Spade & the Grave

death and burial through an archaeological lens

Category Archives: Publications & Other Works


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SHA 2023 Conference, Lisbon, Portugal

It’s time for another travel blog, coming to you live from…my home office where I am writing this very jetlagged, because we got home at 2am yesterday after 27 hrs of travelling! This year, the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) hosted their annual general meeting and conference in Lisbon, and over 900 archaeologists descended on the city to attend the event. This conference was meant to be held in Jan 2021 originally, but for some weird reason that I couldn’t possibly remember, they had to push it forward by two years, and thankfully were able to go ahead with Lisbon 2023 instead! So here we are, drinking vinho verde and talking about archaeology in a gorgeous city of colourful tiles and Moorish castle ruins.

The conference ran from January 4-7, 2023 and was hosted at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. We were able to volunteer as grad students this year to help with registration and monitoring sessions in exchange for not being charged the registration fee for the conference, which is a great initiative that the SHA always has at their conferences. We spent about 8 hrs each (me and my husband, Ian), volunteering over two of the conference days, and attended a load of talks and some events as well! This is going to be a lot of conference stuff, as well as a lot of talking about food and wine, as you do.

Overlooking the city and river from a viewpoint in Alfama, Lisbon (photo by author)
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Conference Trip: Death & Culture IV, York, UK

There is no such thing as a posting schedule when you’re doing your PhD and running a business part time, and writing a book! I do these things to myself, and it’s great! We have just returned from a trip to the UK, where I presented some of my ongoing research at the Death & Culture IV conference, held at the York St. John Campus in the heart of York. York is definitely one of my favourite cities in the UK that I’ve gotten the chance to spend time in, so returning this fall to meet up with friends and talk about research was a huge treat! The rest of the trip was our honeymoon (belated by covid for 2 years, whoops), and I’ll do a separate post about the death-related things we saw on that trip later on! It was a very eventful trip overall, so lets get into it!

The conference, held every 2 years, was put on by the Death & Culture Network (DaCNet) through the University of York, describes itself as promoting “the continuing engagement with the study of death, and acts as a forum for networking and the sharing of multidisciplinary death scholarship”. I presented my ongoing research on the burial grounds of New Perlican, the mapping that has been carried out through our surveys, and what that can tell us about the burial landscape of the community.

View of Old Town, Edinburgh, Scotland (photo by author 2022)
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CBC Article: This archeologist has made it her life’s work to preserve decaying history in N.L.’s cemeteries

A handful of weeks ago, before the latest alert level 5 lockdown here in Newfoundland, I had the opportunity to meet with CBC contributor Andie Bulman to discuss my PhD research and our new little business, Black Cat Cemetery Preservation. It was wonderful to chat with her, and as any research knows, I loved the opportunity to talk about my research!

The article, which opens with an image of me working at Woodland Cemetery in London, Ontario in 2019, discusses my PhD research on burial grounds, concerns with gravestone conservation, and what we hope to accomplish with our (mine and my husband Ian’s) business. It’s a wonderful platform that I am so grateful to have, and I hope the message gets spread far and wide!

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Book Launch: Burial & Death in Colonial North America

I’m so pleased to announce the publication of my first book, ‘Burial and Death in Colonial North America: Exploring Interment Practices and Landscapes in 17th-Century British Settlements‘, published by Emerald Published Ltd!

This book has been in the works technically since 2018, but really several years prior, as it incorporates a lot of my Master’s research! It is also filled with a bunch of really cool other stuff about 17th-century burial landscapes and practices, coffins styles, soil stains (well, I think they’re cool), and protective symbols on graves!

Published in Emerald’s ‘Emerald Points’ series, the book is available for pre-order through the Emerald Publishing website, Amazon, and The Book Depository, as both an ebook and a print book (pre-orders are open on some sites). It will be available as an ebook through multiple carriers soon!

If you are interested in downloading the flyer, CLICK HERE.

Thank you to everyone who helped me through this process, my family, friends, editors, twitter, etc! My two goals in life as a child were to become an archaeologist and to publish books. I always assumed that my first published book would be a novel, but I think academic books also check that box off (don’t worry, novel(s) are in the works)! The archaeology part has been covered for a while!

Citation:

Lacy, Robyn S. 2020. Burial and Death in Colonial North America: Exploring Interment Practices and Landscapes in 17th-Century British Settlement. Emerald Publishing Ltd.: Bingley, UK.


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In Conversation: Questions in Mortuary Archaeology

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Working at Woodland Cemetery to repair a complex marble monument (photo by Brienna French 2019)

Yesterday I had a the pleasure of answering a few questions about my research and work from Dr. Shawn Graham of Carlton University (@electricarchaeo on twitter), for his fall course, ‘Digital History and Digital Archaeology’. Now, I don’t really do digital archaeology, but the questions could be answered focusing on anyone’s specialities. I wanted to share the discussion with all of you! (these answers aren’t work-for-word my short interview answers, but pretty close!)

1. Who are you and what are you currently working on?
Hi everyone! My name is Robyn Lacy, and I’m a historical archaeologist. I work for a cultural resource management (CRM) firm in Ontario, where I am an archaeological, cultural heritage, and social media technician. I’ve been doing this job since early winter, but I’ll be starting my PhD in Historic Archaeology at Memorial University of Newfoundland (remotely at first)! I’m also finishing up my first book which is based on my Master’s research in 17th-century British burial landscapes in North America, and starting research on my second book as well. Exciting stuff!

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Book Review: Changing Landscapes in Urban British Churchyards.

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This post is a formal review of the newly published ‘Changing Landscapes in Urban British Churchyards’ by S.E. Thornbush and Mary J. Thornbush (2020), for Bentham Science Publishers, Singapore.

While academic and public interest books on burial grounds are often published, they tend to only consider the gravestones, and not the spatiality of the burial ground. This book by Sylvia E. Thornbush and Mary J. Thornbush examines gravestones within multiple east coast cities in England and Scotland, as well as the sites’ locality. However, for a text that is titled ‘changing landscapes’, I was hoping for more of a study of the sites as landscapes and spaces over the gravestones.

The sites focused on in this book are situated close to the coast, as to examine the effects of coastal erosion on headstone legibility and weathering rates, although other sites, such as York, were also selected based on the quantity of gravestones available for examination. The goal of the research was to compare the classic Dethlefsen & Deetz 1966 iconographic study (reprinted: Deetz 1977) to trends in the UK. The authors note that there are linguistic features which marked ‘Puritanism’ used on epitaphs, as well as within the iconography. However the iconography, in particular the ‘Death’s Head’ is still wrongly associated with specifically Puritan beliefs. The main goal of the study is stated as looking for differences in style of headstones in England and Scotland from the C17th-C19th after the Protestant Reformation, and how were they distinct from those found in C19th New England.

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Podcast appearance: The Arch & Anth Podcast

Hello friends! Recently, I recorded a podcast episode for The Arch & Anth Podcast, with Dr. Michael Rivera. We chatted about my research in death and burial, work in CRM archaeology, and gravestone conservation. It was lovely, and the episode is out now!

You can listen to the episode by clicking on the link below, or by looking for the podcast on Spotify, Stitcher, iTunes, etc.

Episode 91: What is involved in cultural resource management, cemetery conservation and public archaeology? 

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Hanging out with Samuel Dale at Brickstreet Cemetery.

 


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Interaction with Morbid Spaces: How we move & use burial grounds

This post is a digital summary version of a paper I’d written for a course during my masters, and later expanded on to present at the Transmortality conference in Luxembourg in 2017. I’m choosing to turn these ideas into a blog post, because I think it’s a rather interesting topic and I’d love to have a discussion with all of you about it! So let’s dive it, shall we?

By investigation the relationship between burial spaces and their communities, we can gain insight into the personal relationship between people and death. This post will explore interaction with burial spaces and the influence of these spaces on movement throughout history, from the 17th to the 21st centuries. I looked at Boston, MA and Guilford, CT as my case studies, through historic and modern accounts of being in the burial grounds, examining the multi-purpose use of many of these early Puritan sites.

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The Guilford Green, Guilford, CT (Photo by author 2016).

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Burial Against All Odds

Today I’d like to write a short post to tell you all about a few amazing instances of the pursuit of a ‘proper’ burial against all odds. Before starting, I would like to state that this is a proper burial through the lens of primarily white settler communities in the 19th and 20th centuries in what is now Canada. Thanks!

What denotes a good burial? It can be defined by a person’s social status, their religion, their personal beliefs and choices, fads of the time, and a number of other things. A proper, good burial in the medieval period included being close to the altar, in ancient Egypt it meant having belongings with you to help in the afterlife, for southern USA enslaved families it meant being able to bury their dead in peace on their own terms. For settler communities in Newfoundland and mainland Canada, it meant being able to follow their traditional burial practices of  interment, regardless of the conditions.

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A buck at Woodland Cemetery (photo by author 2019)

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Evolution of roman lettering in Newfoundland: A case study at Belvedere Roman Catholic Cemetery, St. John’s, Newfoundland

Today’s post is based on ongoing research that started as a prompt for a term paper in grad school. I’ve been conducting research on roman lettering development on upright gravestones for some time (there is a paper on the way, I swear. It’s bogged down in reviewer/edits land but it will be out there eventually!), and this research was based on my interest in the development of lettering styles on gravestones. More specifically, the development of lettering styles carved in a ‘remote’ area, that might not have access to lettering books or script trends as carvers in more urban centres in the British Isles were. Lets delve in, shall we?

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St. John’s Harbour (photo by author 2016)

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