Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone: Examining Relationships between the Living and the Dead through Decorated Headstones
Author(s): Jillian Okray; Susan Spencer; Ashley Christianson
Year: 2015
Summary
Cemetery grave sites allow a continual dialogue between the deceased and their descendants. Many living relatives choose to decorate graves with flowers, ceramic figurines, flags, letters, and decorative seasonal items. This study was aimed to examine the relationship between the deceased and loved ones who choose to decorate graves after burial. Two cemeteries in Evansville, Indiana were examined in order to investigate the typology of decorations and the length of time graves remained decorated. The activity recorded, along with information obtained from online memorial web pages, indicates an intricate relationship the living share with the departed.
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Cite this Record
Don’t Forget Me When I’m Gone: Examining Relationships between the Living and the Dead through Decorated Headstones. Jillian Okray, Ashley Christianson, Susan Spencer. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 397931)
This Resource is Part of the Following Collections
Keywords
General
Cemeteries
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Graves
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Indiana
Geographic Keywords
North America - Midwest
Spatial Coverage
min long: -104.634; min lat: 36.739 ; max long: -80.64; max lat: 49.153 ;