In a place often referred to as ‘The Rock’, it sounds a bit redundant to be importing gravestones, but for a period in the 18th-early 19th century, that is exactly what people in Newfoundland were doing. By people, I of course mean people who could afford to have gravestone carved overseas and shipped across the ocean. There are locally carved gravestones as well going back to the 17th-century! I even have a puzzle for all of you gravestone enthusiasts out there, but we’ll get to that in a moment.
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Tag Archives: gravestone
Medieval Graffiti in a (historic) New England Context
That title should also have the word ‘mortuary’ in it somewhere, but you probably guessed that’s where I’m going with this! Today I wanted to talk about above-ground material culture relating to historic burials. More specifically, about the classic gravestones of colonial New England and symbology that appears with some regularity throughout the region that display an iteration of several compass-drawn symbol often found in medieval churches and on items of furniture in the British Isles.
‘Ye Antientist Burial Ground’, 1652~, New London, Connecticut. Photo by author, 2015
Welcome to Spade & the Grave
Good morning.
As I sit here trying to decide what to decide what exactly one is supposed to write to open a website up, to really invite people in, I can’t help but glance at my ‘academic’ bookshelf. There probably shouldn’t be quotations around that, that categorizes most of my books! There are books on medieval churches, old museums, lithic technologies, geoarchaeology, gravestone scripts, and the list goes on and on. The running theme between them all? Everyone that they talk about, all of the past peoples who used to populate the cities and countrysides of the world, have long since died.
But that’s what archaeology is, isn’t it? We study the past, and that means dealing with mortality on a near-daily basis. As someone who originally intended to go into maritime archaeology and ‘got distracted’ in a graveyard during my field field school, I think about death and dying pretty regularly. My own research is fairly landscape based (we’ll talk about that later), but in order to get to a spatial analysis I have to understand why certain spaces may have been used as they were, which means trying to death and burial practices, anxieties, and ideals for lots of different groups of people.
This blog was created after several colleagues and many visitors to the dig asked if I had a website. Spade & the Grave will contain aspects of my ongoing research, fieldwork updates during the summer, and interesting explorations into death and burial as I come across them. I hope you all enjoy, and get in touch if you want to know more!
Welcome to Spade & the Grave.
(photos are my own)
Spade & the Grave 