The Rebecca Nurse Monument and George Jacobs Headstone: Using Landscape Archaeology to Discover a Commemorative Environment

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Monuments and Statues to Women: Arrival of an Historical Reckoning of Memory and Commemoration", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts is home to the first monument commemorating a victim of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692. The 1885 memorial to Rebecca Nurse is located in her historic family cemetery and has functioned as a grave marker because she received no formal burial. A few feet away from Nurses' memorial is the reburied body and 1992 commemorative grave marker of another elderly witch trials victim, George Jacobs Sr. These two physical objects are at the center of a controversial memory that has been carried through generations. The cemetery is a short drive away from Salem, the ‘Witch City,’ meaning that these objects have stimulated interest in both the cultural meaning of cemeteries and their preservation. This paper uses ideas of landscape archaeology to locate Nurse and Jacobs, their stories, and these memorials in a commemorative landscape.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Monuments and Statues to Women: Arrival of an Historical Reckoning of Memory and Commemoration

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow