Grave Landscapes

Growing urban populations prompted major changes in graveyard location, design, and use During the Industrial Revolution people flocked to American cities. Overcrowding in these areas led to packed urban graveyards that were not only unsightly, but were also a source of public health fears. The solution was a revolutionary new type of American burial ground located in the countryside just beyond the city. This rural cemetery movement, which featured beautifully landscaped grounds and sculptural monuments, is documented by James R. Cothran and Erica Danylchak in Grave Landscapes: The Nineteenth-Century Rural Cemetery Movement. The movement began in Boston, where a group of reformers that included members of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society were grappling with the city's mounting burial crisis. Inspired by the naturalistic garden style and melancholy-infused commemorative landscapes that had emerged in Europe, the group established a burial ground outside of Boston on an expansive tract of undulating, wooded land and added meandering roadways, picturesque ponds, ornamental trees and shrubs, and consoling memorials. They named it Mount Auburn and officially dedicated it as a rural cemetery. This groundbreaking endeavor set a powerful precedent that prompted the creation of similarly landscaped rural cemeteries outside of growing cities first in the Northeast, then in the Midwest and South, and later in the West. These burial landscapes became a cultural phenomenon attracting not only mourners seeking solace, but also urbanites seeking relief from the frenetic confines of the city. Rural cemeteries predated America's public parks, and their popularity as picturesque retreats helped propel America's public parks movement. This beautifully illustrated volume features more than 150 historic photographs, stereographs, postcards, engravings, maps, and contemporary images that illuminate the inspiration for rural cemeteries, their physical evolution, and the nature of the landscapes they inspired. Extended profiles of twenty-four rural cemeteries reveal the cursive design features of this distinctive landscape type prior to the American Civil War and its evolution afterward. Grave Landscapes details rural cemetery design characteristics to facilitate their identification and preservation and places rural cemeteries into the broader context of American landscape design to encourage appreciation of their broader influence on the design of public spaces.

Islamic societies of the past have often been characterized as urban, with rural and other extra-urban landscapes cast in a lesser or supporting role in the studies of Islamic history and archaeology. Yet throughout history, the countryside was frequently an engine of economic activity, the setting for agricultural and technological innovation, and its inhabitants were frequently agents of social and political change. The Islamic city is increasingly viewed in the context of long and complex processes of urban development. Archaeological evidence calls for an equally nuanced reading of shifting cultural and religious practices in rural areas after the middle of the seventh century. Landscapes of the Islamic World presents new work by twelve authors on the archaeology, history, and ethnography of the Islamic world in the Middle East, the Arabian Peninsula, and Central Asia. The collection looks beyond the city to engage with the predominantly rural and pastoral character of premodern Islamic society. Editors Stephen McPhillips and Paul D. Wordsworth group the essays into four thematic sections: harnessing and living with water; agriculture, pastoralism, and rural subsistence; commerce, production, and the rural economy; and movement and memory in the rural landscape. Each contribution addresses aspects of extra-urban life in challenging new ways, blending archaeological material culture, textual sources, and ethnography to construct holistic studies of landscapes. Modern agrarian practices and population growth have accelerated the widespread destruction of vast tracts of ancient, medieval, and early modern landscapes, highlighting the urgency of scholarship in this field. This book makes an original and important contribution to a growing subject area, and represents a step toward a more inclusive understanding of the historical landscapes of Islam. Contributors: Pernille Bangsgaard, Karin Bartl, Jennie N. Bradbury, Robin M. Brown, Alison L. Gascoigne, Ian W. N. Jones, Phillip G. Macumber, Daniel Mahoney, Stephen McPhillips, Astrid Meier, David C. Thomas, Bethany J. Walker, Alan Walmsley, Tony J. Wilkinson, Paul D. Wordsworth, Lisa Yeomans.

Grave sites not only offer the contemporary viewer the physical markers of those remembered but also a wealth of information about the era in which the cemeteries were created. These markers hold keys to our historical past and allow an entry point of interrogation about who is represented, as well as how and why. Grave History is the first volume to use southern cemeteries to interrogate and analyze southern society and the construction of racial and gendered hierarchies from the antebellum period through the dismantling of Jim Crow. Through an analysis of cemeteries throughout the South-including Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, and Virginia, from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries-this volume demonstrates the importance of using the cemetery as an analytical tool for examining power relations, community formation, and historical memory. Grave History draws together an interdisciplinary group of scholars, including historians, anthropologists, archaeologists, and social-justice activists to investigate the history of racial segregation in southern cemeteries and what it can tell us about how ideas regarding race, class, and gender were informed and reinforced in these sacred spaces. Each chapter is followed by a learning activity that offers readers an opportunity to do the work of a historian and apply the insights gleaned from this book to their own analysis of cemeteries. These activities, designed for both the teacher and the student, as well as the seasoned and the novice cemetery enthusiast, encourage readers to examine cemeteries for their physical organization, iconography, sociodemographic landscape, and identity politics.

Last Landscapes is an exploration of the cult and celebration of death, loss and memory. It traces the history and design of burial places throughout Europe and the USA, ranging from the picturesque tradition of the village churchyard to tightly packed "cities of the dead", such as the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and Père Lachaise in Paris. Other landscapes that feature in this book include the war cemeteries of northern France, Viking burial islands in central Sweden, Etruscan tombs and early Christian catacombs in Italy, the 17th-century Portuguese–Jewish cemetery "Beth Haim" at Ouderkerk in the Netherlands, Forest Lawns in California, Derek Jarman’s garden in Kent and the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery. It is a fact that architecture "began with the tomb", yet, as Ken Worpole shows us in Last Landscapes, many historic cemeteries have been demolished or abandoned in recent times (notably the case with Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe), and there has been an increasing loss of inscription and memorialization in the modern urban cemetery. Too often cemeteries today are both poorly designed and physically and culturally marginalized. Worse, cremation denies a full architectural response to the mystery and solemnity of death. The author explores how modes of disposal – burial, cremation, inhumation in mausoleums and wall tombs – vary across Europe and North America, according to religious and other cultural influences. And Last Landscapes raises profound questions as to how, in an age of mass cremation, architects and landscape designers might create meaningful structures and settings in the absence of a body, since for most of history the human body itself has provided the fundamental structural scale. This evocative book also contemplates other forms of memorialization within modern societies, from sculptures to parks, most notably the extraordinary Duisberg Park, set in a former giant steelworks in Germany’s Ruhr Valley.

The Early Anglo-Saxon Period is characterized archaeologically by the regular deposition of artefacts in human graves in England. The scope for dating these objects and graves has long been studied, but it has typically proved easier to identify and enumerate the chronological problems of the material than to solve them. Prior to the work of the project reported on here, therefore, there was no comprehensive chronological framework for Early Anglo-Saxon Archaeology, and the level of detail and precision in dates that could be suggested was low. The evidence has now been studied afresh using a co-ordinated suite of dating techniques, both traditional and new: a review and revision of artefact-typology; seriation of grave-assemblages using correspondence analysis; high-precision radiocarbon dating of selected bone samples; and Bayesian modelling using the results of all of these. These were focussed primarily on the later part of the Early Anglo-Saxon Period, starting in the 6th century. This research has produced a new chronological framework, consisting of sequences of phases that are separate for male and female burials but nevertheless mutually consistent and coordinated. These will allow archaeologists to assign grave-assemblages and a wide range of individual artefact-types to defined phases that are associated with calendrical date-ranges whose limits are expressed to a specific degree of probability. Important unresolved issues include a precise adjustment for dietary effects on radiocarbon dates from human skeletal material. Nonetheless the results of this project suggest the cessation of regular burial with grave goods in Anglo-Saxon England two decades or even more before the end of the seventh century. That creates a limited but important discrepancy with the current numismatic chronology of early English sceattas. The wider implications of the results for key topics in Anglo-Saxon archaeology and social, economic and religious history are discussed to conclude the report.

This book explores the relationship and organization of 17th Century burial landscapes within their associated settlements and the wider setting of colonial northeast British North America to provide readers with a more holistic understanding of settlers’ relationship with mortality.

Chronologically documents the colonisation of a clay inland location north-west of Cambridge at the village of Longstanton and outlines how it was not an area on the periphery of activity, but part of a fully occupied landscape extending back into the Mesolithic period.