With all the talk this week about the politics of death and about reburial, I thought I'd talk about a subject that was controversial back in the 1920s and has arisen once again to the topic of a heated debate: what to do with Vladimir Lenin's body. I mentioned briefly in another on of my posts ("In Soviet Russia....They Put the Big Kahunas in the Kremlin Wall") that Lenin, following his death in 1924, was embalmed and interred in his own mausoleum in Red Square, and that he has been re-embalmed ever since -- all of which was a giant political statement. How was it a political statement? The embalming and the obvious presence of the mausoleum were carefully chosen by the remaining Party leaders and were meant as reminders that technically Lenin was dead but he and the legitimacy of his rule lived on in his successors and the tenets of Marxism-Leninism. The embalming was also a sign not only to the people of the Soviet Union but also the rest of the world that the Soviets could hold their own in the scientific community (we may have a massive famine every now and then, but, hey! We can keep a body looking alive for decades...).
This was all in direct opposition not only to what Lenin wanted but also to Communist doctrine. Lenin's grandiose funeral and lying-in-state, the embalming, the mausoleum, and the Cult of Lenin all flew in the face of the social equality that Communism was supposed to espouse, not to mention the fact that it was all highly reminiscent of the tsars' funerals AND used a lot of religious-with-the-veneer-of-Communist imagery. Lenin's uncorrupted body and the Cult of Lenin essentially made him a Communist saint, for instance. Lenin would have found everything done to him and his legacy after he died absolutely abhorrent, but after all, he was dead -- there was nothing he could do about it.
With Lenin dead and the living Party constantly bombarding the public with the glory that was Lenin by way of these ostentatious displays, the public could see no fault in Lenin's leadership and therefore could not see fault in those that claimed to perpetuate it after he died -- the Party maintained power and political stability, just as it had hoped to by "disposing" of Lenin's body in such a way.
The embalming and the mausoleum were not decided upon straight away -- there was much debate within the party as to what exactly would be the best course of action. There were those that argued for a good Communist funeral and burial, but these efforts ultimately failed. The matter was closed.
Until recently. For almost 90 years Lenin has been on display in his cushy, temperature-controlled mausoleum, only being taken out for his regular re-embalmings. Lately, however, many Russians have been urging the government to finally bury him and to close down the mausoleum. This request was actually placed shortly after the fall of the USSR by then-president Boris Yeltsin, but immediately after the fall of the Union there were too many people who were vehemently opposed to the removal of Lenin from his tomb. More recently, though, the idea has become much more welcomed. It would only make sense that after the political and cultural era Lenin began crumbled to the ground he should be removed from his symbolic position in the middle of Red Square. Of course, Russia's present-day Communist Party as well as those who still remain nostalgic for the Communist past hate the idea of burying Lenin.
The increased prominence of this issue last year probably had something to do with the upcoming Russian elections. It was a member of Russia's ruling political party -- United Russia -- that reopened the idea of burying Lenin, probably as a way to keep the party's popularity up in the lead-up to elections. Now that the elections are over and United Russia maintained a majority in the Duma elections in December and Valdimir Putin won the presidency (again...) a few weeks ago, the debate is cooling off again.
Friday 30 March 2012
Friday 16 March 2012
Current Mortuary Archaeology and Kinship: A Case Study of Iron Age Judah
Osborne, J.F., 2011. Secondary mortuary practice and the bench tomb: structure and practice in Iron Age Judah. Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 70(1), pp. 35-53.
This article relates to the archaeological study of kinship by "seeking to illuminate the meaning associated specifically with the secondary handling of skeletal remains within the bench tomb and the implications this secondary mortuary practice has on current understandings of ancient Judahite social structure and cultural practice" (p. 36). Unlike the article we looked at in class today, it does not attempt to discern kinship or aspects of a wider social structure based mainly on skeletal remains and distribution data in cemeteries but rather uses material culture in conjunction with ethnographic and textual evidence.
The article reviews anthropological/ethnographic research to determine what ought to be practiced by those who engage in secondary mortuary treatments, then compares this to how secondary rituals were practiced with the Judahite bench tombs and how this relates to how beliefs were outlined in the Hebrew Bible. The article posits that the presence of bone repositories (as well as bone piles separate from benches in cases where actual repositories were absent) in bench tombs indicates them as locations of secondary interments and were, as it has been traditionally interpreted, used to allow continued use of the tomb but that these bench tombs also served a more important symbolic function for the Judahite people and how they related to their dead (p. 37). The author's main purpose in discerning this symbolic function is to attempt to determine exactly how kinship systems were constructed and given meaning in ancient Israel via cultural practices such as burial as researches, for a long time now, have recognized that kinship played a highly important role in Judahite culture but have not really looked to determine how kinship was constituted through culture and the processes that went into constructing kinship. The author argues, then, that the secondary mortuary practices involved in the use of these bench tombs were an integral part in the (re)construction of overall social structure, including kinship (pp.37-8).
The article we read for class seems to be attempting to determine from mortuary evidence simply that some sort of kinship system existed at Hawikku and that this system was used for cemetery consideration. The article that I've discusses here, however, does something different: it recognizes a widely agreed upon and evidenced kinship system and its importance but uses its own study of mortuary evidence to determine how this kinship system was both created and reinforced in mortuary contexts rather than merely reflected (shows mortuary practices as an important and active part in the dynamic process of cultural creation as opposed to inactive cultural reflection).
From this article it seems that a more recent trend in the study of kinship in archaeology is more towards the importance of mortuary practices in creating kinship and larger social systems, as opposed to the old method of using mortuary evidence as a way to simply determine the structure of kinship and looking at mortuary practices as a product of social structure rather than an actor in the creation of social structure. Recent scholarship accepts more the idea that mortuary rituals are a highly important and active part of forging society and are not merely a product of society.
This article relates to the archaeological study of kinship by "seeking to illuminate the meaning associated specifically with the secondary handling of skeletal remains within the bench tomb and the implications this secondary mortuary practice has on current understandings of ancient Judahite social structure and cultural practice" (p. 36). Unlike the article we looked at in class today, it does not attempt to discern kinship or aspects of a wider social structure based mainly on skeletal remains and distribution data in cemeteries but rather uses material culture in conjunction with ethnographic and textual evidence.
The article reviews anthropological/ethnographic research to determine what ought to be practiced by those who engage in secondary mortuary treatments, then compares this to how secondary rituals were practiced with the Judahite bench tombs and how this relates to how beliefs were outlined in the Hebrew Bible. The article posits that the presence of bone repositories (as well as bone piles separate from benches in cases where actual repositories were absent) in bench tombs indicates them as locations of secondary interments and were, as it has been traditionally interpreted, used to allow continued use of the tomb but that these bench tombs also served a more important symbolic function for the Judahite people and how they related to their dead (p. 37). The author's main purpose in discerning this symbolic function is to attempt to determine exactly how kinship systems were constructed and given meaning in ancient Israel via cultural practices such as burial as researches, for a long time now, have recognized that kinship played a highly important role in Judahite culture but have not really looked to determine how kinship was constituted through culture and the processes that went into constructing kinship. The author argues, then, that the secondary mortuary practices involved in the use of these bench tombs were an integral part in the (re)construction of overall social structure, including kinship (pp.37-8).
The article we read for class seems to be attempting to determine from mortuary evidence simply that some sort of kinship system existed at Hawikku and that this system was used for cemetery consideration. The article that I've discusses here, however, does something different: it recognizes a widely agreed upon and evidenced kinship system and its importance but uses its own study of mortuary evidence to determine how this kinship system was both created and reinforced in mortuary contexts rather than merely reflected (shows mortuary practices as an important and active part in the dynamic process of cultural creation as opposed to inactive cultural reflection).
From this article it seems that a more recent trend in the study of kinship in archaeology is more towards the importance of mortuary practices in creating kinship and larger social systems, as opposed to the old method of using mortuary evidence as a way to simply determine the structure of kinship and looking at mortuary practices as a product of social structure rather than an actor in the creation of social structure. Recent scholarship accepts more the idea that mortuary rituals are a highly important and active part of forging society and are not merely a product of society.
Friday 9 March 2012
Practice What You Preach: Evaluating A Website Based On Our Rubric
The group project that I am a part of deals with mass graves resulting from atrocities committed during WWII as well as the memorialization of such atrocities. SO the website I will be evaluating based on my group's rubric is this: http://members.iinet.net.au/~gduncan/index.html. This site is titled "Lesser-Known Facts of WWII" and it has a large section dedicated to the atrocities of WWII. For some sections I won't evaluate it completely based off our rubric because the rubric was created for an academic, archaeological project and therefore includes sections geared toward this (I will, for instance, not evaluate it based on method/approach because its approach is completely different than the one we need to take for our project and I will ignore the "research questions" part of our rubric because this site isn't about answering specific questions, it's about presenting general information).
In terms of organization presentation, I would classify this site as "Poor". The full site menu does not appear at the top but rather appears at the bottom of the home page, which takes a while to get to as there is a lot of information on the home page. The overall layout doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This all makes it somewhat difficult to navigate and means that information can be difficult to locate. The site, overall, is just not visually/aesthetically appealing -- too many different colours are used for text, there is no balance between images and text (way too much text for the sparse amount of images), and the site just looks outdated.
In terms of sources, I would also give this site a "Poor" because it doesn't give any. Forget thinking about the scholarly integrity of any sources because this is impossible to assess when no sources are cited, listed, or referenced in any way (what if you want more information?!).
For content and data I will not assess the site based on our rubric because the site is meant simply to give information to the public, not to assess or analyze it in any sort of academic way. For its own purposes, the site would actually receive an "Excellent" from me in terms of data because there's lots of it, it's interesting, it covers various areas, and it's easy to understand.
Written communication is "Good" -- it's easy to understand and presented fairly well. It doesn't flow particularly well though and contains some obvious mistakes.
Overall, this website is certainly interesting and thorough, but it is not an especially good website. It could definitely use a design update and some listed information sources. It's great if you want to learn a lot of simple, lesser-known (and some not so lesser-known) facts about WWII, but if you care about aesthetics at all, I would not recommend it.
In terms of organization presentation, I would classify this site as "Poor". The full site menu does not appear at the top but rather appears at the bottom of the home page, which takes a while to get to as there is a lot of information on the home page. The overall layout doesn't make a whole lot of sense. This all makes it somewhat difficult to navigate and means that information can be difficult to locate. The site, overall, is just not visually/aesthetically appealing -- too many different colours are used for text, there is no balance between images and text (way too much text for the sparse amount of images), and the site just looks outdated.
In terms of sources, I would also give this site a "Poor" because it doesn't give any. Forget thinking about the scholarly integrity of any sources because this is impossible to assess when no sources are cited, listed, or referenced in any way (what if you want more information?!).
For content and data I will not assess the site based on our rubric because the site is meant simply to give information to the public, not to assess or analyze it in any sort of academic way. For its own purposes, the site would actually receive an "Excellent" from me in terms of data because there's lots of it, it's interesting, it covers various areas, and it's easy to understand.
Written communication is "Good" -- it's easy to understand and presented fairly well. It doesn't flow particularly well though and contains some obvious mistakes.
Overall, this website is certainly interesting and thorough, but it is not an especially good website. It could definitely use a design update and some listed information sources. It's great if you want to learn a lot of simple, lesser-known (and some not so lesser-known) facts about WWII, but if you care about aesthetics at all, I would not recommend it.
Friday 2 March 2012
Children and Death: What do they learn and what should they (not?) learn?
Obviously my personal experience is going to colour the way in which I believe children learn about death -- what it is, how it works, what it means, how to respond to it, and how to deal with it. Because my own experience influences how I think about these things, I'll begin by discussing my childhood connection(s) with death.
The most intimate experience I have with death -- but, paradoxically, also the least intimate -- is that of my father. He died in a skiing accident when I was six months old, an age where I could not notice or comprehend, let alone appreciate, the notion of death (of my father or anyone else). I grew up knowing that my father had died, that the family had experienced a loss and that they grieved. I, however, did not experience a loss nor did I grieve. I went through childhood going to visit my father's grave with my granny, taking flowers and cards to a person I never knew. Since growing up, I've realized that this was incredibly strange. I feel nowadays that I did these things because people expected it of me, that it was the right thing to do when someone had died, but it was never for me and it never felt right for me to be doing it. I was investing time in falsely "grieving" a person I never knew, I person I did not and could not miss. I couldn't say these things as a child because I had not yet realized that I felt them (although I did feel somewhat awkward and strange whenever I went to the cemetery -- a feeling whose source I was fully unaware of at the time -- where my granny would also take me to the grave of a family friend, a grave I felt more comfortable visiting than that of my own father because I had met this family friend at least twice...). As an older child/young adolescent -- let's say about 11/12 or so -- I started to realize why I had these strange feelings whenever I went to the cemetery, and it started to feel inappropriate of me to be going to this person's grave and leaving him flowers. I realized that cemeteries and graves were supposed to be places of memory -- something that had been taught to me unconsciously by observing my granny and my aunt grieve over my father and put time into selecting flowers, going to the cemetery, maintaining the grave, etc. However, there was nothing that the cemetery represented for me in terms of memory because I was supposed to be remembering a person it was impossible for me to remember. I was supposed to be remembering and getting over a loss I'd never experienced, grieving a person I'd never known. I stopped going to the cemetery around this age.
Throughout the years in which I did go to the cemetery, I'd only ever gone with my granny. I was taught the usual "cemeteries are places of remembrance and respect" and these usual practices we have regarding death, loss, and memory by my granny. It was taught to my by my granny that it's okay to talk about death sometimes (not that I ever did -- what would I have said?). This, however, was only one way I learned about death. My mother had (and has) a completely different approach to my father's death than my granny did. My mom takes the "I'm not going to talk about this or show feelings towards it" approach. My mom rarely talked about my father when I was a kid, and she still rarely does so (she does it more now). I understand this -- my mom doesn't like to cry in front of people and talking about her memories of my father's life and death would have caused her to be more emotional in front of my brother and I than she would have liked. The one exception to this was, and still is, the anniversary of my father's death. This is the one day a year that my mother openly grieves still.
I also don't think I've known my mom, in the entire time since my father died, to have visited his grave. This confused me a lot as a child, especially since I was made to go to the grave of a person to which I had no real connection other than a biological one. For years and years I could not figure out why my mom never visited her husband's grave when people like my granny and my aunt did. When I got to that weird age when I started realizing why I felt awkward going to the cemetery, I finally asked my mom why she didn't go. Her answer was simple: "Because I don't believe your dad is there." This was the first time I had ever encountered the notion of the cemetery not being the main place of interacting with the souls of the dead.
The fact that I was taught two very different versions of how to deal with death -- my granny's approach of active commemoration and my mother's approach of private remembrance -- and the fact that I was forced into recognizing a death that I had not personally felt combined to give me a fairly confused outlook on death, grief, and remembrance. I've had to figure out a lot of things relating to these on my own over the last few years. I came to fully realize that it was odd and somewhat wrong of me to pretend to grieve for someone that it was impossible for me to do this for. I now feel like that was an infringement on the real right to grief and commemoration that the rest of my family has. I've realized that I only acted in that manner as a child because people taught me to do that, people expected it of me so that's how I was supposed to behave. I've also realized that my family's pressure on me to feel that loss was probably not the best approach in teaching me about death. It has fostered in me some strange thoughts on death and has reduced my sentimentality because I now have a mental connection between grief practices and false intent behind them. I can intellectually comprehend the fact that there is real intent behind grief practices and that they are usually motivated by a legitimate sense of loss. All my activities surrounding death, however, have not been motivated by this. They have been motivated by a childhood desire to do what people expect of me, to behave like a good little kid. I have a newfound cynicism regarding these topics now, and it leads me to think things like going to the cemetery and buying flowers for the dead, big expensive funerals, and burial with things in the coffin and a headstone can be somewhat useless and, sometimes, too mushy.
These ideas are also coloured by the fact that no one I've ever been close to has died yet. I haven't had the real feeling of deep loss in my entire almost 20 years. I'm sure when this does happen, my cynicism about death and funerary/remembrance practices will fade, but for now my concrete views on death, a weird mixture of my mom's distant approach to death and my own weird feelings on my childhood visits to the cemetery, are as follows: do something useful with the body (science, coral reef, etc.), and have a funeral as a form of closure but don't spend extravagant amounts of money. Basically, since the messages I received about exactly how to grieve were so jumbled, grief is something that I think people should practice however they feel is right for them. Having a mode of loss forced upon me as a child and realizing that grief is one of the most personal things people can experience had led me to believe that individualized grief practices are the way to go. People should demonstrate their mode of grief to their children, but they should also think about how their kids go through these experiences because kids experience things differently than adults. Parents, I think, should make sure their kids know that there is more than one way to grieve and more than one way to handle and view death. Kids should know about different ways of doing this so that they can figure out whatever works best for them with as little confusion as possible.
This gets to my thoughts on the "100 Fact About Mummies" books for kids and Ericka's question of whether or not kids should be seeing these kinds of images and reading about things such as human sacrifice in ancient cultures. My answer to this is: why the heck not? This kind of book can help to show kids that there are ways to deal with death other than what they're used to, and also show them that other people do things differently than we do in general, leading to (hopefully) and early acceptance of other, very different cultures (and possible cultivate some future anthropology students?). I find that death can be kept at a great distance from children in our society unless people they are very close to die. This can make the death of others an extremely traumatizing experience (which, yes, death should be affective, but should it cause as much emotional turmoil as it tends to for us). I think teaching children about death and the different ways of dealing with it can make them better equipped to do so and could give them a richer understanding of what death means to them as well as others. My view that children should be taught that there are different ways of dealing with death may seem odd given the fact that I've expressed some frustration with how my exposure to two different styles of dealing with death caused me some confusion. However, I feel like I was never actually taught that these other methods (other than my mom's and my granny's) existed and I always felt like I wasn't supposed to make a synthesis between the ways I was taught. I rather felt like I was being pulled between the two approaches, not that it was okay to pick one, the other, a mixture of both, or something completely different. I think telling kids about various modes of grief while performing one yourself, explaining to them that your method is only one of many and that grief is too personal to be practiced because you think it's expected of you, and being openly discursive about death with kids (while still being sensitive to the fact that they're little kids...) is a good approach to teaching kids about death.
The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to the more graphic kinds of death and dealing with it, such as mummification, seems a little silly to me. While I don't necessarily approve of exposing kids to things such as violent video games and graphic movies, I think dealing with something as pervasive, personal, important, and influential as death and grieving requires us to be less squeamish. Our mode of teaching kids about death by telling them, for instance, that a person isn't "dead" but is just "gone now" or "passed away" -- a very euphemistic method -- teaches kids that death needs to be kept at an extreme distance and that open dialogue about death can't occur. I know I never really felt like I could talk about death as a kid, and if I did it had to be in such euphemistic and softened terms because using words like "dead" and "death" were seen by my older families members as too harsh and, I think, too realistic. This attempt at keeping death at as much of a distance as possible leads, I think, to death being more emotionally traumatizing and shocking because we refuse to deal with it.
The most intimate experience I have with death -- but, paradoxically, also the least intimate -- is that of my father. He died in a skiing accident when I was six months old, an age where I could not notice or comprehend, let alone appreciate, the notion of death (of my father or anyone else). I grew up knowing that my father had died, that the family had experienced a loss and that they grieved. I, however, did not experience a loss nor did I grieve. I went through childhood going to visit my father's grave with my granny, taking flowers and cards to a person I never knew. Since growing up, I've realized that this was incredibly strange. I feel nowadays that I did these things because people expected it of me, that it was the right thing to do when someone had died, but it was never for me and it never felt right for me to be doing it. I was investing time in falsely "grieving" a person I never knew, I person I did not and could not miss. I couldn't say these things as a child because I had not yet realized that I felt them (although I did feel somewhat awkward and strange whenever I went to the cemetery -- a feeling whose source I was fully unaware of at the time -- where my granny would also take me to the grave of a family friend, a grave I felt more comfortable visiting than that of my own father because I had met this family friend at least twice...). As an older child/young adolescent -- let's say about 11/12 or so -- I started to realize why I had these strange feelings whenever I went to the cemetery, and it started to feel inappropriate of me to be going to this person's grave and leaving him flowers. I realized that cemeteries and graves were supposed to be places of memory -- something that had been taught to me unconsciously by observing my granny and my aunt grieve over my father and put time into selecting flowers, going to the cemetery, maintaining the grave, etc. However, there was nothing that the cemetery represented for me in terms of memory because I was supposed to be remembering a person it was impossible for me to remember. I was supposed to be remembering and getting over a loss I'd never experienced, grieving a person I'd never known. I stopped going to the cemetery around this age.
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| One of the more uncomfortable kinds of places I encountered during childhood. It's not that I was uncomfortable with death, rather that I had no reason and felt I had no right to be here (photo courtesy of http://www.vdfhs.com/cemeteries/north_okanagan/vernon/vernon_municipal_pleasant_valley/images/inside.jpg) |
Throughout the years in which I did go to the cemetery, I'd only ever gone with my granny. I was taught the usual "cemeteries are places of remembrance and respect" and these usual practices we have regarding death, loss, and memory by my granny. It was taught to my by my granny that it's okay to talk about death sometimes (not that I ever did -- what would I have said?). This, however, was only one way I learned about death. My mother had (and has) a completely different approach to my father's death than my granny did. My mom takes the "I'm not going to talk about this or show feelings towards it" approach. My mom rarely talked about my father when I was a kid, and she still rarely does so (she does it more now). I understand this -- my mom doesn't like to cry in front of people and talking about her memories of my father's life and death would have caused her to be more emotional in front of my brother and I than she would have liked. The one exception to this was, and still is, the anniversary of my father's death. This is the one day a year that my mother openly grieves still.
I also don't think I've known my mom, in the entire time since my father died, to have visited his grave. This confused me a lot as a child, especially since I was made to go to the grave of a person to which I had no real connection other than a biological one. For years and years I could not figure out why my mom never visited her husband's grave when people like my granny and my aunt did. When I got to that weird age when I started realizing why I felt awkward going to the cemetery, I finally asked my mom why she didn't go. Her answer was simple: "Because I don't believe your dad is there." This was the first time I had ever encountered the notion of the cemetery not being the main place of interacting with the souls of the dead.
The fact that I was taught two very different versions of how to deal with death -- my granny's approach of active commemoration and my mother's approach of private remembrance -- and the fact that I was forced into recognizing a death that I had not personally felt combined to give me a fairly confused outlook on death, grief, and remembrance. I've had to figure out a lot of things relating to these on my own over the last few years. I came to fully realize that it was odd and somewhat wrong of me to pretend to grieve for someone that it was impossible for me to do this for. I now feel like that was an infringement on the real right to grief and commemoration that the rest of my family has. I've realized that I only acted in that manner as a child because people taught me to do that, people expected it of me so that's how I was supposed to behave. I've also realized that my family's pressure on me to feel that loss was probably not the best approach in teaching me about death. It has fostered in me some strange thoughts on death and has reduced my sentimentality because I now have a mental connection between grief practices and false intent behind them. I can intellectually comprehend the fact that there is real intent behind grief practices and that they are usually motivated by a legitimate sense of loss. All my activities surrounding death, however, have not been motivated by this. They have been motivated by a childhood desire to do what people expect of me, to behave like a good little kid. I have a newfound cynicism regarding these topics now, and it leads me to think things like going to the cemetery and buying flowers for the dead, big expensive funerals, and burial with things in the coffin and a headstone can be somewhat useless and, sometimes, too mushy.
These ideas are also coloured by the fact that no one I've ever been close to has died yet. I haven't had the real feeling of deep loss in my entire almost 20 years. I'm sure when this does happen, my cynicism about death and funerary/remembrance practices will fade, but for now my concrete views on death, a weird mixture of my mom's distant approach to death and my own weird feelings on my childhood visits to the cemetery, are as follows: do something useful with the body (science, coral reef, etc.), and have a funeral as a form of closure but don't spend extravagant amounts of money. Basically, since the messages I received about exactly how to grieve were so jumbled, grief is something that I think people should practice however they feel is right for them. Having a mode of loss forced upon me as a child and realizing that grief is one of the most personal things people can experience had led me to believe that individualized grief practices are the way to go. People should demonstrate their mode of grief to their children, but they should also think about how their kids go through these experiences because kids experience things differently than adults. Parents, I think, should make sure their kids know that there is more than one way to grieve and more than one way to handle and view death. Kids should know about different ways of doing this so that they can figure out whatever works best for them with as little confusion as possible.
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| photo courtesy of www.all-about-psychology.com/ grief-and-loss.htm |
This gets to my thoughts on the "100 Fact About Mummies" books for kids and Ericka's question of whether or not kids should be seeing these kinds of images and reading about things such as human sacrifice in ancient cultures. My answer to this is: why the heck not? This kind of book can help to show kids that there are ways to deal with death other than what they're used to, and also show them that other people do things differently than we do in general, leading to (hopefully) and early acceptance of other, very different cultures (and possible cultivate some future anthropology students?). I find that death can be kept at a great distance from children in our society unless people they are very close to die. This can make the death of others an extremely traumatizing experience (which, yes, death should be affective, but should it cause as much emotional turmoil as it tends to for us). I think teaching children about death and the different ways of dealing with it can make them better equipped to do so and could give them a richer understanding of what death means to them as well as others. My view that children should be taught that there are different ways of dealing with death may seem odd given the fact that I've expressed some frustration with how my exposure to two different styles of dealing with death caused me some confusion. However, I feel like I was never actually taught that these other methods (other than my mom's and my granny's) existed and I always felt like I wasn't supposed to make a synthesis between the ways I was taught. I rather felt like I was being pulled between the two approaches, not that it was okay to pick one, the other, a mixture of both, or something completely different. I think telling kids about various modes of grief while performing one yourself, explaining to them that your method is only one of many and that grief is too personal to be practiced because you think it's expected of you, and being openly discursive about death with kids (while still being sensitive to the fact that they're little kids...) is a good approach to teaching kids about death.
The idea that children shouldn't be exposed to the more graphic kinds of death and dealing with it, such as mummification, seems a little silly to me. While I don't necessarily approve of exposing kids to things such as violent video games and graphic movies, I think dealing with something as pervasive, personal, important, and influential as death and grieving requires us to be less squeamish. Our mode of teaching kids about death by telling them, for instance, that a person isn't "dead" but is just "gone now" or "passed away" -- a very euphemistic method -- teaches kids that death needs to be kept at an extreme distance and that open dialogue about death can't occur. I know I never really felt like I could talk about death as a kid, and if I did it had to be in such euphemistic and softened terms because using words like "dead" and "death" were seen by my older families members as too harsh and, I think, too realistic. This attempt at keeping death at as much of a distance as possible leads, I think, to death being more emotionally traumatizing and shocking because we refuse to deal with it.
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| photo courtesy of http://www.wesleyjsmith.com/blog/uploaded_images/euphemism_gif-743732-720565.png |
Friday 24 February 2012
Gay Caveman? Uh....
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| The supposed "gay caveman" (photo courtesy of http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2011/04/06/article-1374060-0B81BCAD00000578-340_634x520.jpg) |
Gay caveman? First of all, I'm not even going to go into the "caveman" part of that and how horribly inaccurate it is because this post is about gender in archaeology. So, onto the "gay" part of it. This assessment fraught with assumptions and biased projections of a modern Western cultural perspective. First of all, it's entirely possible that the skeleton was sexed incorrectly and that it is indeed a woman, buried with the "proper" female burial. BUT, for the purpose of this blog post, let's assume that the skeleton was indeed sexed correctly and that this is a male buried in the fashion of a female.
After reading some newspaper articles online about the discovery, it's clear to me that the term "gay caveman" is obviously something the media is using, but no so much when it comes to actual archaeologists who acknowledge that the burial possibly indicates the "man" was of a gender other than male or female. The media, by labelling this discovery a "gay caveman," is not inferring something about the person's gender identity but rather their sexual orientation, something that is impossible to tell with archaeological remains such as this. A lot of people seem to often think that one's gender identity is going to directly correspond with a certain sexual orientation, but this is false. For all my fellow "30 Rock" fans our there, I'm going to use an example from the show: Jenna's boyfriend Paul. Paul does drag, but is a heterosexual man. Drag is merely something that he enjoys and implies nothing about his sexual orientation.
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| This just in: the media is full of turkeys. (photo courtesy of http://cdn.theatlanticwire.com/img/upload/2011/04/gay-caveman-courtesy-abc/large.jpg |
We can't even really know the gender identity of this man, especially since he didn't bury himself. We can make some educated guesses about how those who buried him viewed his gender status, and we can speculate that this reflects how he viewed is own gender status. However, there are various possibilities other than the notion that he was physically a man that was identified -- either by himself or his community, or both -- as being a female. There's the possibility that he was a social deviant who was buried improperly for a man as a way to shame him or prevent a proper afterlife. It's also possible that he was some sort of ritual specialist, or some sort of other figure within the community that had special status.
News reporters are also looking at this burial as though it's isolated -- there is no information about whether or not there have been other burials like this found in the area or form other Corded Ware areas, and it does not really acknowledge that outside of the Corded Ware Culture many similar, possibly alternately-gendered graves have been found.
This also shows a case of a sort of double standard. A lot of the time people pay attention to graves where a physical female is buried as a male, and label these women as warrior women or women with higher status in their communities. These are generally not labelled lesbian, transgendered, or transsexual graves. This article http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/8433527/First-homosexual-caveman-found.html acknowledges that Siberian shamans of the Corded Ware time would bury male shamans in a similar fashion but with richer funeral accessories -- this is the author's reason for ruling out that this burial may be of a ritual specialist. It does not take into account the fact that maybe resources were scarce when this individual was buried or that some other sort of situation occurred that would call for scaling back the grave goods for a ritual specialist.
My take on the media explosion of the story and the absurdity and idiocy of most of the reporting: don't harp on the archaeologists. The reporters twisted the assessment of what this burial possibly is just for a story. Which is terrible. Most people, outside of the academic discipline of anthropology (or archaeology...), are not going to be reading academically-written articles on this subject and will take what the media tells them at face value. They will assume that what they're being told must be true and will not know any of the actual facts. They take they parts of the story -- in this case, the "man buried in the fashion of a woman" part -- and ignore the other parts in order to have an exciting story. Classic media reporting.
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| photo courtesy of http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/legacyimg/2009/04/media-bias-2.jpg |
Luckily, there are some journalists who will set the others straight.
There is actually an article I found here http://www.salon.com/2011/04/08/gay_caveman_absurdity/ that points out that a lot of journalists writing about the discovery were using the terms transsexual, transgendered, homosexual, and intersexed interchangeably and how utterly idiotic this is. This same article points out that the discovery could be exciting for the reason that it can remind those people with a rigid view of gender and what it is that gender is really a fluid concept and that it's probably been this way since the concept of gender was first socially constructed by our ancestors, which could (hopefully) show the less-than-accepting people in our world that homosexuality and genders outside the Western binary of male and female have existed in our species forever and are therefore natural and a part of who we are.
This article http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/04/17/gay-caveman-probably-not-gay-or-a-caveman/ actually points out a lot of the kinds of things I've said up until this point and is probably the most accurate and thoughtful piece of reporting on the find I've found so far (even pointing out, in addition to the diversity in human gender and sexual behaviour, the sociosexual behaviour of bonobos as evidence that the common North American heteronormative views are just strange...). It takes into account a much more academic standpoint on the discovery and the interpretation of it, and condemns the misinformed and attention-seeking news reporters that came up with and disseminated the term "gay caveman."
Saturday 18 February 2012
Monument Analysis: Anglican Graves at Ross Bay Cemetery
First things first: here is the link to our group's Google map for those of you who would like to see it http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?vps=2&hl=en&ie=UTF8&oe=UTF8&msa=0&msid=214005049597555568959.0004b8900ded7fa7ea4ad.
Second order of business: here is the list of research questions that we came up with while in the field:
1. It appears that something has broken off the top of monument 5. What could this have been?
2. Why do you think there is so much variation in the monuments within this small section of the cemetery?
3. Notice the differences in the dates of the standing carved monuments (monuments 1, 3, and 14 -- family ones -- and graves 5 and 7 -- individual monuments) and the flat stones for individual burials (and even monument 6, which is standing but much simpler than the other standing ones, and has a similar date to the flat ones). What happened in this time gap of about 40 years that could have changed attitudes towards, and therefore practices surrounding, death and burial? Do you think these changes could simply be attributed to the passing of time?
4. For monument 1, the dates of the deaths of younger (under 20 years old) family members are close together (1884-5). Could something specific (e.g. disease, etc.) have happened to these individuals that could have caused their deaths to occur so close together?
5. What are the differences and similarities between the standing family monuments and the standing individual monuments? Why do you suppose these occurred?
6. Why do you suppose, within the individual graves with flat stones, that there are some that have their plot marked with stone boundaries (e.g. 9 and 10) and some that do not (e.g. 4 and 8)?
7. What did a typical Anglican family monument in the late 1800s look like?
Now, on to my own interpretations/analysis/answers to these questions. For the sake of brevity, my focus will be on questions 2, 3, and 4.
First, I will address question number 4:
Two babies, Edwin and Ernest Leigh, died three days apart (August 19 and 22) in 1884, 16-month-old Bernice died January 16 of that same year, and 16-year-old Agnes died March 23 of that year as well. The other death that was close in time to these occurred in 1885 and was of a 29-year-old, so I will actually separate this person and not group her (Edwina) in with the babies and Agnes. It's quite possible that these four young individuals -- Edwin, Ernest, Bernice, and Agens -- coincidentally all died within this short time frame. However, based on the time and the ages (relatively young) of these individuals, I am going to hypothesize that it was possible for them to have been killed by polio. The 1880s were a time when polio was still somewhat common, and young people were likelier to contract it. Of course, there are various other maladies that could have plagued these people, such as small pox; polio just seems to make the most sense to me in this case. It is also possible that perhaps there was some sort of genetic cause for their deaths (all members of the same family), but disease (polio in particular) seems like a likely culprit to me.
Next, I will address question number 3 (which really addresses number 2 as well...):
I will propose three reasons for the amount of variation seen between graves from different dates, individual graves -- standing and flat -- and family graves: fashion through time, war, and economics.
The earlier graves coincide with the later portion of the Victorian era. None of the standing monuments are particularly elaborate or carved intricately, and the carving present is relatively simple and does not display any complex or highly decorative sculpting; the standing monuments include family monuments and individual ones. Seven standing individual monuments (two of which are very small and very simple, presumably in the memory of children), four flat individual monuments, and three standing family monuments are present in this set. Only one standing individual monument occurs after 1890 (this is monument 6), but this monument is contained within a family plot so can be seen as an exception to the pattern that, eventually, individual monuments are generally only flat.
Because the monuments we chose are within the Anglican portion of Ross Bay Cemetery, I will use Cannon's "The Historical Dimension in Mortuary Expressions of Status and Sentiment" (1989) and its study of Victorian - Modern English mortuary displays as a guide for my analysis of the monuments dedicated to those that died from ca. 1880-1910. I am going to guess that these family monuments and the contemporary individual ones were the result of the fashions of the times. Cannon's evaluation of status as expressed in grave monuments -- that the wealthy, during the later Victorian era, reduced the amount of ostentation present in their funerary monuments after a period of high elaboration as a way to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and that the lower echelons of society followed suit and opted for simpler monuments themselves -- leads me to believe that the carved yet simple monuments (family and individual) are the result of lower class mimicry of the rich. The area of the cemetery we chose did not seem like it was occupied by once-wealthy dead that set the trends (as there were areas within view that looked, let's say, more polished) but rather by the ordinary folk that emulated their economically higher counterparts.
These monuments follow some of the general patterns noted by Cannon, such as the tendency for the amount of variety in monument shapes to decline during the latter half of the 19th century. If you look at the three family monuments, they are almost indistinguishable from one another. I think this actually had to do with the fact that each monument was created by the same carver. If we look to Cannon's Fig. 1 (p. 440) and Figure 2 (p. 441), we see that, in terms of monument shape/style, all the monuments from this time period (ca. 1880-1910) in our set fit in with general Victorian English patterns, where shape diversity declines from a peak in the mid-19th century but was still relatively high compared to, say, the first quarter of the century. There is definitely a higher diversity in monument shapes among monuments from this 30-year period than the later monuments that we looked at, which followed the pattern of decline in variety. These patterns explain why standing family monuments, standing individual monuments, carved flat individual monuments, and simple individual monuments all coexist over this time period in this section of the cemetery.
For the later monuments (of the 1920s-30s), two are flat and all are individual while monument number 6, also individual, is standing. The exception that number 6 represents can, I believe, be explained by the fact that it was added to a family plot. I assume that it is a standing monument at a time of almost exclusively flat monuments because (yes, we only have 3 monuments from this time, but from looking at other monuments in the same area it seemed as though the simple, flat monuments were quite common at this time), had it been flat and added to the middle of this family plot, it would have looked odd and been displeasing aesthetically. The rest of the monuments from this time are all simple, flat and small. This can perhaps be explained through the normal progression mortuary fashion (as Cannon there was a general trend of increasing simplicity), but I am going to suppose that the stark simplicity of these monuments can be attributed more, but not exclusively, to changes in mortuary display due to the Great War and possibly event he Great Depression.
As we can conclude from Garazhian and Papoli Yazdi (2008), disasters can affect mortuary practices and monuments rather noticeably, and the first world war was indeed a disaster. It stands to reason, then, that it had an effect on mortuary display. It is frequently the conclusion of psychologists and sociologists (e.g. Field 2000) that exposure to mass and frequent death can cause those exposed to become somewhat desensitized to or detached from death, causing alterations in the population's overall attitude towards it. This alteration in attitudes would, more likely than not, be reflected in grave monuments. Field notes that wartime experience can cause a loss of religious belief, especially in those that engage in actual combat, and more acceptance to the fact of our own individual mortality. Loss of religious belief would explain the absence of any religious markers on all three monument in our set that are dated after the first world war (note that monument 6, marking one person that died in the 1920s and one that died in the 1930s, is within a family plot next to a monument from the 1880s that is shaped like a cross), and the simplicity of the flat monuments in particular can perhaps be explained by a desensitization to death resulting in a feeling of not being obligated to devote a lot to mortuary display. Another possibility is that, during the first world war, monuments became simple because of resource conservation and this continued after the war.
Economics of the times may also be a factor in the simplicity of these monuments, but this seems less likely because 2 of the 3 monuments from this time were created for people who died in the 1920s, before the Great Depression hit (so during a time of relative economic prosperity). However, they may reflect the economic status of either the people they are dedicated to or the people who did the dedicating.
References
Cannon, A., 1989. The historical dimension in mortuary expressions of status and sentiment. Current Anthropology, 30(4), pp. 437-58.
Field, D., 2000. Older people's attitudes towards death in England. Mortality, 5(3), pp. 277-97.
Garazhian, O. and L. Papoli Yazdi, 2008. Mortuary practices in Bam after the earthquake. Journal of Social Archaeology, 8(1), pp. 94-112.
Second order of business: here is the list of research questions that we came up with while in the field:
1. It appears that something has broken off the top of monument 5. What could this have been?
2. Why do you think there is so much variation in the monuments within this small section of the cemetery?
3. Notice the differences in the dates of the standing carved monuments (monuments 1, 3, and 14 -- family ones -- and graves 5 and 7 -- individual monuments) and the flat stones for individual burials (and even monument 6, which is standing but much simpler than the other standing ones, and has a similar date to the flat ones). What happened in this time gap of about 40 years that could have changed attitudes towards, and therefore practices surrounding, death and burial? Do you think these changes could simply be attributed to the passing of time?
4. For monument 1, the dates of the deaths of younger (under 20 years old) family members are close together (1884-5). Could something specific (e.g. disease, etc.) have happened to these individuals that could have caused their deaths to occur so close together?
5. What are the differences and similarities between the standing family monuments and the standing individual monuments? Why do you suppose these occurred?
6. Why do you suppose, within the individual graves with flat stones, that there are some that have their plot marked with stone boundaries (e.g. 9 and 10) and some that do not (e.g. 4 and 8)?
7. What did a typical Anglican family monument in the late 1800s look like?
Now, on to my own interpretations/analysis/answers to these questions. For the sake of brevity, my focus will be on questions 2, 3, and 4.
First, I will address question number 4:
Two babies, Edwin and Ernest Leigh, died three days apart (August 19 and 22) in 1884, 16-month-old Bernice died January 16 of that same year, and 16-year-old Agnes died March 23 of that year as well. The other death that was close in time to these occurred in 1885 and was of a 29-year-old, so I will actually separate this person and not group her (Edwina) in with the babies and Agnes. It's quite possible that these four young individuals -- Edwin, Ernest, Bernice, and Agens -- coincidentally all died within this short time frame. However, based on the time and the ages (relatively young) of these individuals, I am going to hypothesize that it was possible for them to have been killed by polio. The 1880s were a time when polio was still somewhat common, and young people were likelier to contract it. Of course, there are various other maladies that could have plagued these people, such as small pox; polio just seems to make the most sense to me in this case. It is also possible that perhaps there was some sort of genetic cause for their deaths (all members of the same family), but disease (polio in particular) seems like a likely culprit to me.
Next, I will address question number 3 (which really addresses number 2 as well...):
I will propose three reasons for the amount of variation seen between graves from different dates, individual graves -- standing and flat -- and family graves: fashion through time, war, and economics.
The earlier graves coincide with the later portion of the Victorian era. None of the standing monuments are particularly elaborate or carved intricately, and the carving present is relatively simple and does not display any complex or highly decorative sculpting; the standing monuments include family monuments and individual ones. Seven standing individual monuments (two of which are very small and very simple, presumably in the memory of children), four flat individual monuments, and three standing family monuments are present in this set. Only one standing individual monument occurs after 1890 (this is monument 6), but this monument is contained within a family plot so can be seen as an exception to the pattern that, eventually, individual monuments are generally only flat.
Because the monuments we chose are within the Anglican portion of Ross Bay Cemetery, I will use Cannon's "The Historical Dimension in Mortuary Expressions of Status and Sentiment" (1989) and its study of Victorian - Modern English mortuary displays as a guide for my analysis of the monuments dedicated to those that died from ca. 1880-1910. I am going to guess that these family monuments and the contemporary individual ones were the result of the fashions of the times. Cannon's evaluation of status as expressed in grave monuments -- that the wealthy, during the later Victorian era, reduced the amount of ostentation present in their funerary monuments after a period of high elaboration as a way to distinguish themselves from the lower classes and that the lower echelons of society followed suit and opted for simpler monuments themselves -- leads me to believe that the carved yet simple monuments (family and individual) are the result of lower class mimicry of the rich. The area of the cemetery we chose did not seem like it was occupied by once-wealthy dead that set the trends (as there were areas within view that looked, let's say, more polished) but rather by the ordinary folk that emulated their economically higher counterparts.
These monuments follow some of the general patterns noted by Cannon, such as the tendency for the amount of variety in monument shapes to decline during the latter half of the 19th century. If you look at the three family monuments, they are almost indistinguishable from one another. I think this actually had to do with the fact that each monument was created by the same carver. If we look to Cannon's Fig. 1 (p. 440) and Figure 2 (p. 441), we see that, in terms of monument shape/style, all the monuments from this time period (ca. 1880-1910) in our set fit in with general Victorian English patterns, where shape diversity declines from a peak in the mid-19th century but was still relatively high compared to, say, the first quarter of the century. There is definitely a higher diversity in monument shapes among monuments from this 30-year period than the later monuments that we looked at, which followed the pattern of decline in variety. These patterns explain why standing family monuments, standing individual monuments, carved flat individual monuments, and simple individual monuments all coexist over this time period in this section of the cemetery.
For the later monuments (of the 1920s-30s), two are flat and all are individual while monument number 6, also individual, is standing. The exception that number 6 represents can, I believe, be explained by the fact that it was added to a family plot. I assume that it is a standing monument at a time of almost exclusively flat monuments because (yes, we only have 3 monuments from this time, but from looking at other monuments in the same area it seemed as though the simple, flat monuments were quite common at this time), had it been flat and added to the middle of this family plot, it would have looked odd and been displeasing aesthetically. The rest of the monuments from this time are all simple, flat and small. This can perhaps be explained through the normal progression mortuary fashion (as Cannon there was a general trend of increasing simplicity), but I am going to suppose that the stark simplicity of these monuments can be attributed more, but not exclusively, to changes in mortuary display due to the Great War and possibly event he Great Depression.
As we can conclude from Garazhian and Papoli Yazdi (2008), disasters can affect mortuary practices and monuments rather noticeably, and the first world war was indeed a disaster. It stands to reason, then, that it had an effect on mortuary display. It is frequently the conclusion of psychologists and sociologists (e.g. Field 2000) that exposure to mass and frequent death can cause those exposed to become somewhat desensitized to or detached from death, causing alterations in the population's overall attitude towards it. This alteration in attitudes would, more likely than not, be reflected in grave monuments. Field notes that wartime experience can cause a loss of religious belief, especially in those that engage in actual combat, and more acceptance to the fact of our own individual mortality. Loss of religious belief would explain the absence of any religious markers on all three monument in our set that are dated after the first world war (note that monument 6, marking one person that died in the 1920s and one that died in the 1930s, is within a family plot next to a monument from the 1880s that is shaped like a cross), and the simplicity of the flat monuments in particular can perhaps be explained by a desensitization to death resulting in a feeling of not being obligated to devote a lot to mortuary display. Another possibility is that, during the first world war, monuments became simple because of resource conservation and this continued after the war.
Economics of the times may also be a factor in the simplicity of these monuments, but this seems less likely because 2 of the 3 monuments from this time were created for people who died in the 1920s, before the Great Depression hit (so during a time of relative economic prosperity). However, they may reflect the economic status of either the people they are dedicated to or the people who did the dedicating.
References
Cannon, A., 1989. The historical dimension in mortuary expressions of status and sentiment. Current Anthropology, 30(4), pp. 437-58.
Field, D., 2000. Older people's attitudes towards death in England. Mortality, 5(3), pp. 277-97.
Garazhian, O. and L. Papoli Yazdi, 2008. Mortuary practices in Bam after the earthquake. Journal of Social Archaeology, 8(1), pp. 94-112.
Friday 17 February 2012
Why Did I Choose the Second World War Group Project?
Lacking a prompt this week and realizing just how fast we're coming up on the group projects, I figured I'd blog this week about why I chose the WWII project over all of the other topics.
First of all: it was tough to finally make a choice. Our class managed to come up with a list consisting of what I though were all interesting topics rife with potential and possibilities. I originally narrowed my pick down to a shorter list of 4 topics -- still not horribly narrowed down. These 4 topics were: Ancient Greece, the Scythians, Ancient Egypt, and, obviously, the Second World War (or, as our Russian friends would call it, "the Great Patriotic War" -- nationalism reared its ugly head as part of Stalin's massive propagandistic mobilization campaign...).
Ancient Greece was one of the topics I contemplated working on because I've looked at some ancient Greek history, art, architecture, etc. and I find it all fascinating. When I took classes on these subjects, burial came up every now and again. I learned a little about the Kerameikos (the main necropolis) of Athens, but this was focused largely on the ceramics found. These ceramics were interesting, though, because they included items such as cinerary container and vessels for offerings during funeral processions, and contained painted depictions of funeral processions. In addition, for my Art and Architecture of Ancient Greece class (which, by the way, was a great class and I would highly recommend it, especially when taught by Dr. Burke!), I wrote my term paper on the debate over whether King Philip II of Macedon or his son Philip III Arrhidaios was contained within the gold larnax in Tomb II at Vergina (the site of the family's royal cemetery). As much as physically writing that paper was not my idea of a fun day-before-the-paper-is-due kind of thing (so I procrastinated on the writing a little...), researching the topic was incredibly interesting (I actually chose that topic because it seemed more archaeological than a lot of other topics I could have chosen). Studies of the tomb include forensic analysis of the cremated remains found within it as well as analysis of the myriad artifacts found -- alongside historical writings of the lives and deaths of Philip II and Arrhidaios. Based on these two ancient Greek burial topics I learned about, I thought it would be neat to learn more. Alas, I decided against it (for this class at least).
The gold larnax from Tomb II at Vergina. Did it contain the cremated
remains of Philip II or Philip III Arrhidaios?
image courtesy of http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/221/290/22129037_640.jpg)
The Scythians and their kurgans (burial tumuli/mounds) were on my list because, well, the Scythians were early inhabitants of Russia and I love anything Russian. These kurgans would also sometimes be incredibly elaborate and rich and included some very colourful textiles, beautifully crafted metal objects, etc. Also, the Scythians sometimes had some pretty cool tattoos. I happen to really like tattoos, and ancient body modification fascinates me as much as modern body modification. There have also been recent developments with the study of the Scythian mounds as someone (I think it's the Dutch...) is working on developing 3-D models of the kurgans. Like my Ancient Greece leanings, though, the Scythians fell by the wayside.
As for Ancient Egypt....well, let's be real: who doesn't like mummies? Or ancient Egyptian beliefs about death and burial in general? Side note: I find this stuff so interesting I have a tattoo of Anubis -- the Egyptian god of mummification and embalming that had a tremendous role in funerary practices -- on my body. This topic also did not make the final cut. I am somewhat regretting this decision after seeing a Discovery Channel special a few days ago in which a chemical archaeologist mummified a body donor to test his hypothesis on how the 18th Dynasty (including Ahmenhotep, Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, Hatshepsut, and Nefertiti, just to name some famous names) was mummified differently than every other Dynasty that practiced mummification. This chemical archaeologist discovered, via radiographs, that the mummies of the 18th dynasty (and only them) had salt crystals within their mummified flesh. This would not have happened had their bodies been covered in natron like the other pharaohs' bodies were (because this would simply draw water out of the body, not bring salt into it), but rather the 18th Dynasty pharaohs must have been submerged in a concentrated natron bath, which would allow the flow of water out of the body and salt into it, allowing for salt crystals to form. This special was really awesome, so if anyone has a spare hour lying around one day, I suggest you hunt it down and watch it. Just be prepared for watching some scientists pull the dead guy's organs out of him!
I almost regret my decision to not select ancient Egypt, but only almost. I am fully happy with my selection of WWII. Firstly, I love learning about the history of WWII. Secondly, I find it to be one of THE pivotal historical events. Now, this may be because it was quite recent and extremely well documented, giving me the opportunity to learn about it in more detail than a lot of historical events as well as the aftermath and reverberations of these events and how they relate to my life today. However, also because WWII was so recent, a lot of new archaeological studies are being done, much of the archaeological data are fresh, and there are so many more opportunities to study WWII from an archaeological perspective. This is different from places like ancient Greece and Egypt which have been studied archaeologically for a couple of centuries now. In addition, I tend to find any case involving mass burial particularly interesting, and there were a lot of mass burials during WWII relating to varying circumstances. Also, when we think about WWII, we tend not to think about how it would (and must have) altered beliefs about and practices surrounding death. Lastly, I really want to be able to look at anything to do with the Soviets whenever possible...
First of all: it was tough to finally make a choice. Our class managed to come up with a list consisting of what I though were all interesting topics rife with potential and possibilities. I originally narrowed my pick down to a shorter list of 4 topics -- still not horribly narrowed down. These 4 topics were: Ancient Greece, the Scythians, Ancient Egypt, and, obviously, the Second World War (or, as our Russian friends would call it, "the Great Patriotic War" -- nationalism reared its ugly head as part of Stalin's massive propagandistic mobilization campaign...).
Ancient Greece was one of the topics I contemplated working on because I've looked at some ancient Greek history, art, architecture, etc. and I find it all fascinating. When I took classes on these subjects, burial came up every now and again. I learned a little about the Kerameikos (the main necropolis) of Athens, but this was focused largely on the ceramics found. These ceramics were interesting, though, because they included items such as cinerary container and vessels for offerings during funeral processions, and contained painted depictions of funeral processions. In addition, for my Art and Architecture of Ancient Greece class (which, by the way, was a great class and I would highly recommend it, especially when taught by Dr. Burke!), I wrote my term paper on the debate over whether King Philip II of Macedon or his son Philip III Arrhidaios was contained within the gold larnax in Tomb II at Vergina (the site of the family's royal cemetery). As much as physically writing that paper was not my idea of a fun day-before-the-paper-is-due kind of thing (so I procrastinated on the writing a little...), researching the topic was incredibly interesting (I actually chose that topic because it seemed more archaeological than a lot of other topics I could have chosen). Studies of the tomb include forensic analysis of the cremated remains found within it as well as analysis of the myriad artifacts found -- alongside historical writings of the lives and deaths of Philip II and Arrhidaios. Based on these two ancient Greek burial topics I learned about, I thought it would be neat to learn more. Alas, I decided against it (for this class at least).
remains of Philip II or Philip III Arrhidaios?
image courtesy of http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/221/290/22129037_640.jpg)
The Scythians and their kurgans (burial tumuli/mounds) were on my list because, well, the Scythians were early inhabitants of Russia and I love anything Russian. These kurgans would also sometimes be incredibly elaborate and rich and included some very colourful textiles, beautifully crafted metal objects, etc. Also, the Scythians sometimes had some pretty cool tattoos. I happen to really like tattoos, and ancient body modification fascinates me as much as modern body modification. There have also been recent developments with the study of the Scythian mounds as someone (I think it's the Dutch...) is working on developing 3-D models of the kurgans. Like my Ancient Greece leanings, though, the Scythians fell by the wayside.
 |
| Tattoos on a male Scythian, 5th century BCE, found in modern Kazakhstan, now displayed at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg (image courtesy of www.britannica.com/bps/media-view/869/1/0/0) |
As for Ancient Egypt....well, let's be real: who doesn't like mummies? Or ancient Egyptian beliefs about death and burial in general? Side note: I find this stuff so interesting I have a tattoo of Anubis -- the Egyptian god of mummification and embalming that had a tremendous role in funerary practices -- on my body. This topic also did not make the final cut. I am somewhat regretting this decision after seeing a Discovery Channel special a few days ago in which a chemical archaeologist mummified a body donor to test his hypothesis on how the 18th Dynasty (including Ahmenhotep, Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, Hatshepsut, and Nefertiti, just to name some famous names) was mummified differently than every other Dynasty that practiced mummification. This chemical archaeologist discovered, via radiographs, that the mummies of the 18th dynasty (and only them) had salt crystals within their mummified flesh. This would not have happened had their bodies been covered in natron like the other pharaohs' bodies were (because this would simply draw water out of the body, not bring salt into it), but rather the 18th Dynasty pharaohs must have been submerged in a concentrated natron bath, which would allow the flow of water out of the body and salt into it, allowing for salt crystals to form. This special was really awesome, so if anyone has a spare hour lying around one day, I suggest you hunt it down and watch it. Just be prepared for watching some scientists pull the dead guy's organs out of him!
I almost regret my decision to not select ancient Egypt, but only almost. I am fully happy with my selection of WWII. Firstly, I love learning about the history of WWII. Secondly, I find it to be one of THE pivotal historical events. Now, this may be because it was quite recent and extremely well documented, giving me the opportunity to learn about it in more detail than a lot of historical events as well as the aftermath and reverberations of these events and how they relate to my life today. However, also because WWII was so recent, a lot of new archaeological studies are being done, much of the archaeological data are fresh, and there are so many more opportunities to study WWII from an archaeological perspective. This is different from places like ancient Greece and Egypt which have been studied archaeologically for a couple of centuries now. In addition, I tend to find any case involving mass burial particularly interesting, and there were a lot of mass burials during WWII relating to varying circumstances. Also, when we think about WWII, we tend not to think about how it would (and must have) altered beliefs about and practices surrounding death. Lastly, I really want to be able to look at anything to do with the Soviets whenever possible...
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