Someone presented this to the class today:

I love Eddie Izzard and this is soo good, I feel fellow archaeology students will enjoy this:

This may seem odd...

But I follow some rather strange things on tumblr. One of those being the http://www.obitoftheday.com/ this is a tumblr page that shows famous, interesting and unique people's obits (very relevant to a class about death). Very interesting stuff. It is mostly just a way to show off the lives of interesting people. 

The most recent one I was looking at was about the man who died twice. 

Lincoln Hall after being brought to hospital From www.obitoftheday.com.

This is the story of Lincoln Hall, a man who climbed Everest twice, only to be left behind thought to be dead the second time. The next day a different expedition on their way up found him sitting with his legs dangling over a cliff still conscious. Amazing. Apparently he lost 8 fingers due to frostbite (sorry about the photo guys) as well as a few toes. He also has lasting memory problems, but that is incredible considering what happened to him. 

Because of this amazing article I started perusing the sites to find other interesting people. I found the obituary of the "Last Madam of the Chicken Ranch." The story of the real life woman who inspired the musical "The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas." This is the musical that later inspired the 1982 movie of the same title featuring Dolly Parton and Burt Reynolds. A whore house musical extravaganza. I stumbled upon this movie one night and it was the most amazing thing to find by accident in the middle of the night. 

Incredible.

I'll leave you with a clip of this. (I know I got off track, but it is really hilarious and amazing). 

Some Dolly Parton Goodness. 

Too cute not to post somewhere!

Found the image at: http://365times3oflaw.blogspot.ca/

This may not be entirely appropriate for the website, but I had to post it somewhere. This little vampire bat is just so cute.

I should really stay off google...

The other day I was reading some old tweets of mine (I tweet, deal with it) and I came across one from that I posted at the beginning of the semester: "Ugh. Should not have googled 'hermetically sealed coffin." Looking at this I thought it might actually make an interesting blog post. 

Why am I so grossed out by the idea and why what is up with the internet?!

Once I started googling hermetically sealed coffins though, I found that I was much less disturbed. I thought I was desensitized to grossness before this semester, but nearing the end I realize how much more of it I understand; or at least have covered in so much detail that it just can't gross me out anymore (well, I say that, but don't test me please). This semester I not only have our class on the archaeology of death, but as well I have a class on the anthropology of zombies, and forensic osteology. Mix that with the details of the project my group is doing on vampire burials and well... it's not all that gross anymore. 

I did find myself in that corner of the internet that sort of weirded me out. I know I should have been ready for it since well... you can find anything on the internet if you look. Through various links and articles I got pretty deep into the funerary part of the internet. Let me at least share some of the more interesting sites that I found, it was pretty fun perusing through them. 

From the Readers Digest article below.

The first link I want to share is an article done by the Reader's Digest website:

13 Things The Funeral Director Won't Tell You.

This article follows the basic framework they use for a number of articles to help people find good deals and learn the in's and out's of whatever it is they are looking to purchase. For instance they also have links to 13 things your Car Mechanic won't tell you and 13 things your computer guy won't tell you. It was interesting though because it just points out the amount of unnecessary things that are included in funerals and how easy it is to avoid them. It forces you to remember that funeral directors are salespeople, they provide a service but they also want to make as much money as they can from you. Why not up-sell the grieving widow some ridiculous extravagant casket for her husband, that is at least a few more thousand dollars onto her bill! 

If you look at that list you will possibly be led down the same rabbit hole that I was: Walmart sells coffins. Thats right, Walmart.com (not .ca only the America Walmart website sells coffins... I checked...) sells coffins that you can order easily off the internet. 

Personally I like this stainless steel one. Not that I would want a casket. Or would need one that costs $2000 US.

Not only does it sell caskets, but it also has a variety of different styles of urns, even some with clocks on them (???), and 'keepsakes' which are like miniature urns (I guess?).

I guess so you can keep it with you?

This is not something I ever would have thought to look for on Walmart.com. Even Costco.com sells caskets. 

After this I just went too far. I googled: Strange funerals. 

To be honest a lot of the things I came up with were just those joke websites that are there to shock you and make you laugh, therefore there was a lot of funeral rituals posted and things written about them that were fairly... ethnocentric. This was especially the case in regards to the tradition of creatively shaped coffins in Ghana that Meredith posted about earlier in the semester. 

My favorite thing that I found was the tradition of the hanging coffin left from the Bo people of China. 

Thanks fuckyeahantiques.tumblr.com for the picture.

I will leave you here with this clip (aww yeah bringing it right back around to archaeology):

Where's Waldo? Early Dealings with Death.

My first pet when I was just little was a hamster named Waldo.

Not Waldo. Just the cutest happiest hamster. Seriously. Link to Original.

I was too little to remember him, but in my head he will always be that first pet. The story that I have always been told was that one day when there was some construction going on at our house, someone (I can't remember whether it was a neighbour girl, a babysitter, or just a family friend) forgot to close his cage and Waldo got out. With so much commotion going on in the house and the door being kept open for the guys moving things in and out as they worked, no one would have noticed a tiny little furry buddy scurry out the door. At least that is the theory, no one in my family could ever definitively answer the question "Where's Waldo?"

As I started growing up I was aware of the fact (television and my generation of course) that parents would lie about pets deaths to their children who they felt were too young to deal with the idea of death. I talked to my mom about it as it related to Waldo and even now she assures me that Waldo just disappeared, and that he probably got out of his cage and ran away. I thought about it and what is harder for a child: a pet dying and having to learn about death, or a pet just disappearing with no explanation? Either way it means a little kid has to deal with the fact that something that was there is now gone.

The idea of children and how they are introduced or sheltered from the concept of death is one that I find extremely interesting. I took an english class on children's literature and we covered the material from the oldest to the newest looking at the roots of children's literature. That was the most shocking introduction to a course I think I have ever experienced. When we think of children's literature we think of the kinds of things we had when we were growing up. For instance later in the course we read "The Hobbit," and "The Paper Bag Princess," classics that I read when I was little. What we started with was the kind of depressing and dark stories like those from the brothers Grimm and their Fairy Tales and other tales that are filled with death and hopeless endings. These are not the Disney versions of my childhood. They remind me of Edward Gorey and his gruesome alphabet:

We were forced to confront the fact that children were not always looked at as innocent as we view children today. They did not live in the kind of world that sheltered them from everything sad or scary, it was right there in their world all the time. For the beginnings of children's literature it made sense as a necessary tool to teach children about death. Childhood mortality rates were much higher and therefore being a child in the past meant that you had to deal with death eventually, chances are that not all of your friends or your siblings were going to make it.

Knowing that even in the last few centuries the idea of children and their 'innocence' has changed dramatically makes it easier to look at different cultures and how they might look at death and childhood. If something that we take for granted with children in our own culture has changed so much what does that say about the way in which we do look at children. Just because we can shelter them from the bad things that we don't want to acknowledge, does that necessarily mean we should be doing that?

Questioning "Vampire" Discoveries.

I had a tough time finding websites that were more than just blogs for this assigned post. Since our project is about Vampires and archaeology I thought I would be able to find some really interesting sites that were more than pop-culture fan sites or small blog posts. Unfortunately my searching did not come up with anything that really fit what I was looking for. I ended up deciding on a blog post about the problems with sensationalizing the concept of 'Vampire' burials to gain notice and public popularity about the dig site. It outlines the argument as well as including a letter written by an expert, critiquing a recent 'vampire' find. But since it is just a blog post, I decided to look at the website as a whole to mark it with the rubric. The website is called Publishing Archaeology and posts information about professional publishing issues in Archaeology.

For analysis I would probably give the page a 7. While good material is given the posts are fairly short and only really look at the surface of each full topic. Because all of the posts are on different subjects it makes the amount of analysis for each of them pretty basic. It falls somewhere between a 'good' and a 'very good' on our rubric. It works for the site but does not really fit what we are looking for for our site.

In the content and background information I would give this site a 10. The information included is from peer reviewed articles and academic sources. The site also uses their information in an interesting and clear way in order to present new and interesting ideas. As I explained in the last section, the site is meant to give pretty short descriptions of interesting new ideas and concepts in Archaeology, this lends itself well to our marking system because it is very clear and concise in the descriptions of the ideas presented.

The resources section would receive full marks because there are more than 2 articles used as resources for each post that cover a cross-disciplinary approach to the concepts. As well it is clear and well laid out and you can find the sources used for each one at the bottom of each post.

Navigation is pretty simple here since it is a blog, so therefore if you are at the main page you just keep scrolling down to get to different articles. The site also includes a sidebar with a few things I found useful for navigation, specifically the "Labels" which has tags for each post so that you can navigate old posts easily. I would give this section a 4 because I would have likes a little bit more accessibility in the form of a search bar to search old articles quicker and the presentation is a little boring, but overall it works well.

The only other section is on teamwork and since this site it put together by more than one person I will give it full marks for teamwork! Go Team!

The website provides interesting information from academic sources in a concise way. It includes pictures every now and then to keep the site fun and interesting:

A cute picture that I found on the site and figured it would represent the site as a whole pretty well. 

And while I found the site relatively bland and boring, the sources are very good, the layout was clear, and the information was easily accessible. 28.5/32.5

The site: Publishing Archaeology. Contributors: Cindy, Michael E. Smith. URL: publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com

Monument Analysis: What makes you 'unique' after death?

For our Monument analysis project my group went to the Ross Bay cemetery. Our research question that we went into the cemetery with was the question: What makes a grave stand out? Is there a progression of change as time moves on? We also wanted to look into what the motivation behind a grave like that, and would it have been the family or the deceased choice to have such an incredible grave?

The graves we chose were relatively scattered throughout the cemetery, only a few clusters of the graves. We marked down on our map what the graves looked like and what made them unique. Of course because of the size of Ross Bay cemetery, we had to limit our dataset to only 11 graves. While there are many more unique and outstanding graves in the cemetery, our choices I believe create a varied sample of the types of graves in the cemetery. 

Our whole group went to the cemetery and studied each grave together. We looked at size, description, art, style, and materials used. To me the grave that stood out the most was the Anchor grave. 

Schultz and Sims. "Faith, Love and Hope."

This was a plot for two young women that had their names on small plaques on opposite corners of a large anchor. The plot was covered with a green vine or plant, that was very well maintained. The anchor itself, after close inspection, looks to be a real anchor that has been painted many times and is not just a sculpture for this grave. It also contains two stones, one with a Cross carved into it, and one with "Faith, Love and Hope," with the carvings of a cross, a heart and an anchor. This stood out in the whole grave yard because it wasn't a stone. It was a large anchor that was viewable from all sides and you could see it from far away. It was easily identifiable as this grave, and I'm sure there isn't another one similar to it at the cemetery. 

Over-all I found that what mattered the most to what made a grave stand out was the context in which it was placed. So even though I did find that the change in grave style happened over time, there is still a sense that within the more modern graves the ones we chose are the ones that stand out within their areas. Since the cemetery is grouped off into different religious affiliations, and times, it was within each of these areas that we looked for differences. While one grave may have looked unique and significant within it's surroundings, if we were to have seen it in a different section of the cemetery it may not have been the same reaction. The first grave we looked at stood out because it was a grave for a small child and the stone itself was very small and not associated with any family. 

Verna M.

It was also an interesting because it was more like a sculpture than a grave stone. However had we seen this near the other child grave that we looked at which had stuffed animals and a little garden in front of it, it may not have been so remarkable. But in the area it was in, it was significantly smaller and less grandiose, as well most graves in that area were either included with family or were beside family. 

I believe that we were also influenced by our own culture, and were looking at the graves with a familiarity with the simple grave stone or the mausoleum. At least that is what I expected going into the cemetery. Even the ones with the beautiful carvings or large plots associated with them stood out to me since in my mind when I think of a grave I think of the typical flat stone on a single grave. Personal biases definitely made some of the graves stand out in my mind. For instance in the area where we found some of the most recent graves, so many of them stood out to me. There was a lot of unique graves that were not what I imagined a grave to be like. For instance the "Ross" grave included a headstone and an engraved table, between them was planted a tree and surrounding both were flowers. 

Ross. Table on one side and Headstone on the other.

This does not in my mind signify a grave, so much so that I'm sure if it weren't within the context of a cemetery I would not think it was an actual grave, but more like a memorial. Why I have made this distinction in my mind, I'm not sure. As if burials are saved for the cemetery and not for the rest of the world. 

Another cultural distinction made was on one of the last graves that we looked at. This was actually the grave that made me realize that we were really just looking at the graves that stood out within their context. We were in the Roman Catholic area, and all the graves were evenly plotted and all had a fairly similar design, and all that I could see were facing West. This made the 'Bermarija," grave stand out here.

Bermarja.

 While it still followed the similar size and faced the West as well, it was covered with a large black granite slab over the grave itself and the headstone was black granite as well. The inscriptions were painted white and written in Croatian. It also contained two inlaid pictures of the deceased husband and wife. I didn't see any other graves like this one (although I was informed that there were a couple that had pictures inlaid in them as well) and the pictures more than anything else made them stand out quite a bit. That mixed with the black granite slabs reminded me of the article by Garazhian and Papoli Yazdi, about how the grave decoration changed in Bam after the earthquake. This contained similar characteristics with the photos of the deceased and the slabs over the graves. What made it stand out to me was how very different it was to most of the other graves in the cemetery, and it is clear that it is purely a different culture with different religious practices regarding the deceased. Now I am more curious about that culture and even economic status, whether this is standard or spectacular. However had I not known about the tradition, it would have made this grave stand out for a different reason. I would not be wondering about potential economic status and culture, but perhaps why their grave was important. The difference that makes it stand out would perhaps have lead me to a different conclusion about the reasons behind the style of grave. Coming back to the idea that our choices were coloured by our culture. 

What made these graves stand out to us was not the fact that they were all entirely unique and never been done before, but that they made an impression in their area. They stood out within their own culture or religion and that is what made them significant. 

The most interesting question that we came up with, we can't necessarily answer within this type of project. Were it a more in-depth project where our data could include interviews with possible family members or research into personal records or newspaper obituaries we would be able to go into the reasoning behind the choices of graves. Who made the choice? Was it a choice made with the deceased prior to death? Or was it the family honouring a loved one in a spectacular way? Or maybe even the community choosing to honour an outstanding community member? This is the aspect of our project that we could not answer, no matter how much time with the graves we spent.

View A Selection of Unique Graves in Ross Bay Cemetery in a larger map



Garazhian, O & Papoli Yazdi, L 2008, 'Mortuary Practices in Bam after the Earthquake: An Ethnoarchaeological study', Journal of Social Archaeology, vol. 8, no.1, pp.94-112.