Gravestone Designs Rubbings And Photographs From Early New York New Jersey

The use of engraved sculptural or painted images was a pagan practice, hesitantly adopted by the earliest Christians, who had to transform the old mythological symbols in order to express suitably the meanings of their new religion.

New Jersey Cemeteries and Tombstones presents a culturally diverse account of New Jersey's historic burial places from High Point to Cape May and from the banks of the Delaware to the ocean-washed Shore, to explain what cemeteries tell us about people and the communities in which they lived.

Historical Archaeology of New York City is a collection of narratives about people who lived in New York City during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, people whose lives archaeologists have encountered during excavations at sites where these people lived or worked. The stories are ethnohistorical or microhistorical studies created using archaeological and documentary data. As microhistories, they are concerned with particular people living at particular times in the past within the framework of world events. The world events framework will be provided in short introductions to chapters grouped by time periods and themes. The foreword by Mary Beaudry and the afterword by LuAnne DeCunzo bookend the individual case studies and add theoretical weight to the volume. Historical Archaeology of New York City focuses on specific individual life stories, or stories of groups of people, as a way to present archaeological theory and research. Archaeologists work with material culture—artifacts—to recreate daily lives and study how culture works; this book is an example of how to do this in a way that can attract people interested in history as well as in anthropological theory.

Includes assessing the problem, collecting data, cleaning and maintaining the site, and caring for gravestones.

James Crissman explores cultural traits related to death and dying in Appalachian sections of Tennessee, Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, and West Virginia, showing how they have changed since the 1600s. Relying on archival materials, almost forty photographs, and interviews with more than 400 mountain dwellers, Crissman focuses on the importance of family and "neighborliness" in mountain society. Written for both scholarly and general audiences, the book contains sections on the death watch, body preparation, selection or construction of a coffin or casket, digging the grave by hand, the wake, the funeral, and other topics. Crissman then demonstrates how technology and the encroachment of American society have turned these vital traditions into the disappearing practices of the past.

This illustrated guidebook to New Jersey's old burial grounds is unique, not just for New Jersey, but for anywhere in America. Janice Kohl Sarapin introduces you to the history and lore of old graveyards. She shows you how to read epitaphs, how to date gravestones by style, how to restore an abandoned graveyard, and how to find out the stories of the people buried there. She describes more than 120 fascinating old burial grounds throughout the state (including the cemeteries of African-Americans, Jewish communities, and other ethnic and religious groups). She provides full directions and details about what makes each one special as well as suggestions for planning your visit and for educational activities to use with children and adults.

An illustrated cultural history of America through the lens of its gravestones and burial practices—featuring eighty black-and-white photographs. In The American Resting Place, cultural historian Marilyn Yalom and her son, photographer Reid Yalom, visit more than 250 cemeteries across the United States. Following a coast-to-coast trajectory that mirrors the historical pattern of American migration, their destinations highlight America’s cultural and ethnic diversity as well as the evolution of burials rites over the centuries. Yalom’s incisive reading of gravestone inscriptions reveals changing ideas about death and personal identity, as well as how class and gender play out in stone. Rich particulars include the story of one seventeenth-century Bostonian who amassed a thousand pairs of gloves in his funeral-going lifetime, the unique burial rites and funerary symbols found in today’s Native American cultures, and a “lost” Czech community brought uncannily to life in Chicago’s Bohemian National Columbarium. From fascinating past to startling future—DVDs embedded in tombstones, “green” burials, and “the new aesthetic of death”—The American Resting Place is the definitive history of the American cemetery.