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. 

Since I'm up this late...

Ok, it might not be that late for you, but 10:30 pm is pretty late for me.

I have been meaning to write a post to show off my cool brother's awesome tumblr page! It's called http://anthrocuriosities.tumblr.com/ and it is all anthropology all the time. He recently added me to it so that I could contribute anthropology stuff since I'm in classes full time and am learning all this awesome stuff all the time. Unfortunately I am finding a hard time keeping up with school itself, let alone ANOTHER blog on the side. You will every now and then see some posts I've done which you will easily recognize as things we've seen or heard about in class.

If any of you have a tumblr and love posting anthropology stuff let me know! I will follow you and reblog any cool stuff you guys are posting. If anything it is a great blog my brother started that is constantly updating with a huge variety of anthropological gold!

A lovely recent post my brother found! Click here to check it out!

Stephen Fry is the host. Seriously. It's the best.

Hey! So I wanted to share with the class just how I knew about the Buddhist Self-mummification. I know, most people don't really find it necessary to share the roads that led them to the odds and ends of information gathering in their brains but this is just too cool, I feel I need to share. I love it that much.

I'm sure a bunch of you have heard of the British show QI. It stands for Quite Interesting because that is all that matters to them. You don't merely gain points for right answers and lose points for wrong answers, you get points for being interesting and lose them by being predictable. It is very common for the panellists all to end up with points in the negative numbers. But that's what makes it so fun! Stephen Fry is the host and Alan Davies his recurring guest every week, all the other panellists are different each episode.

Anyways, I was re-watching some episodes for the one that had the Buddhist mummification in it because I told one of the members of that group that I would find it and maybe they could put it somewhere on the site. There probably aren't too much mentions of that sort of practice in popular culture so it would be a cool link! This episode turned out to be a gold mine for this class! Not only does it have the mummification, it also includes the creative coffins that Meredith talks about in her blog from Ghana, and even cemetery memorial symbolism. So good and so hilarious:

Enjoy!

My own Grave Goods

My mother and I have already talked about what we want to happen when we die and neither of us actually wants to be buried at all. This made this weeks topic kind of strange and difficult for me, I had to totally revise my ideas of what to do with my body once I was dead. The idea of being stuck in the ground with my things just seems cramped and kind of pointless to me, but none the less it made for a cool topic that was fun to explore.

What I would put in my grave would be kind of boring, I would have my favorite dress on and possibly my paper crane necklace that I always wear. Those are really the only things I feel would be necessary. Even when it came to coming up with ideas of ANYTHING I could put in there that would tell someone about who I was, I just came up blank. I feel like the only thing that I could do is just more jewellery. I want loads of diamonds and pearls in my grave. But honestly that says absolutely nothing about my personality other than the fact that leading future archaeologists to believe I was some kind of royal would be hilarious!

So since I was utterly stumped I started asking family and friends. This was the oddly unsettling part of all this; what everyone else came up with.

My mother was the first person I saw and actually remembered to ask. What I got from her were these things: 

• Art
• Music (Etta James, after I made her narrow it down a bit)
• (and with serious probing and FORCING her to do something less generic) my hair-straightener. If you could have seen my face when my mom said these you would understand why her reaction was "Well I dont know!!!" and then finally added,
• My boxing gloves

This was when I started getting worried. If my own mother only sees me as her little girl and doesn't really know or at least know how to express the other sides of my personality, what was everyone else going to say?

I then went over to my boyfriends apartment to hang out there and asked him the same questions. After a lot of "I don't care"'s and "this is stupid" answers, I finally forced him to just say something! This is what I got:

• a ladle
• lid to a cookie jar
• tiny novelty mug from Nova Scotia
• a Kate Bush album

:| ...... Yea none of these having any relevance to my life or my personality, I then moved on to the next person on my list. (Stupid-useless-annoying-nohelp-good-for-nothing boyfriend. Good thing he's pretty). 

Next I started texting my brother, normally I would just treat him to some sort of greasy disgusting food to get his help but unfortunately he now lives in Vancouver so a text would have to do. Since he has taken this class (and this is just what our brother-sister relationship is like), he hardly needed an explanation to help. He said:

• a bunch of skulls (which he admits would throw off any archaeologist looking at my grave)
• knitting needles
• small furry animals

These things put me a little more at ease since I feel they more reflect my personal interests instead of just my role as a female, which is really what worried me about my mom's ideas. Although this did lead to a hilarious discussion about how exactly the furry animals would be included. For instance would they be tiny adorable sacrifices? Or stuffed toy animals? Or something in between, like taxidermy animals? 

Just toss in some puppies.

At that point my brother just went, "Oh I dont know, do your own homework!"

All-in-all it was pretty fun, I think I really just like getting my family's opinions on things like this because I find their answers hilarious. But still this whole exercise was slightly worrisome and left me a little bit unsettled because of the way in which I found my identity being viewed through the eyes of someone else. The only one that really bothered me was my mother's choices. I suddenly felt as if she was only including the things about me SHE wanted to include. She chose things that, while I do enjoy them, I wouldn't use them in describing my identity. I'm far more complex than that.

THE OTHER THING that came out of this blog prompt was something magical. So magical it has gained a place in legend (well my heart at least). And that, my classmates, is the

~*Legend of the Ponybear*~

When I described this assignment to a friend from a different class all he wanted to do was to mess with the heads of future archaeologists. Not only did he want to be buried with the skeleton of a pony but the pony would have the skull of a bear in place of a pony skull. Amazing, I know. I'll let you take a moment and pick your jaw up from off the floor.

You good?

Good.

This then created so much stir between the two of us that we have been coming up with stories and myths surrounding our lives with the Ponybear. It has been magical. 

I give you the Ponybear:

I suck at photoshop.

The End.

Click images for links to original sites as none of these pictures are my own. (Although I did photoshop the Ponybear...those don't exist.)

Ok, so I have always wanted to be a Mermaid... this counts right?

I was having a hard time starting my search for interesting not all that common funerary practices in Canada, but then I went and looked at other blogs (hehe totally sneaky). Kayla and Jaylene had great posts so far that helped me think outside of the box. So while Jaylene had suggested burial at space I thought why not a non-standard burial at sea? Really cool results, and it led me to other options that sound really neat as well (I will post a link so if you are stuck like I was it is a pretty cool option).

What I found was the Eternal Reefs website. 

What they do is they create a living reef ball and the cremated ashes of a loved one are put inside them. They then put this reef into bays and the sea life can actually live off of them and it promotes the health of the bay as well as having an underwater resting place. Its a neat and green way of making a final resting place while promoting sea life.  Here's a link to a video if you want to know a little more information. While it is not yet offered in Canada and looks like it's mostly the southern US, it is definitely something that could be brought up here and done pretty easily.


Looking up reef memorials I also came across the Neptune Society Memorial Reef. This is just cool.

So pretty much ideal mermaid burial right???


And since I did say I was going to provide some info or at least links to other stuff if you are totally stumped, here are a few links including the option that made me take a while in deciding which topic I was actually going to do here:

• This is a link to the Daily Grommet and the post they did on Alternative Funerals.
• More specifically they mentioned Memory Glass, which is just cool and I hope someone writes about it. 

(photos are from the Eternal reef website and the Memory Glass website. Video from youtube. Links in text)

First Day

If only I could think of a witty title. I always swear I'm going to make my blogs hilarious and yet I can never think while I'm writing. Must be more creative. Hopefully these will improve as I go.

My name is Amy Polkey. I am an Anthropology Major and an English Major (all of my English requirements are done so I am all Anthro all the time, oh yeah!). I started doing Anthropology because I was really into the physical aspect (and am still really interested in Osteology) and yet I was totally taken in by the culture side of things as well. I have always had a bit of a preoccupation with things that revolve around superstitions and rituals around death. Taking the Folklore course offered at Uvic was such a blast as well.

Anthropology has become a bit of a family thing now, my brother just graduated from Uvic last year. I'm sure a few of you even had classes with him (and by now have probably noticed how familiar my last name is... Polkey is not that common. If you ever meet one chances are I am immediately related to them).  We have little nerd outs every now and then just talking about different anthro-related things we've been into recently. He doesn't live on the island anymore so now we just text and have even been planning a Skype chat just to share our nerdiness.

Well I guess that will do for now. Comment or post if you want to chat! I swear I'm a totally decent person to chat with!