Cufflinks, Quarters, and Consumption: An Examination of Adolescent Burials at Dubuque’s Third Street Cemetery

Summary

From 1833 to 1880, members of St. Raphael’s Cathedral, a largely Irish parish in Dubuque, Iowa, interred their dead in the Third Street Cemetery. After the Catholic burial ground fell out of use, the graves were forgotten. The cemetery was inadvertently disturbed by construction in the 1940s, 1970s, and 1990s, and most of the remaining graves were excavated by the Iowa Office of the State Archaeologist between 2007 and 2011. During this fieldwork, unique features were noted in several adolescent interments. Clothing hardware suggesting elaborate burial outfits and grave goods of a nonreligious nature were observed more frequently in the graves of teenagers than in those of adults and children. The analysis presented today is part of an ongoing study utilizing data from osteological and material culture analyses, as well as archival research, to investigate differential mortality patterns and mortuary preparations in nineteenth century adolescent burials in across America.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2018   •
• The Red Shoes: Toward a Materialized Relationship Between the Living and the Dead

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 348