"Making a Box Worthy of a Sleeping Beauty": Burial Container Surface Treatments in the 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Recently, a fair amount of attention in historic mortuary literature has been paid to burial container hardware, and to a lesser extent, to the influence of hardware on the socioeconomics of the funeral and burial. However, base surface treatments, such as painting, varnishing, cloth-covering, etc. also influenced social perception and cost. Relatively little has been systematically presented in the published archaeological literature about the types of interior and exterior surface treatments used historically and encountered during historic cemetery/burial relocations. This is largely due to the fact that surface treatments often don’t preserve. Degree of preservation does limit the scope of observation, but absence of evidence does not necessarily indicate absence of practice and surface treatments can preserve in certain situations. Close attention to this evidence is required for it to contribute to the archaeological record of historic mortuary sites.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• 2020 SHA Poster Submissions

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 947