Hi friends, it has been a minute since I’ve sat down to write anything on the blog! My last post was in May, and since then it has been a pretty busy summer with fieldwork, family visits, and a variety of trips! This winter, I’ll be updating our Black Cat fieldwork blog on some of the cool projects we’ve worked on, so keep an eye out for that HERE!
This August, we (my husband Ian and I) had the wonderful opportunity to travel to Utrecht to attend and present at the Association for the Study of Death and Society’s bi-annual conference, ‘Death, Dying, and Disposal 17’. Held in Utrecht and hosted by the Utrecht University, it looked like it was going to be a fantastic event, and my first DDD in person after presenting digitally a few years ago, so I was very excited. Of course, you can’t just fly all the way to Europe from Newfoundland and not add on a little holiday in there too, so we started off the trip in Paris! There were some excellent death studies related sites, so lets get into it.
A city square, Utrecht, Netherlands (photo by author 2025)
If you haven’t heard of Loren Rhoads’ fantastic book ‘199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die’, then you’re missing out! Luckily, Loren has released an updated version! Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers kindly sent me a review copy, and I’ve had the best time checking out the new edition! You can purchase the book directly from the publisher by clicking HERE or by asking your local bookshop or wherever you buy books!
Loren Rhoads is an author and editor of numerous fiction and non-fiction books, and is a longtime cemetery history expert and enthusiast. She has served as a cemetery consultant for AAA, The Weather Channel, Mental Floss, and Atlas Obscura among many others, and currently resides in San Francisco, where there are no active cemeteries.
The gorgeous new book! Thank you Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers!
The book is a great guide to visiting cemeteries around the world, with tidbits about the history of the sites and the significant people who are buried there. Each site entry includes the location of the site, and a website about the site if it’s available. It’s such a great way to explore the history of a new place through the people who created it and the artworks they left behind!
The book covers sites primarily in the USA, with 101 sites introduced throughout the pages. There are 7 sites included in Canada, which was very exciting for me as a Canadian archaeologist! The first edition of this book only had 5, and it was great to see that expanded a bit more! The rest of the book is primarily divided up by region: Central and South America and the Caribbean, Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Oceania. While the book clearly skews heavily towards American sites, this makes sense as both the publisher and author are based in the States.
I was really impressed with the breadth of sites that Loren covers throughout the book. For the Canadian sites, Saint Mark’s Churchyard in Niagara-on-the-Lake, ON and the Hunt Family Cemetery on Vancouver Island, BC were new additions. As a Canadian archaeologist and cemetery enthusiast, I was very excited to see this! Saint Mark’s Churchyard is a notable site, the final resting place of William Riley and John Waters, Black residents in the area, as well as the site of large trenches cut through the graveyard during the War of 1812. The Hunt Family Cemetery is located on the land of the Kwakwaka’wakw people of Vancouver Island, who occupied the region long before the arrival of European settlers, and occupied different areas based on the seasons. Their lives were permanently disrupted by the construction of a Hudson Bay fort, Fort Rupert, in 1851. The Europeans brought smallpox to the Indigenous people, and the fort was abandoned only a few decades later in 1882. The cemetery is located near the Kwakiuli Band Longhouse, where much of the art was carved by local Kwakwaka’wakw artist Calvin Hunt and other family members, to commemorate family buried there. I really appreciated Loren’s inclusion of an Indigenous site in the Canadian section, and her thoughtful discussion of the impact of colonialism and residential schools on the community.
Visually, I love the redesign of the new book! The original version was black, with gates opening into a mossy cemetery. Gold filigree decorates the top of the cover, and the exterior edges of each page inside. The new version is brighter, with a stunning southern cemetery with a large tree dripping in Spanish moss covering the entire cover, with a narrow white border around the edge. The filigree is removed from the interior pages, which I think makes the pages less busy. It draws your focus to the photos, I think it was a good choice. I’m of the mind that cemeteries aren’t always morbid or creepy, so I love a book about burial grounds that aren’t dark and gloomy looking.
‘222 Cemeteries to See Before You Die’ ends with the grave of author Robert Louis Stevenson, located in Samoa. The book covers all corners of the globe, introducing the reader to burial practices from numerous different cultures, and is a great introduction to regions you might not have already been familiar with as a burial ground enthusiast. Overall, this updated volume is absolutely wonderful, and would be a great addition to the bookshelves of any taphophiles or history fans in your lift! 10/10!
Hello readers! It has been a wild last few months with my defence, dissertation edits, submitting my final dissertation (convocation next month!) and a sprinkling of fieldwork. I’m excited to get back to a bit of writing on here, and bring you all some interesting mortuary archaeology pieces! Today, I’m excited to finally be sitting down to write a bit about our recent trip to Scotland with my parents, and all the amazing burial traditions we learned about while there.
We (my husband and I) travelled to Edinburgh to meet up with my parents, who had gone over a few days before us to explore the city. The joke for the entire trip was that we were only going to look at old stuff and birds, as a group of two archaeologists and two birders who also like history! And look at old stuff and birds we did! I also dragged everyone into every chambered burial cairn we came across, and we all brought headlamps on the trip for just that reason. It was amazing, lets get into it!
The Wideford Hill Chambered Cairn, Orkney (photo by author 2024)
Hi readers, it’s time for a quick update about my PhD and recent travels to British Columbia. As of right now, April 27th, 2024, my brain has turned to mush after completing all the dissertation edits from my two supervisors! I’m currently waiting for a few more comments back from my external supervisor, and once I do those my dissertation will be off to examination! If all goes well, I should be defending sometime this summer, hopefully sooner than later. I can’t believe how quickly my PhD program has flown by!
After completing the majority of the edits, I headed out to BC to visit my parents, Grandpa, and best friend Kelsey! A much needed visit to the Okanagan, and a huge different in weather and abundance of flowers from Newfoundland. Because I flew out early in the morning, it was daylight flying over the rockies, and I spent that last part of the flight with the flight map up so I could identify lakes in the Kootenays as we flew over.
It has been a while since we’ve gotten to update the Dead House Database (click here), but we have an exciting addition to make! My internet friend and journalist, Warren Schlote, messaged me recently with a drawing of an octagonal dead house posted to instagram by the ‘History Hound’ Richard MacLeod of Newmarket, Ontario. This drawing, done by his grandfather George W. Luesby Sr. (who ran a memorial making business), shows the dead house located in the Newmarket Cemetery, north of Toronto. In this post, we’ll discuss this site and the architect who designed the structure.
Happy New Year! It’s probably time for another blog post, right? I’ve spent the the last year working non-stop of my dissertation, writing and editing, and now the whole document has been compiled and is with my supervisors for another run through! Then I’ll have more tweaks to make before it goes off for committee review, and then sometime in the spring/summer I’ll be defending! In the meantime though, I’ve been writing a public-facing article on counter-magic use in Newfoundland (keep an eye on the NQ Magazine), being an editor for a book volume I’m collaborating with a colleague on, scrambling around planning a trip to Scotland with my parents, and peer-reviewing other peoples’ work. And sleeping til like 9 am everyday.
Before I finished compiling my behemoth of a dissertation, however, we flew to Arizona for the Christmas holiday to visit my husband’s parents and revel in the fact that there was not rain and snow blowing horizontally across the horizon for a week. It was very relaxing, we mostly read, played games, drove around the neighbourhood in a golf cart, and drank wine watching the sunset, but I did manage to sneak in a little history exploring while we were there as well!
The front of Henry Wickenburg’s last home, made from adobe (photo by author 2023).
It’s time for another travel blog, coming to you live from…my home office where I am writing this very jetlagged, because we got home at 2am yesterday after 27 hrs of travelling! This year, the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) hosted their annual general meeting and conference in Lisbon, and over 900 archaeologists descended on the city to attend the event. This conference was meant to be held in Jan 2021 originally, but for some weird reason that I couldn’t possibly remember, they had to push it forward by two years, and thankfully were able to go ahead with Lisbon 2023 instead! So here we are, drinking vinho verde and talking about archaeology in a gorgeous city of colourful tiles and Moorish castle ruins.
The conference ran from January 4-7, 2023 and was hosted at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa. We were able to volunteer as grad students this year to help with registration and monitoring sessions in exchange for not being charged the registration fee for the conference, which is a great initiative that the SHA always has at their conferences. We spent about 8 hrs each (me and my husband, Ian), volunteering over two of the conference days, and attended a load of talks and some events as well! This is going to be a lot of conference stuff, as well as a lot of talking about food and wine, as you do.
Overlooking the city and river from a viewpoint in Alfama, Lisbon (photo by author)
Happy November, readers! It’s been a hectic last few weeks in our house, and I think I’ve spent just as much time living out of a suitcase this fall as I have at home… still not unpacking my suitcase. Whoops. Early in October, I travelled to Nova Scotia for a week for my PhD research. I visited the Nova Scotia Archives, the Old Burial Ground, the Nova Scotia Museums offsite storage, and travelled out to Annapolis Royal to visit the Garrison Burying Ground and meet with Parks Canada and Mapannapolis staff in order to discuss the history of the site. It was a really amazing trip, and I got to stay with my dear friends in Dartmouth as well, which is just a research trip bonus!
Lets go!
Fort Anne, Annapolis Royal, from the site of the church looking towards the centre of the site over the earthworks (photo by author 2022).
There is no such thing as a posting schedule when you’re doing your PhD and running a business part time, and writing a book! I do these things to myself, and it’s great! We have just returned from a trip to the UK, where I presented some of my ongoing research at the Death & Culture IV conference, held at the York St. John Campus in the heart of York. York is definitely one of my favourite cities in the UK that I’ve gotten the chance to spend time in, so returning this fall to meet up with friends and talk about research was a huge treat! The rest of the trip was our honeymoon (belated by covid for 2 years, whoops), and I’ll do a separate post about the death-related things we saw on that trip later on! It was a very eventful trip overall, so lets get into it!
The conference, held every 2 years, was put on by the Death & Culture Network (DaCNet) through the University of York, describes itself as promoting “the continuing engagement with the study of death, and acts as a forum for networking and the sharing of multidisciplinary death scholarship”. I presented my ongoing research on the burial grounds of New Perlican, the mapping that has been carried out through our surveys, and what that can tell us about the burial landscape of the community.
View of Old Town, Edinburgh, Scotland (photo by author 2022)
If you follow my social media, you might have gathered a few things recently. Firstly, I just got back from a lovely holiday in Scotland where I explored the morbid and macabre as one such as myself is wont to do, and secondly, I got engaged! So that is all very exciting, but because this is a death blog, I’m going to focus on the former for now.
The majority of my trip was based in the city of Edinburgh. The city is famous for being the home of the Royal Family’s Palace of Holyroodhouse, Edinburgh Castle and the Military Tattoo, and of course…Burke and Hare.
Edinburgh & the Firth of Forth, from Calton Hill (photo by author 2019)
Spade & the Grave 