Landscapes of Oblivion: Forgetting burial grounds and placing the past

Summary

Forgetting is a cultural act.  Memories of burial grounds do not fade away bleached by time.  This paper explores the anthropology of forgetting: examining the role of burial grounds as meaningful places in cultural landscapes. The materiality of the burial grounds gives presence to descent, kinship, sodality and the generational transfer of wealth and property.  The eighteenth-century Moore-Jackson burial ground is such a place.  Over generations, Moore burial markers were placed to memorialize the social means -- marriages, inheritances and kinship -- by which farmers acquired land that allowed their offspring to become farmers.  The expansion of industrial capital in nineteenth-century New York brought a new social landscape of capital and alienated labor marked out by industrialized waterways, factories, mansions and worker’s housing.   In this landscape, commercial cemeteries provided places for the landless: both factory owners and their workers.  Family burial grounds could be forgotten in plain sight.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• Reclaiming Identity at Forgotten Cemeteries in New York City

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 570