Archaeological Perspectives on American Cemeteries and Gravestones

Summary

This paper provides a brief overview of our forthcoming book on the archaeology of American cemeteries and gravestones. Over the last fifty years archaeologists have analyzed how cemeteries and gravestones reflect and embody changing ideas regarding commemoration and remembrance from the 17th to the 21st centuries. Cemeteries are important repositories of cultural information and gravestones are essentially documents in stone. Moreover the human remains buried in the cemeteries can provide valuable information about an individual’s physiological characteristics: stature, sex, health, and injuries suffered during life. But cemeteries are not just about the dead, they reflect the decisions surviving relatives made in the choice of gravesite and tombstone based on religion, ethnicity, gender, status, and in some cases the economic limitations of those choices. Our research provides a broad over-view of cemetery studies in terms of geographic areas, chronological time, and theoretical perspectives. 

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The American Experience in Archaeological Perspective   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2013

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

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PaperId(s): 183