Spade & the Grave

death and burial through an archaeological lens

Tag Archives: travel


by Leave a comment

Holiday Diaries: Museums & Outdoor Adventures in the Okanagan Valley, BC

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.

Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Catalogue of Octagonal Dead Houses in Ontario: 11th Structure Identified

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.

Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

Holiday Diaries: Henry Wickenburg’s Home & Grave, Wickenburg, Arizona

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).
Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

SHA 2023 Conference, Lisbon, Portugal

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)
Continue reading →


by Leave a comment

PhD Research Trip: Halifax & Annapolis Royal, NS

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).
Continue reading →


by 6 Comments

Conference Trip: Death & Culture IV, York, UK

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)
Continue reading →


by 4 Comments

Holiday Diaries: Exploring the History of Body-Snatching, Burial, & Mourning in Edinburgh, Scotland.

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.

xxx20191008_113422

Edinburgh & the Firth of Forth, from Calton Hill (photo by author 2019)

Continue reading →


by 10 Comments

‘Guilford’s Town Greene’ – a vanished 17th-century burial landscape in Connecticut

The alternate title to this post is: ‘Guilford’s Town Greene’ – The burial ground that if you give me a moment, I will never stop talking about’. If you’ve heard me speak at a conference or lecture, or…ever… you’ve probably heard me use it an an example of a curious burial landscape, one that has seen endless change, interaction, and ultimately erasure. It’s a very interesting case study in the changing views of death in Western society as well, so if you’re here for the modern death aspect, read on!
guildford1
Continue reading →


by 1 Comment

Temporary Graves – Burial in Luxembourg & the Transmortality Conference 2017

I recently had the honour of presenting some of my research at the Transmortality Conference in Luxembourg City, Luxembourg. The conference dealt with the themes of materiality and spatiality of death and dying historically and in modernity, and as my research mainly deals with spatial aspects of burial landscapes, I was beyond excited to attend and present at the conference, and chat with like-minded researchers from all over the world!
20170302_130827
The Transmortality project is being conducted by Université du Luxembourg, and if you’re interested in their work, there will be a special issue of the journal Mortality coming out on the theme in 2019. More information on the project can be found here: https://transmortality.uni.lu/
Continue reading →