This blog post was written byAlison Batstone, for the Archaeology of Death undergraduate course in Fall 2020 at Memorial University of Newfoundland, taught by Dr. Meghan Burchell. They graciously allowed it to be posted on Spade & the Grave, thanks Alison!
The Peter Pan Statue (Branes, 2020)
Above is a photo taken of the Peter Pan Statue located in Bowring Park, St. John’s NL. The statue is centered in the picture, a bronze sculpture of children, animals and plants swirling around a rock perch as Peter stands atop playing flute; most characters, including Peter, are wearing small shifts as clothing. The statue sits on a stone walkway, and is framed by a duck pond and leafy trees. It is autumn, and green, orange and yellow leaves cover the grass and stones behind the monument. (Branes, 2020).
Landscape photo at St. John the Evangelist Cemetery, Newfoundland (photo by Dr. Burchell 2020)
Hello readers, I am very excited to be writing this introductory post for you all with Dr. Meghan Burchell, of Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dr. Burchell taught the undergraduate course ‘The Archaeology of Death’ this Fall 2020 semester, and I had the honour of being her TA! One of the student’s assignments for the course was to create a ‘blog-style’ post which would explore a monument, mostly within the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, to examine the history and politics of monumentalization.
Part of the challenge with the course and its assignments this semester was, of course, the fact that it was not face-to-face teaching in light of the pandemic. Adapting to the sudden switch to remote teaching brought to light the importance of creating records for, and digitizing said records for, historical artifacts and sites such as graveyards. While part of their coursework was to do just that, create digital records and analysing gravestones in Newfoundland, this blogging assignment asked different questions.
Their blogs answered a number of questions, including:
“What does the landscape of monuments in Newfoundland and Labrador look like?”
“How can we create a digital landscape of monuments, whether they are memorials, graves, or other monumental sites or objects?”
“How are people and events commemorated and remembered in Newfoundland and Labrador?”
“What does a memorial tell us about the site / event / person, as well as the people who erected it?”
Everyone did an amazing job on their blog posts, and in the end I selected six examples to post on Spade & the Grave, that I thought fit well into the theme of this website and with the research that I undertake in death and burial archaeology. The next six posts, written by undergraduate students at MUN, examine monuments and their meaning across the province. In this series we will look at the Peter Pan Statue in Bowring Park, the Terry Fox statue by the harbour in St. John’s, the Statue of Amelia Earhart in Harbour Grace, the Ocean Ranger Disaster Monument, the Renews Grotto, and the controversy of the Gaspar Corte-Real statue.
It was wonderful to read what the students thought about monumentalization within the province, as well as how these sites impacted their view of the historic events or people they commemorated. Please join us for the series, as we share this series over the last two weeks of 2020!
It’s time.
The trowels are cleaned*, the boots are dusted off**, and the car is ready and full of excited and bright eyed volunteers***. The fieldwork season has begun!
*it’s never really going to be clean again, is it?
**Same goes for the boots, they are as dusty as ever
*** No one is that bright eyed at 6:30AM!
If you remember from my last post, I had indicated where I was going to be excavating this summer by a large circle on the map. Of course, I’m not going to be digging literally all of the space inside that circle but a few select trenches to get a better idea of what is going on in the subsurface.
The first trench laid out over the gravel slope. It’s mostly slopewash and debris from above, and parts of the area were previously excavated so the ground lever was actually much higher than it currently appears to be! Photo by author, 2017.
Spade & the Grave 