outport | Spade & the Grave

Hi friends, we’re back! This past Saturday we went out to New Perlican so I could give a little presentation to the community on my research in their burial grounds! It’s important for public archaeology that you actually tell the community you worked in about your research, so I was very excited to show off the maps and conclusions about my fieldwork surveys from the past 2 summers. I put together a little presentation showing the maps of the sides as well as several gravestone examples from each site to show everyone, and was able to tell them that we are going to be back in September to attempt GPR survey around St. Mark’s Cemetery to try and location the first Anglican church that was built in New Perlican. Stay tuned for that!

The purpose of my fieldwork and studying of these burial spaces was to take a closer look at the development of the burial landscape within a singular community, and how it has grown and evolved over the years, reflecting the community’s relationship with these spaces and mortality as a whole. We’ll also see some larger trends in burial spaces organization that are reflections of what we see in the rest of North America in the late 18th and 19th centuries. I also wanted to map these sites for the community, so that they would have a better record of gravestone location and site boundaries for future research and development.

View of New Perlican from Bloody Point (photo by author 2023)

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This Saturday I was invited to speak at and participate in a community heritage & folklore event in the town of New Perlican, Newfoundland. New Perlican is located on the eastern coast of the Avalon Peninsula, and has dated back to the 17th-century through records such as the 1675 Berry Census and archaeological evidence of a ‘plantation’ in the area. It is suspected that several of John Guy’s settlers from the 1610 Cupid’s Plantation may have settled in New Perlican in the early 17th century, but there has yet to be any physical evidence of that move identified.

The event I was involved with was a collaboration between the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador, Memorial University of Newfoundland, and Heritage New Perlican, and involved something really that I’m pretty passionate about…burial grounds! Students and community volunteers would join us for the day to learn about the history burial places in this historic town, hear about the town’s history from members of the Heritage group, meet the cemetery cleaning ‘Goats of New Perlican’, and help the community clean up one of their most historic burial spaces. I was there as an additional help supervising the students, to answer questions on burials and gravestones (and have some awesome conversations about headstone preservation with local folks!), and to give a talk about my research as a historic mortuary archaeologist. Also, to map a bunch of gravestones!
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