Spade & the Grave

death and burial through an archaeological lens

Tag Archives: book


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Book Release: “Daisy Wheel, Hexfoil, Hexafoil, Rosette: Protective Marks in Gravestone Art”

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!

Buy my book! 🙂


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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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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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