My goodness, what a whirlwind these past 7 weeks have been! With only one week to go, I can’t believe I’m nearly finished with these weekly(ish) blog updates of my training and work as a gravestone conservator. Here we go people, I can fix gravestones and know more about stone than I did two months ago! Does anyone want me to talk about stones forever…because too late, I’m never going to stop!
It was an exciting and productive week at the cemetery, so lets dive in! It was only a four-day week because last Monday was Canada Day, so I’m pretty impressed with all the things we got done.
Meagan & Thomas, archivist/historians, preparing for the July 6 tours.
Hello all, welcome back to another ‘updates from the field’ style post, where I’d like to discuss what we got up to at the cemetery this week! It was an extremely busy week, and we got quite a lot accomplished, and learned a load of new skills throughout it all that I am very excited to use throughout this program and hopefully throughout my career as a historical archaeologist.
Little woodchuck friend coming to see why we were digging so many holes in their field!
If you’ve been around this website for more than a minute or two, you’ll have noticed that I’m really interested in what settlers did with their dead during the winter. I’ve written about dead houses several times on this blog, talked about them at Death Salon Boston 2018, am currently working on a paper on winter corpse disposal in colonial North America, and shout about them to anyone who listens!
A really interesting form of dead house is the octagonal structures that can be found in Ontario. As far as I know so far, these seven surviving examples (if anyone has one not listed in this post, please let me know!) are the only octagonal dead houses in the province, if not North America. The style was extremely localized to Toronto, and north of the City around Yonge Street.
If you are new to the study of burial markers and don’t come from a geologic background or have prior knowledge in basic geology, grasping the differences in materials found in burial grounds might seem like a monumental (hah) task! In this post, we will be discussing the composition and problems/perks of different stone types that are found across North American historical burial grounds, as well as common erosion issues that can be seen across these stones.
Woodland Cemetery, London. ON. (Photo by author 2019).
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?
This is a topic I’ve discussed with colleagues on several occasions, and most recently in a really engaging thread on twitter: When is a grave…no longer a grave? If ever, at what point might that happen? There isn’t one definitive answer to this question, and the understanding of a grave, its significance, and longevity are rooted in our backgrounds, cultures, and society. I’ve finally found some time to sit down and write up the results of the discussion, and share some thoughts with you all.
This is a particularly special site I’d like to discuss with you today: The Fairview Cemetery, near Oliver, BC. Fairview was a gold mining town in the South Okanagan-Similkameen, born out of the gold rush in the area in the late 1880s. Legend has it that gold was first discovered by a one-armed man in the 1860s, but no Europeans arrived to exploit the areas for gold until the 1880s. It was located just west of the modern-day town of Oliver, and some older homes in Oliver are said to have been built out of wood salvaged from the would-be ghost town.
View from the Fairview townsite over the South Okanagan
I’m excited to be able to share my public burial archaeology paper, “Public Engagement through Burial Landscapes: Cupids and Ferryland, Newfoundland” with all of you!
It was released today, along with many other articles on public burial archaeology in AP: The Online Journal in Public Archaeology’s Special Volume 3: Death in the Contemporary World: Perspectives from Public Archaeology.
My article discusses ‘lost’ burial grounds – burial grounds which are known to exist, but have yet to be identified – like the 17th-century burial ground at Ferryland, and how discussion with visitors on historic burial practices can often lead to a dialogue on modern burial practices.
If you are interested, I’ve put a link HERE, where you can download the entire volume or each paper individually. It’s an open-access journal too, which is amazing! (If you’re going to do a Public Archaeology journal, it really should be open-access or it’s negating its own point.) I’m so pleased to be able to share this research with you all. While you’re at it, check out the amazing papers by everyone else in the volume, it’s chalked full of deathy-arch goodness!
Citation:
Lacy, Robyn S. 2018. Public Engagement through Burial Landscapes: Cupids and Ferryland, Newfoundland. AP: Online Journal of Public Archaeology, Special Volume 3: Death in the Contemporary World: Perspectives from Public Archaeology. Pp. 55-78. Available online: http://revistas.jasarqueologia.es/index.php/APJournal/issue/view/14/showToc
Last week I had the utter pleasure of attending and presenting my research at Death Salon Boston, put on by the Order of the Good Death and hosted at Mount Auburn Cemetery. For anyone new to this blog / death and burial studies in general, Mount Auburn Cemetery is significant as the first landscaped rural garden cemetery in North America, opening in 1831 and is still an active cemetery today.
My talk, “An Inconvenient Corpse: Winter Dead in colonial Canada” discussed how individuals at early colonial settlements dealt with their dead during the winter. It’s just not something we think about that much! I’d like to summarize my talk in this post for everyone who didn’t get to attend the conference (it sold out so quickly), and just some all around thoughts about my experience at Death Salon Boston!
As I may or may not have explained on this blog already, I work in built heritage. That means that I deal with the archaeology of standing buildings. In North America it is often referred to as cultural heritage, and is a facet of historical archaeology that I am quite passionate about (and who doesn’t like getting to go into old houses all the time!).
Lately, I’ve been doing a bit of reading into the conscious curation of decaying built heritage. It’s a very interesting topic, and while it’s hard to get away from the mentality that all old buildings are worth saving / preserving / restoring, curation of decay doesn’t mean justification for letting something fall into disrepair that perhaps does need some restoration but rather the ability to see and to interpret the change of a space, its meaning, and its place in history as it becomes overgrown, crumbles, or falls.
I’m excited to be able to share my public burial archaeology paper, “Public Engagement through Burial Landscapes: Cupids and Ferryland, Newfoundland” with all of you!
Spade & the Grave 