the walls of the church had coffins as part of the designs, and that not all of the coffin styles were the same. I pulled out my sketchbook and raced around the cathedral as it was about to close, quickly writing down the dates and coffin styles on all the ledgers that had one, to conduct a quick survey on coffin styles depicted in 17th-century Orkney funerary monuments!
I know you’ve all been on the edge of your seats, waiting for the site visit portion of my research trip blogs, right? Right?? Well don’t you worry at all, I’ve got all that fieldwork goodness for you here! (is this a weird way to start a research blog? haha)
The second half of my research trip consisted of site visits to three of ‘my’ Dutch settlements that I’m looking at for the landscape analysis portion of my dissertation research. Those sites are the infamous Sleepy Hollow, NY, as well as the town of Kingston, and Albany, NY. You might be familiar with Albany from the Broadway Hamilton, as the city where Philip Schuyler and the Schuyler sisters lived (coincidently we did go see Hamilton live in Boston, and it was amazing, 100/10), and you likely already know a little bit about Sleepy Hollow, so lets get into what I was doing there, and what I’m looking at for these sites!
Old Dutch Reformed Church, Sleepy Hollow, NY (photo by author 2023)
Spade & the Grave 