Thinking Spatially about the Dead: Using GIS to Examine Upstate New York’s Nineteenth-Century Cemeteries

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Geospatial analysis has much to offer historic cemetery archaeology. Recognizing the lived-in landscapes past people moved within through geospatial analysis allows us to visualize historic cemeteries more holistically and recognize their important roles as sites for social and economic interactions at multiple scales. This paper follows the author’s dissertation research, presenting case studies from geospatial analyses of four historic cemeteries in Madison County, New York. The author combines traditional questions of historic cemetery archaeology, such as stylistic change over time within a site, with site- and regional-scale GIS analyses to visualize the shifting choices people made about how to care for their dead in complex social and economic contexts. Each cemetery studied demonstrates unique mobilizations of American Victorian mourning customs, influenced by local town histories, economic opportunities, and constraints of the landscape. While the cemeteries studied are interesting as individual sites, the regional scale reveals the dynamic negotiation of cosmopolitan mortuary practices by rural communities, raising questions about the validity of the assumed urban/rural divide in 19th century Upstate New York.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53340