Funerary Hardware in 18th and 19th Century Philadelphia: What Can Be Used as an Indication of Wealth from the Arch Street Site?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The cemetery of the First Baptist Church of Philadelphia (ca. 1702-1859) was excavated in 2017. Almost 500 remains and associated material culture highlight the lives of Philadelphia’s early citizens during pre and post-colonial eras. Individual graves offer multiple lines of evidence from which to assign a wealth index within the sample. Variables used in the study include coffin hardware (furniture), lid plaques, lid tacks, escutcheons, and grave goods. The study created a rubric on which to grade each individual graves’ wealth based on the presence or absence of such funerary goods. Historical records were then compared to the results to blindly test how the cemetery’s sample may represent the congregations’ population at the time. This paper presents the results of the analysis and highlights the importance of additional research on coffin hardware and grave goods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Bones and Burials in Philadelphia: The Arch Street Project’s Multidisciplinary Research   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24021