Quotes and Cats

Part of the research question our group decided on when looking at the St. Luke's Church cemetery looked at the expression of identity on the monuments. The most interesting thing I found is the detail given about an individual's life drops off during the twentieth century.

One of the older monuments at St. Luke's.

The burials from the late 1800s all give familial relationships, birthplace, and a quote (biblical or otherwise). Yet after 1950, there's only two markers (out of about 7 we looked at from that time period) give anything beyond the years of life and the name. Why was the identity of the individual devalued to two numbers and a name? In the family burial plots where we noticed this, the family name was more decorated than other plots--one had one of the only symbol inscriptions in our sample. Was the family becoming more important as space decreased? Or was it due to something that happened during the early 1900s that changed the style?

A non-traditional monument we found in the cremations section.

Cremations were introduced to save space in the small cemetery. One of the cremation markers we looked at had a cat on it; not something you'd expect to see in an Anglican cemetery, is it? But besides the cat, there was no information past the minimum inscribed. It seems like with the adoption of a new practice, nontraditional symbols are also being accepted as a way to describe the personality or identity of someone without words. 

"Make her be served a good meal."

A necropolis of the ancient kingdom of Kush, neighbour to the Egyptian kingdom, appears to have a hybrid of two styles: the local tradition of circular tumulus construction and Egyptian pyramids. These densely packed gravesites vary in size, and one even has a tablet wishing grandma good meals in the afterlife. The combination of cultures here is interesting.

From Live Science. The Kushite necropolis.

The inner circles of these pyramids offer no structural support, leading the authors to suggest they come from a local style. They say that only one pyramid outside of the Sedeinga site follows this style. Having just completed the monument analysis project and thinking about our modern grave-markers and their susceptibility to style, I can't help but see this necropolis in the same terms. I can imagine wealthy Kushites influenced by the Egyptians, perhaps wanting those powerful pyramids to reflect their own wealth. Eventually, the style becomes so popular that even a child is buried next to a 30-inch wide pyramid and Sedeinga is suddenly a dense graveyard of tumulus-pyramid hybrid monuments.

The few artifacts described in the article make this seem more like an ancient graveyard than an ominous-sounding necropolis. Offerings for grandma, prayers to Isis, Osiris, and Anubis on behalf of loved ones; they don't sound much different than Ronald Kendrick's gravestone at St. Luke's cemetery. I hope we find more sites like Sedeinga.

Individuality Among the Dead

One of the earliest things I remember about my mom is her fascination with graveyards. I used to think it was creepy, and would never want to accompany her on those visits to local graveyards during vacations. But with this monument analysis project, I'm finding myself almost as fascinated by those tombstones as she is.

At the small church cemetery my group and I visited this week to record information, I was surprised by the amount of multiple interments (all cremations? or did they stand people up when burying them?) and the stories I could infer from the little information provided. I saw a family's grave occupied by brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren. The couples temporarily separated by death (but seemingly prepared for it in the ominous birthdate-only engraving for the surviving partner) and those reunited after decades apart.

But my favourite was a Scottish couple, who easily had the coolest grave; none of us saw it until we were about to leave, but once found it stuck out from the rest of the toned-down grave markers (before this, the most unique grave was marked by a stone scroll). I think this is the kind of monument I would want over my grave: almost fitting in, but individualized enough that it can be picked out amongst all others.