Transcript of this week’s podcast episode.

Part I

This week you’re going out into the field. But which field? When I was a kid, there was a graveyard on the other side of the dirt road from our farm. It had about six or seven headstones, and an old wrought-iron fence that surrounded the little plot. One stone was flat on the ground, at the centre of the graveyard. Almost like a lid. In fact, now that I think about it, it was probably a family vault, with soil backfilled around it. That would explain why this little burial ground was so much higher than the surrounding fields. Even when we bury our dead, we change the environment around us.

That graveyard fascinated me as a kid. Who were these people? Where did they come from? Where did they live? Was my house their house? This was probably where my own journey into archaeology began, trying to understand how this little graveyard related to my house, my farm, and the nearby river. I didn’t go there very often though; I was just a kid, and the place terrified me.

Mortuary archaeology, as I conceive of it, is about the study of burial customs and human remains. This week, we begin our graveyard project. There are a lot of ethical issues involved. Some of them are obvious, involving things like obtaining permission to go wandering over what is quite often private property. Some are more subtle, like, what obligations do we owe to the people we are studying, and to their descendents? Some issues only become apparent once we start obtaining data en masse, which is to say, the ethical issue emerges as we draw conclusions based on entire populations.

So: our fieldwork begins this field. Which field? Ideally, there is a graveyard not too far from where you are, that is accessible, and for which you can reasonably obtain permission to study. If you’re in a smaller town, you might just be able to call up the office for the church or other institution responsible for the graveyard. For rural family plots like the one across the road from my childhood home, it could be more difficult. Some graveyards are run by modern corporations, and likely won’t be bothered in the least if you quietly, and respectfully, begin to record information from the stones. Figuring this out will be your first challenge.

Recording the information will be your second challenge. The digital recording forms will work offline; you’ll need to bring a smartphone or laptop with you with the forms pre-loaded and bookmarked. You could just use our recording scheme with a paper notebook, as well. ‘Digital archaeology’ doesn’t always mean a device at every turn. The scheme we’ll use was developed in Britain. You might find that it has assumptions about the study populations that are not always warranted; pay attention to when things don’t fit!

My archaeological background is in Roman materials from central Italy. It was in petrology, and mineralogy, and epigraphy, and social networks. Canadian burials were not my area. As you go out this week, I will be recording as well. All of our data gets collated into a central database, and the results will be made available to you.

Graveyards are liminal spaces, and given the ways our cities have grown, are now sometimes in very out of the way or otherwise dodgy places. When you go out, ideally have someone from your social bubble go with you. Always tell people where you are going, and when you’ll be back. Have a phone with you.

Part II

This week, we’re joined by Robyn Lacy.

Hello, my name is Robin Lacey, and I am a historic archaeologist currently working in crm, which is cultural resource management in Ontario. I am currently working on publishing my first book, which is based on my master’s research, with some other things thrown in there. I signed a contract to write my second book which I’m really excited about, and I am also preparing to start my phd in historical archaeology, focusing on mortuary studies, because most of my research focuses on burials.

I got started in mortuary archaeology in my undergrad. I went into my undergrad in archaeology being interested in maritime archaeology, and I was really interested in mesoamerican studies so I went to the university of calgary because their department is known for that but I decided that I wanted to do a field school in a specific place rather than on a specific topic and I went to Ireland and the Isle of Man with the University of Liverpool. And the first thing that we did at that field school was spent two weeks in County Monaghan in the northeast of the Republic of Ireland recording cemeteries and basically after those two weeks I completely shifted everything I wanted to do with my research. This was after the first year of my undergrad but I get pretty set on ideas and I’m still here starting my PhD looking at burial practices and landscapes of - deathscapes I guess you could call them? 

I think a challenge facing Mortuary archaeology at the moment is focussing on this idea of the ‘good death’ particularly of white settlers. When we talk about 17th century colonial settlement which is where a lot of my research focuses, what you get is a whitewashed idea of what the 17th century colonies were like but of course they weren’t all white people that were coming here - there were black people there were other people of colour, there were indigenous people that were living in and around these communites as well and their death practices and their attitudes towards mortality and their understanding of death within their families and within their communities should not be whitewashed and that’s something I’m interested in looking at with my PhD research is just like not saying that they weren’t all white we assume and that’s wrong and that’s definitely a problem you got whenreading documents about that sort of thing. so I’m really interested in looking at all of the cultural practices that were being put into play as early as the 17th century for Colonial settlements.

Something that really bothers me about working in mortuary archaeology and public Archaeology is the ideas that people get -  because there’s not enough information about what we do available to the public. Obviously that skews what people know about archaeology overall but particularly for mortuary archaeology  - if you start talking to anyone about graveyards or cemeteries, they tell you about their friend who restore gravestones and they tell you about their own attempts to restore gravestones particularly with volunteer organizations and that is wonderful and volunteers are the people doing most of the restoration and cleaning of these historic sites, but it becomes a problem when the information isn’t there that they can update their conservation and restoration techniques for gravestones and then we end up dealing with an awful lot of poor restoration that can’t be rectified in the future and actually does more damage to the grave stones themselves. Personally my vendetta is against concrete - feel free to ask memore about that! - but I am trying to make as much conservation information possible for people to get their hands on regardless of whether or not they are professional conservators or in academia because gravestones are there for everyone and everyone, and historic gravestones are kept by volunteer groups and they’re kept by the public and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I love the question about failures in archaeology and it’s definitely something that we as early career researchers and graduate students should understand that it happens and understand other people’s stories so that when our own research goes a little weird sometimes we can understand why and how to grow from that. My own masters research was partially based around looking for the 17th century burial grounds at the colony of Avalon at Ferryland in Newfoundland and I spent 10 weeks over the course of my Master’s doing very calculated excavations and ground-penetrating radar survey. At the end of the 10 weeks we had not located any of the burials or everyone would have heard about it by now but I still got my Master’s degree so it all work out fine in the end.

I think what makes me really happy and hopeful about archaeology is all of the enthusiasm that people have in the field even when working in CRM when we’re in fairly difficult working conditions, when it is incredibly hot in Ontario, we’re still there to do a job and we’re there to do what we can to protect the heritage of an area and the archaeology of an area before development comes through and potentially destroys something that would be irreplaceable to the archaeological record so yeah that’s what I really like and I also really enjoy teaching the public about the research that I’ve got going on, that my colleagues and friends have going on and just my own enthusiasm I hope spreads a little bit of excitement and what every other archaeologist I know as well would probably tell you similar things.