Cemetery Studies

"This Open Access article presents a case-study demonstrating the potential of GIS visualisations for analyses of mortuary data, recorded half a century ago at the site of Holešov, Kroměříž district, in the Czech Republic. This cemetery consists of 10 Bell Beaker and 420 Early Bronze Age graves, giving the impression of continuous development over a considerable period of time. The temporality of the cemetery is examined in detail, via its chronological development, as well as the inseparable aspects of its social use and structuring through time.

The original data were converted from the printed catalogue into a Geographical Information System (GIS) consisting of digitised plans and a database. Exploratory analyses of the data were conducted, based on two complementary perspectives: the spatial reference of recorded features and objects, and the formal similarity of burial assemblages. The former approach includes spatial density and trend surface analyses, the latter applies multivariate factor analysis visualised in GIS, where the extracted factor scores define a new reference system. The methods employed are sometimes unorthodox, specifically because such plots describing formal space have been little employed in GIS-based studies of mortuary behaviour. This article strives to highlight the positive aspects of contemporary computer software in order to encourage researchers to pursue new ways of conceptualising their research ideas through the integration of concepts and methods, which traditionally have been applied to different research domains."

This paper aims to demonstrate that an historical understanding of the introduction of public cemeteries in Angola is feasible, although dependent on the study of a wider context: the “Lusophone Atlantic”. Taking this premise into account, before analyzing how the new Romantic ideals clashed at Luanda and Benguela (the two major Angolan urban spaces of the 19th century) with the ongoing Baroque traditions of the local elites – as well as the native costumes – a brief overview of what went on at Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro during the Romantic cemetery “revolution” is essayed.

This article investigates the peculiar cultural importance of funerary epigraphy in nineteenth-century Italy. Epitaphs, considered as a main literary genre, were not only engraved on tombstones, but also published in anthologies and were the object of manuals, treatises, articles and critical reviews. These abundant discourses on funerary epigraphy offer historians a rare opportunity to gain insight into the emotional practices that developed around them, both inside and outside funerary space and time. The investigation of this literature  highlights the awareness that emotions were crucial in reinforcing the pedagogical role attributed to the epitaph in transmitting religious, moral, civic and familial values to present and future generations.

The beginning of the nineteenth century heralded a huge Romantic shift in the conceptual and architectonic design of graveyards throughout Europe - redesigned then as a bourgeois lieux de mémoire. This rupture, smoothed in Europe by a stable Judeo-Christian background, was differently enacted in colonial Angola. To the local and metropolitan elites, the creole compromise achieved during the late Enlightenment became impossible to sustain - during the Liberal and Romantic period that ensued - because it became unfeasible to imagine a "proper" city without its silent, hygienic and tightly regulated double: a modern public cemetery. This paradigm shift meant that an ongoing religious truce (during which the few Roman Catholic priests present at the colony didn't interfere with the local "gentile" funerary rites - such as "itamas" or "mutambe") was ultimately broken by Liberal public works reformers, in the name of progress and sanitation (Malaria was still attributed to miasmas). Public cemeteries thus became disputed memory sites, where two different groups worshiped the remembrance of their dead in wildly different ways, while projecting their values into the future via the design of their urban environment.

St John’s parish church, razed to the ground in the 19th century, was the subject of a rescue excavation during construction-works in « Foch square », undertaken in conjunction with excavations for the Rouen « Metro-bus ». This parish, which is known to have been present by the end of the 12th century, was located near to the Gallo-Roman city wall of Rotomagus, in the medieval center of Rouen, today occupied by the site of the “Palais de Justice” metro station. The parish’s graveyard was explored over a surface area of 480 m ; the stratified sequence of the funerary deposits was 2.50 m deep. The excavations provided the author with an opportunity to reconstruct the history of the ecclesiastical site from its origins (8th-9th century), and to investigate the course of its development up until the 16th century. The archaeological study of the graveyard culminated in an anthropological analysis of remains from the four first centuries of the establishment and use of this medieval cemetery (9th-12th centuries).

Archaeologists have made significant advancements in recognizing transformations in identity through the material record of the past. However, there remains the assumption that once memorialized, material manifestations of identity are static, isolated and possess a singular, permanent meaning. Through the examination of one monument from Ross Bay Cemetery, Victoria, B.C., this paper argues that monuments exist within a temporal, spatial and social environment that literally and figuratively transforms the identity of the individual commemorated through an interactive, mutually constitutive relationship. Archival, ethnoarchaeological and material analyses are used to explore the significance of physical changes to the monument, its connections to the landscape and the interactions between people and object. In tracing these historical transformations of the monument, it is evident that identity is equally fluid in death as in life and that processes of identity construction and negotiation continue through the life of the headstone as it continues to bring about particular forms of interaction.