Our Dearly Loved Daughter and Sister: A Bioarchaeological, Material Culture, and Archival Case Study in Extraordinary Organic Preservation from Bethel Cemetery, Marion County, Indiana

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project: Historical, Osteological, and Material Culture Analyses of a Nineteenth-Century Indiana Cemetery" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

During the 2018 Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project, 26 concrete or metallic burial vaults were recovered. Established field protocol dictated that these were to remain unopened and were to be reinterred at the new cemetery location without further investigation; however, the poor preservation and condition of several concrete vaults necessitated the transfer of their contents to new containers at an off-site lab prior to reburial. This afforded the archaeological team a unique opportunity to document and analyze five remarkably well-preserved late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century caskets and their contents. This poster details one of these cases, Burial 009, the interment of a 30-year-old young mother, wife, daughter, and sister who succumbed to tuberculosis in 1908. The exceptional preservation of organic materials (including her intact wooden casket, burial dress, shoes, and hair) within the vault provide insights into mortuary material culture not often encountered by archaeologists working in historic cemeteries. These observations, coupled with comparisons to contemporary undertakers’ catalogs as well as archival and genealogical research, paint a fuller, more vivid and nuanced picture of early twentieth-century mortuary behavior.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)   •
• The Bethel Cemetery Relocation Project: Historical, Osteological, and Material Culture Analyses of a Nineteenth-Century Indiana Cemetery

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36137.0