This week we wrapped up my fieldwork surveying in New Perlican! This part of my project, which I’ve written about a few times already in earlier blog posts, involves using a total station theodolite to survey and record the location of gravestones at historic burial grounds in New Perlican in order to create maps of the sites for the local archives and to use in my dissertation research on the evolution of the burial spaces in a single community over 400 years. You can find those earlier posts here: PhD Fieldwork Part 1, PhD Fieldwork 2, and Burial Ground Mapping.
This last round of surveying (before all the total stations vanished to field schools and Labrador for the summer) took place at St. Augustine’s Cemetery 1, and yes, there is a second one of the same name! Due to the size and complexity (ie: trees) of the site, I decided to record only the field stones at this location. Often overlooked, field stones are locally sourced grave markers that typically don’t have inscriptions but show a lot of importance in burial marking traditions in a community.
Last year, I wrote a blog post about the 17th-century journals of Samuel Sewall, and my work to catalogue all mentions of funerals and burials that he recorded during the 17th and early 18th centuries. Now that my comps are completed and passed (woo!), and a draft of my thesis proposal has been sent off for comments, I can get back into a bit of research for my dissertation…and blog about it as I go.
To refresh your memory, part of my research into the development of 17th-century burial grounds in the colonial northeast of North America is to explore details of how people were being buried in these spaces. By doing so, we can gain a better understanding of how funerals and burials were being carried out at the time, how people were using the spaces, and how these practices have changed through the decades and centuries.
This is my second diary analysis, and it was also written by a Puritan. Joshua Hempstead (1676-1758) of New London, Connecticut, was a shipwright, carpenter, and gravestone carver / letterer, who is most well known today for the extensive diary he kept between 1711 until 1758. Available online through Archive.org HERE, the diary is an extensive document, over 700 pages, detailing life in the early 18th century in a New England community. While it is a bit beyond the main scope of my project, I thought it would be important to look at examples from the turn of the century as well, for comparison. For those in death studies in this region, Hempstead is well known for his gravestones, especially in the New London area where he was also responsible for constructing many coffins. Due to the many hats he wore in the community, and in direct involvement in death care, Hempstead’s diary offer an exciting look at burials in the period.
The TV show Taboo, beginning in 1814 London, was created by Steven Knight, Tom Hardy, and Chips Hardy. Airing in 2017 originally with a second season rumoured, the show has just arrived on Canadian Netflix, so we’ve just started in. Why am I writing about a gritty long-18th century set TV program, you may be wondering? Well, one of the first scenes in the first episode involves a funeral. It was an excellent example of the impact that research can have on a television show, to really portray the life and death that people lead during the period, through the accurate display of all aspects of their daily lives, funerals included.
Hello readers, its been a minute! Since I last wrote a blog post, I have finished and passed my comprehensive exams, searched for and moved into a new apartment with my husband and our cats, and have spent the last 6 weeks working on my thesis proposal, writing my manuscript, and doing a bunch of other bits including a quick trip out to New Perlican for a little field visit.
Today, I wanted to talk about why cemeteries (and burial grounds, and graveyards) are worth visiting, in my opinion as a person who has always been fascinated with them as historic sites, and as an archaeologist who has focused the majority of my research career on death and burial as a part of human existence. I was inspired to write this post after attending a talk yesterday by my friend and colleague Lee Sulkowska, a PhD Candidate in history at Deakin University in Australia, whose research explores how cemeteries are a mirror of the society that created them through fascinating archival case studies. Her talk was in support of Ukraine (tickets were donated to humanitarian aid) through the Instytut Dobrej Śmierci, or the Institute of the Good Death in Poland. After the talk, author Loren Rhodes was telling us about her upcoming book, “Death’s Garden Revisited: Personal Relationships with Cemeteries” and it had me thinking about what stands out about burial spaces to me, both as a person and a researcher. This post is more of a personal essay than a research post, but I wanted to share it all the same.
Subtitle: “Doing a PhD during the pandemic is pretty weird sometimes“
Hello readers, happy 2022! It’s been quiet over here on Spade & the Grave as I took about a month off from looking at my laptop, after spending the entire fall working on my comprehensive exams. As I was tweeting or talking about my comps to various group chats and platforms, many people asked me what the process is, so I thought I’d write about that today!
In most universities in North America, our PhD programs involve taking courses and comprehensive exams of some form before being considered a ‘candidate’ and being able to move forward with our program, and are 4-years minimum. This differs significantly from programs in Europe and Australia (and probably other places, I’m not sure) where the typical PhD program is 3-years, with an additional 4th for writing sometimes.
This is an exciting post, friends! As you may or may not have seen on the news this summer(maybe only if you live in the Atlantic provinces in Canada), I have been working with the City of Fredericton as a consultant on the Old Burial Ground in the heart of Fredericton, since August 2020. The City is working on the long-term restoration and preservation of the historic burial site, and this involves exploring the gravestones housed on the grounds and what can be done to help them last a little while longer.
If you’ve been a reader for more than a minute, you might already know that some of my PhD research is taking place in the outport community of New Perlican. Well, I’m currently working on my second comps paper, and that means it’s time to write another blog post to let some of that writing energy go somewhere, now that I’ve met my page goal for the day!
Today I wanted to share the maps that were made for my project by my colleague Bryn, who is a mapper extraordinary and taught myself and Ian how to use the total station theodolite (TST or total station) ((which is something I need to remember finally, rather than re-learning every time I need to use one)). The benefit of using the total station to record the gravestones is that not only are they geo-referenced within cm’s accuracy, but it allowed us to create accurate maps of the gravestones for the community to have on record in their archives.
“Creative” writing is a good break from comps writing, right? Right. This might not be creative writing, but it’s a good flow to get those typing juices flowing while still keeping my head in the game! What is the game, you might ask? It’s gravestones. It’s always gravestones.
Today I wanted to chat to you all today about the construction of historic gravestones below the ground, getting to my archaeological roots subsurface, and how historical gravestone construction methods differ from what we see today, aka too much or too little. Let’s dig in! (hah)
Hi everyone, this is a blog post version of the talk I gave at the Death, Dying, & Disposal 15 conference this past week (#DDD15). It was my very first DDD conference, and while digital, I was very excited to attend! Digital conferences are exhausting and maybe not as easy for networking or getting together in the ways that traditional in person conferences have been, but they really open attendance doors for people who might not be able to travel around the world for talks every year! I presented from St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, on the traditional territory of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq people, and acknowledge their ownership of the land and my place here as a settler.
My talk was titled “Gravestone Conservation & Social Media: Benefits and Challenges of the Online Dissemination of Gravestone Cleaning”. If you know of any other examples of gravestone cleaning online that you’d like to share with me, I’d love to see them!
Back for another research blog instalment! The past few weeks have been pretty busy, with Black Cat projects, some comps reading, a camping trip and hiking in Gros Morne, getting my 2nd covid vaccine, and my parents coming out to visit. We still managed to sneak in a little community archaeology engagement though, which turned out to be sort of a conjuncture between the NLAS (Newfoundland and Labrador Archaeology Society) ((I’m the VP this year)) and my own research in New Perlican.
The town of New Perlican was holding their annual Heritage Day this past Saturday, and the NLAS went down with our museum in a box / ‘edukit’ to talk to anyone interested about archaeology in the province. I was also asked to give a short tour and talk about the Bloody Point burial site, which is part of my PhD research! Check HERE and HERE if you need to get caught up on the site! It was an amazing day, and I’m excited to share it with you all!