Write What You Know, Part II

I might be expanding this for publishing one day. It works as a research investigation, I think, but could use a thorough retooling– it is definitely not the best thing I've ever written, a bit more padding out, and more actual experiential stuff. Also, just so you know on these, I have removed all footnotes because those are a pain to do in Wordpress, which is the platform I use for blogging.

"Escaping Burke and Hare: The Ethics of Graveyard Archaeology"

Introduction
The stereotype of the archaeologist as grave robber is an unfortunate trope that has clung unshakably to the practice since its earliest days. From colonialist treasure-seekers to today’s media-driven misconceptions, a number of negative influences serve as strong evidence for the imperative to archaeologists to have strong professional ethics. While no area of archaeology is free from the need to make ethical decisions, certain aspects require a significantly greater amount of careful thought. Perhaps the most ethically tricky area of archaeology is practiced by those archaeologists who excavate burial sites. In these cases, it is not enough to merely consider the ethical qualms that come with the excavation of human remains; the excavation practices need to be crafted to address the concerns specific to each excavation. But how best to go about this? How can cultural and ethical concerns be addressed in excavation practice? These are questions that merit discussion, for they effect any excavation which might uncover human remains.

Cultural Concerns
    In order to discuss these ethical concerns, they must first be identified. Cultural connections to human remains are perhaps the most important of the ethical concerns, both for making personal decisions about their involvement with human remains and for deciding how to manage the excavation. This is especially true if the culture in question is extant or has one or more clearly defined descendant groups. There have been clashes between scientific analysis and the concerns of such groups worldwide; in Britain, spiritual descendant groups of the neolithic people who constructed Stonehenge call for better treatment of the people they deem their ancestors, while in the United States Native American groups use the umbrella of NAGPRA to ensure fair treatment of their ancestors. The question here becomes the debate between the scientific value of the remains and the cultural importance of leaving them undisturbed. Also, while many religions acknowledge a dualism of soul and body, it takes an unusual amount of desensitization to have no reaction to the sight of human remains. These concerns can lead to personal issues for archaeologists and can affect their choices of digging locations. Buddhists view the disturbance of human remains as inappropriate, while practitioners of Shinto see the dead body as dangerous. This is especially true of modern bodies; what “some would consider as legitimate to scientific inquiry [is] tantamount to desecration to others.” Religion, of course, is not the only factor in these decisions. Secular cultural relevancies and traditions also lead to the development of ethical practices.

Established Practice and Descendant Groups
    Established archaeological practices play a very important role in the development of ethical excavations. For example, it is generally agreed among many archaeologists that historical graveyards should not be excavated unless the site is in danger. However, prehistoric burial sites are not often afforded such reluctance. Regardless of age, there is always an element of violation when excavating intentional burial sites. Memorials have a living memory of their own– bodies are deposited with intent. Unfortunately, sometimes this intent is unclear. This is where descendant groups can be either very helpful or very harmful to the integrity of the excavation. This is seen in many high-profile excavations, especially when the human remains in question are of contested origins. The Kennewick Man is perhaps the most famous of these, with dozens of groups claiming his bones as those of their ancestors. When a case is as contested as this one, it is vital for the archaeologists involved to make sure that the group or groups with the most legitimate claim are the ones involved with the excavation. Stonehenge has also seen its fair share of non-linear descendant groups; modern druids and pagans claim the remains found there as their ancestors, despite no proof of a genetic link. Cooperation with descendent groups is absolutely necessary for the ethical treatment of human remains. While negotiations may be thorny and can last for years, often they come with great reward. In the United States, anthropologists working under NAGPRA have been forced to repatriate many Native American skeletons. Historically, though, many of these skeletal collections were neglected. In  Mississippi, only 16.4% of the skeletons collected before NAGPRA had been studied at all. In contrast, 97.9% of skeletons collected in Iowa had been studied, which is important because Iowa has the longest history of repatriation of any state. This demonstrates the effectiveness of cooperation with descendent groups- it provides motivation and occasionally funding for research.

Safety Issues
    Next to the moral ethical concerns, there are physicalities involved with the excavation of human remains that need to be addressed. Often they are found in unstable ground conditions, where grave digging activity has made the soil loose. Historic bodies also have the rick of harboring pathogens; even today, there are concerns that the bodies of smallpox victims represent a health threat. The safety of the excavators and of the general public is a vital ethical concern in these excavations, and although the situation of each excavation is unique, a set of basic safety precautions should be observed at all burial sites. At prehistoric sites, an observation of difficult terrain might be the only extra safety precaution taken. At a modern site, the British Institute of Field Archaeologists recommends heavy gloves, a body suit, and a head-covering filter mask as part of any site’s list of rules. While this might seem extreme, it demonstrates just how important it is not to overlook safety concerns. Human remains are not a subject to be taken lightly– engaging with them can provide an active risk to excavators, a risk that it would be highly unethical to ignore.

Beyond Discussion: Putting Ethics Into Practice
    These are the key features needed to form a good ethical practice while excavating human remains. Having them theoretically, however, is not enough. It would be useful to examine their applications in the field in order to see how actually putting these practices into use works. While no excavations are identical, there are several instances that can be considered landmark cases that highlight the benefits of taking these ethical concerns into consideration. One of the notable instances is the excavation of the African Burial Ground in New York City. After the initial discovery in 1991, the concerns of the descendants of the graveyard’s inhabitants were immediately taken into effect. Construction was halted, the site’s plans were altered to include a memorial, and, perhaps most importantly, the remains were sent to Howard University for study. Howard, being a historically Black institution, was seen as a good choice because it was obvious that they would take the descendant group’s interests to heart. While this meant that the bones would have to travel further, this was a case of an obvious  biological descendant group expressing their wishes and having them honored. All in all, the excavation was considered a triumph for both the descendant group and the scientists. While initially there were struggles with the site’s memorial plans, the handling of the remains from the African Burial Ground during excavation, research, and reburial was considered a great success by civil rights activists, scientists, and citizens alike.

    The importance of these ethical concerns has led several organizations to release official best practice policies and codes of ethics for their excavations. While no two excavations are the same, best practice statements are an excellent base for ensuring the observation of ethics in the field. The World Anthropology Council’s Vermillion Accord on Human Remains is a prominent example of one such policy. The seven articles of the accord were drafted to create a balance between scientific and spiritual value. They explicitly address the indispensability of legitimatizing the concerns of both scientists and descendent groups, as well as insisting upon respect for all human remains.  Notably, the accord also creates a hierarchy of legitimacy for the concerns of various groups in the way that it is numbered. First precedence goes to the “wishes of the dead… when they are known or can be reasonably inferred,” and then to “the local community and the relatives of the dead.”  This is important, for cultures change and certain descendant groups can carry their own agendas, so the article protects the original depositors’ intentions. The WAC’s ethics code also contains accords detailing the proper treatment and display of sacred objects. This includes grave goods and other elements that give the human remains context.
   
    The British Association for Biological Anthropology and Osteoarchaeology has its own ethics code that deals more strictly with human remains and the behavior of the archaeologists who excavate and study them. They point out that the politically-correct tendency to allow reburial is not always the ethical decision:

    “Destruction of information about our past by indiscriminate reburial of skeletal   
    collections is unethical. Nevertheless, in some cases of contested remains, moral
    rights of a claimant group over the remains may outweigh this consideration, so
            that reburial rather than retention is the more appropriate response.”

    BABAO also emphasizes the role of the archaeologist as an educator, addressing the concern of accessibility. Essentially, they make it a point in their code of professional ethics to discourage sensationalism and exaggeration of the conditions surrounding the excavation of human remains; they do their part to make sure that the myth of the graverobber is not perpetuated.

Conclusion
    Ultimately, the excavation of grave sites is a delicate issue and one that requires a multifaceted approach in each situation. However, with the careful consideration of the ethical issues involved, it is possible to excavate without arousing moral concerns. By respecting the desires and traditions of one’s own culture, honoring the culture or cultures tied closely to the excavation’s subject, and adhering to overarching ethical guidelines, an archaeologist can shape their own best practice and address the multifaceted ethical issues that come with the excavation of human remains.

Write What You Know, Part I

I don't just hang out in graveyards. I'm not fourteen any more, and I've mostly got the angst turned down.

Mostly.

But all kidding aside, it is important that I put what I learn into practice. This is what is important to me- graveyards are a pretty big part of my life, after all. So I thought I'd share a couple of examples of how I've managed to incorporate it into my education. The following are a couple of essays that I've written about issues surrounding graveyards and their archaeology.

Houses of the Dead: The Evolution of Graveyards in Gothic Literature

    It is a common scene in Gothic literature. Maybe it is the damsel in distress, fleeing barefoot through the headstones in her billowy white nightgown. Maybe it is the corpse bride, wandering sylph-like through the mausolea and memorials, unaware of any watchers. Maybe it is the villain, hiding amongst the bones of the dead. Maybe it is the gravedigger, preparing for the next day’s funeral when a ghost chooses to appear to him, imparting a message of impending doom. Or maybe it is the romantic hero, come to lay flowers at the foot of his dead beloved. Whoever the character, the setting is as familiar to the sense of the Gothic as any location could possibly be. It is the graveyard, and everybody has seen it before.
    The graveyard or cemetery is one of the most common tropes in Gothic literature. However, the walled place where the crosses are all in a row and shady rest under the trees is usual is a relatively recent development, with the oldest proper graveyard having just celebrated its 200th anniversary. The graveyard as we know it is not a static concept; rather, it has changed in the past and may yet change again. And as the concept of what makes a graveyard developed, so to did its role in the Gothic. Over time, burial grounds changed from a set piece to a dynamic location with which characters actively engage and interact, essentially mirroring their real-time development.
    In 1764, when the first Gothic novel was published, there were no graveyards as they are understood today. All bodies were buried in the greens and lawns around churches. The majority of this space would invariably be consecrated and fenced, while a section would be kept separate for the burials of foreigners, suicides, criminals, and heathens. Occasionally, disease would necessitate the use of mass graves, but generally in Europe and especially in England, individual burials in consecrated ground was the normal way to treat a body. However, while the ideal was one body to a grave, this never happened. Urban expansion and high mortality rates, particularly amongst the lower economic classes, led to churchyards simultaneously shrinking and having to handle higher traffic. Complicating the matter further was the intolerance of cremation; it was considered a serious offense to desecrate a body by burning it. Stories of clandestine cremations were later used as bases for more lurid tales, one such being that of Sweeney Todd, where the scent of burning bodies attracts attention from the neighbors and ultimately leads to Todd’s undoing. This has a factual background, coming from places like Spa Fields where illegal cremations were performed by night1. Churches with large crypts had the option of  disinterring the bodies after decomposition and storing the bones, but small parishes could only dig deeper. In some London churchyards, bodies were buried twenty-five deep. Is it any wonder, then, that graves and the churchyard were so easily associated with terror?
    Early Gothic authors certainly seized upon them as perfect scenery for the macabre. They were popular settings for chase sequences or apparitions. However, characters didn’t stay long– at least, not living characters. A churchyard might be mentioned many times, but involvement with one was dangerous. Only two kinds of people stayed long in churchyards: the dead and the evil (who were often soon-to-be dead). Matthew Lewis’s The Monk is a good case of this: Early in Matilda’s corruption of Ambrosio, the couple take refuge in a tomb. This is foreshadowing for their later use of mausolea. Ambrosio’s greatest tomb-related sin occurs when he enters the drugged Antonia’s tomb to take advantage of her “by the side of three putrid half-corrupted Bodies.2” Although he lifts her from the coffin itself, “the gloom of the vault” and “the surrounding silence3” only serve to further his unholy desires. The sepulchre has become “Love’s bower4” to Antonio; clearly, here, he has become mad. No person in their right mind would consider a crypt full of decaying bodies romantic, after all.
    Matilda, for her part, has been using a tomb as a base of operations for her demon-summoning. Little explanation is needed as to why this leads to an unpleasant fate– dealing with magic is dangerous enough, but becoming a black magician seals one’s fate. In the endgame of the novel, the two attempt to take refuge in the tomb, which has been a somewhat-hidden door. This does not fool the soldiers of the Inquisition, come to find them, and the two are dragged from the tomb, only to return to it later. While both survive their initial encounters with the churchyard, neither emerges uncorrupt. The decay around them essentially ruined them; they entered the verboten land of the dead and could not come out and rejoin the living.
    For many years, the idea of a churchyard was the only expression of a burial ground in literature. This concept began to change in 1804 with the opening of the Père Lachaise in Paris. This was the first cemetery to use the familiar park-like setting distanced from main residential areas. It also was not attached to a particular parish, meaning that it allowed for an intermingling of social classes that was unlikely to happen in life. Death, after all, is the great equalizer, and having both rich and poor in the same ground was a revolutionary idea. For many years, the Père Lachaise was unique. However, the design was adopted in London to deal with the unpleasant churchyard situation. By the 1830s, churchyards were no longer a viable option. The crowded areas of London had the greatest problems. Parish membership was determined by residence, so there was very little mingling of social classes within parishes- and thus, within churchyards. Since poor neighborhoods tended to be the most crowded and have higher rates of mortality, their churchyards were filled beyond capacity. Aside from the stench of decomposition, this overcrowding became a serious health issue, leading to breakouts of cholera. In 1832, Parliament put forth a motion to abolish the old practice of churchyard burials and create cemeteries like the one in Paris. This act, known as the Cemeteries Act of 1832, encouraged private companies to create incorporated graveyards. Kensal Green was the first of the incorporated, public graveyards. While it was Anglican, it was not exclusive to one parish, which was a first for London. Six others followed, eventually known as the “Magnificent Seven.” For years, these large cemeteries have served as London’s main burial grounds. These seven park-like graveyards were renowned for the beauty and grace of their landscaping and architecture, leading to a revolutionary new way of thinking about burial grounds.
    By the time of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the cemetery’s role in both society and literature had changed. This had much to do with the popularity of the London cemeteries as more than burial grounds. In the late Victorian age, Highgate had become a fashionable destination. Instead of being foreboding places, they were welcoming. They had become liminal spaces, where the dead slumbered peacefully and the living came to visit. It was a place where the living could engage with the dead, and this was seized upon by the Gothic authors- notably, Bram Stoker. In Dracula, the cemetery is not a place of flight, but of action. The characters engage with the space in a way that was previously impossible. While the space is the domain of the dead (and the undead), it is also a space that the living can use and emerge from alive.
    However, Stoker does not abandon the older version of the graveyard entirely. The first pivotal burial ground scene occurs prior to the return to England, when Jonathan Harker discovers “an old ruined chapel, which had evidently been used as a graveyard5.” The soil that Dracula brings to England is being excavated here; Dracula himself sleeps in the vaults. In this sequence, Stoker deliberately evokes the old image of the outlawed churchyards, both to give his readers a sense of an older world and a more backwards world. Dracula’s first victim in London, Petrof Skinsky, is found in a religiously-identified churchyard. He is “found inside the wall of the churchyard of St. Peter, and that the throat had been torn open as if by some wild animal6.” This brief entanglement of churchyard and macabre calls to mind the often-grisly scenes of the pre-Act churchyards.
    In contrast, the place of Lucy Westenra’s interment is clearly meant to evoke Highgate Cemetery. Although it is identified as “the churchyard at Kingstead7,” Stoker’s description of large family mausolea, “ghastly white” tombs, and “cypress… yew… [and] juniper8” call to mind the appearance and plantings of the park cemeteries. It is said that Stoker often took his lunch in Highgate, which at his time would have been a voguish pursuit. Curiously, the one feature of the graveyard that sets it apart from the actual Highgate is its low wall, which is mentioned by Dr. Seward. This distinction in all likeliness was made because, while Stoker’s audience would not have been aware of the various facets of fictional vampire lore, they would have been familiar with Highgate and the other London cemeteries. All of these had high walls that were difficult to climb. They may have questioned the group’s ability to get over such a wall, so Stoker paid attention to this detail. It is also quite possible that he is drawing on the imagery attached to several Dublin churchyards, many of which do have low walls. Ultimately, this makes Kingstead a synthetic accretion of various burial grounds from Stoker’s experience, which paradoxically removes it from and places it within the real world. It is a place to be understood, but not really a place to visit, except in the mind’s eye.
    But aside from the short wall, trees, and white memorials, Kingstead has little textual imagery. It is not described with the lavish detail that authors like Anne Radcliffe used to detail their environments; there is no need. Essentially, by the time of Dracula the cemetery has become a codified trope: if the author mentions a cemetery, he or she bypasses the need to give an elaborate description of the place and can focus on the action. Details that the author chooses to give only enhance the atmosphere; they do not redefine it. In these cases, familiarity is actually a good thing and adds to the ghastly air by letting horror seep into peoples’ ideas of a place they know intimately.
    The blurring of lines between such distinct dichotomies that occurs in large graveyards is also an element that contributes to a strong Gothic atmosphere. The undead Lucy Westenra is obviously the prime example of this- she is a monster neither alive nor dead, her beauty twisted into a perverse sexuality. She is anathema to those who loved her in life, for she has broached one barrier too far. In Dracula, social classes can mingle in life– an American, a Dutch Catholic, a lawyer, and a lord become a team when pressed by a common threat– just as they can mingle in death in the graveyard. But life and death? That line cannot be crossed without invoking the monstrous.
    In the most recent Gothic, cemeteries evoke a polarized reaction, obtaining a new dichotomy to smudge. They are either places that have been completely romanticized, or they are places of terror. In America, many folktales and urban legends have developed around the idea of a haunted cemetery; they are often guarded on Halloween night to deter vandals and thrill-seekers. In Britain, Highgate’s status as a gothic setting has continued  in both literature (Neil Gaiman tends to make use of it) and other media. It is a common filming location, and in the 1970s, was home to the apocryphal Highgate Vampire.
    Of course, not all graveyards are frightening. Particularly often in music, they are places of comfort. Themes of loss and sorrow run deep in the Gothic, and cemeteries as we understand them today can help mourners transition between stages of grief. Because of their accessibility, they make it possible to commune with the dead, which can often help a mourner move on. It is unlikely that this feeling will ever change, but it is also unlikely that cemeteries will remain exactly as they are, both from a literary and social standpoint.
    Part of the cemetery’s allure is the general age of these burial grounds. Most are old,
But like every other manmade design, cemeteries will change as society changes. The current trend is the “green cemetery,” a take on the park setting that eliminates the memorial stones, ornate tombs, and ideas about corruption and preservation. These cemeteries allow bodies to decay naturally and are very peaceful places that have completely lost the sinister aura of their predecessors.
    However, natural burials have made appearances in American horror in the form of the Native American burial ground, upon which foolish developers tend to build and terrible things then tend to happen. Perhaps in the future, these natural burial grounds will converge with them as a stock environment for the use of authors wishing to give their stories a gloomy, dangerous atmosphere. The potential for contrast is intriguing. But regardless of future possibilities, it seems unlikely that the graveyard as a setting for Gothic tales will ever fade from vogue. The cemetery has become too useful as a shorthand for fear, darkness, loss, and the general flavour of the Gothic.

Coming Attractions

To all of you who are following this blog and wonder why the heck I don't talk about graveyards more, I have a present for you! It's a series I've been working on for a little while now about what happened to all those churchyards after they were no longer allowed to be used as burial grounds. Interspersed with this sequence will be my visit to the Guildhall area and a look at hellhounds. Next weekend will come a visit to Highgate (FINALLY. JEEZ.), a look at Jewish cemeteries, and hopefully, if all goes well, I'll have finished my Finding Neverwhere sequence. I'll also have some stuff from Kapow up, hopefully.

Also, later in the series, we'll see a cute duck and an anorexic TARDIS.

So, uh, keep watching is what I think that I am trying to say?

Wasn't This Supposed To Be An Anthropology Blog?

Yes. Yes it was, and yes it is, actually.

I'm going to this conference in the fall, and I'm hoping to present a poster based on my summer research. Specifically, the anthropology of "museum people" and how public perceptions of what anthropology is and what it should be shape the way museums present material and curate objects. I've kinda been thinking about museum archaeology a lot recently. Depending on how this summer goes, I may look into it further for grad school and a career track.

This summer, for those of you who read this and don't know– and I can't imagine that's very many of you– I've got an internship at the Field Museum in Chicago. Ten weeks of working in the most glorious place on earth.

So yeah, brief update on how this blog actually serves a purpose.

Skeletons in the Closet, Bodies in the Floor

Many of the churches in London are old. Very, very old. Several go back to the medieval period. The Victorians didn't want to tear them down- they were sacred spaces, after all, but the fact remains that they were kind of falling apart. So they'd try to fix them. They'd bolster the walls, redo the roofs, and relay the floors. The floors were a particular issue because of how uneven they were. It was almost as though they'd been dug up a lot and never really carefully redone.

This is exactly what happened. See, the medieval folks used the space outside of their buildings to graze animals, not for burying bodies. That would be undignified, so if you could pay for it, you'd do what you could to get buried in... alternate sacred space. This meant the floor of the church. Bodies would be piled atop of bodies, some going as far as twenty-five to thirty feet down. When the Victorians figured this out, they kinda freaked out. Victorian sensibilities couldn't deal with bodies under the floor. That was gross. Bodies led to cholera, and that was terrible. So they typically would dig them up, probably making grossed-out faces the whole time, and move them. With most of these bodies, it was a pretty easy decision about where to put them. They assumed that all the bodies were Christian and buried them in the nearest churchyard, often in a mass grave. It's kind of like how they treated poor and/or foreign (Irish) bodies. Little status in life, little status in death.

But what did happen to the high-statused bodies? If you look at the bodies of St. Peter Ad Vincula, seven still remain in the floor. All of them were connected to the Tudor dynasty in some way- Anne Boleyn, her brother, Lady Jane Grey, and several others. This is a small but visible sign of the way postmortem status was assigned to certain bodies. George Boleyn wasn't as important as other prisoners executed at the tower, but because of his family ties, he was included in the burials. It is interesting, though, to notice that those bodies remained in the floor and weren't vaulted. While they might have status, they were still traitors to the crown. They couldn't be treated like the other burials conducted in Peter Ad Vincula and given an above-ground memorial.

In some situations, the above-ground memorial was impractical, yet bodies were too important to go into the graveyard. This is incredibly evident in Westminster Abbey, which is filled with floor burials, wall burials, and monuments. Space in this ancient space is honestly pretty limited, especially with the huge memorials of the past, so the Victorians did continue to bury people in the floor. It'd be nice to find out more about the decision-making process when it came to Westminster burials, I think.

With the eventual creation of large, park-like graveyards, the tradition of burials in churches pretty much died out. The Dean of Westminster's got to give permission for any more burials in the Abbey, and, furthermore, there's no bodies allowed. Only ashes. People who have served the Abbey in an official capacity, such as an Organist or Surveyor of the Fabric (I... don't actually know what that is) may be buried here and important British artists and scientists and such can be considered as well. The most recent burial was Sir Laurence Olivier in 1991.

One of the interesting problems about living on an island has always been the disposal of dead bodies. This only gets more complicated when your religion, culture, or ideas about sanitation prevent cremation. In Haiti, they tend to do reusable above-ground concrete vaults, similar to the solution worked out in New Orleans. In London, they've tried a number of things to deal with the problem, from literally building bodies into the infrastructure of their churches to artificially raising the terrain level of their Victorian cemeteries to keep reusing them. At Kensal Greens, for example, some of the ground is six to ten feet higher than it was back when it opened so that they can keep using the space. It's been interesting tracing funerary trends as the economy shifted from agricultural (any extra land goes to animal grazing) to industrial (creation of big sprawly class-distinct graveyards) to service (blurring of class lines in graveyards). I might end up doing more with this as a smaller project, or including it in my marginalization thesis as a sort of ending bit.