My Grave Goods? Hopefully not...

I find the question of "what would I want buried with me" very difficult to answer. I do not find it a difficult question because I'm unsure about what sort of messages I want to convey about how I perceive my own identity but rather because I have absolutely no intention of ever being buried, a desire I have clearly and vehemently expressed to those people who may be responsible for the disposal of my body. I also find it difficult because I quite frankly don't really care how an archaeologist may conceive of my persona, it's just not something I think about. A large part of why I don't think about it is because of how we live -- my entire life is already documented quite well. If someone in the future wants to find out about how I lived, they can check all my activity on Facebook, Tumblr, and even something like this blog. They can talk to the credit card company -- which I'm assuming is going to be around for a very, very long time -- and discover what kind of things I bought, how much money I spent, how much credit I paid off, etc. These kinds of things will tell people about my interests, my economic standing, and so forth. We have come to a point where, following in the spirit of good old conspiracy theorists, the government likes to keep constant tabs on us and therefore allows a plethora of avenues that keep track of who we are that will be eternally preserved on the Internet. This probably sounds a little cynical, but cynicism is certainly an aspect of my personality that an archaeologist wouldn't be able to ascertain from my burial or any grave goods of mine but can be conveyed right here. I also have 5 tattoos currently and I plan on getting more over the course of my life, and tattoos are very telling and represent various aspect of my personality.

Now, if hypothetically my family were to disobey my direct orders (which are have me sent to a body farm and if that doesn't happen, plan B is to harvest any viable organs and donate the remainder of my corpse to science) and have me buried, there is not much I would want buried with my body. I don't believe in any sort of afterlife and I don't feel as though I need to have my status conveyed to my community via my funeral or burial. But, if I did intend on sending any messages, some items I'd choose would be things like my favourite books (something like Catcher in the Rye, Charlie Chaplin's My Autobiography, and probably something about Russian history), pictures from my travels and maybe of my family, and little in terms of body decoration. I don't really wear jewelry to begin with (all I wear in terms of jewelry is a watch, maybe a bracelet or a necklace on a special occasion) so I wouldn't really want to have jewelry placed on my dead body. I wouldn't want to be buried in any special clothing, either. Other than that, there's not really anything else I can think of that I would want placed in my grave. The things I've mentioned that I would have buried -- the books in particular -- tell about my interests and things that are important to me (knowledge, family, seeing what the world has to offer).

I asked both my brother and my mom what they would have placed in my grave. One thing that struck me is that my mom would write some sort of note for me and put that in my grave. To me this seems to imply that she thinks I'd be able to read the note after I've died. My mom does believe in an afterlife of some sort, not because of any sort of religious conviction (I think she believes in God and heaven, but she's not religious in any way). Even if she was an atheist, she would still believe in an afterlife because she desperately wants there to be an afterlife. The reason for this, I believe, is that my father died when I was just a baby and she very much wishes there to be an afterlife so she can be reunited with him when she dies. This whole note business sends a message different than what I would want to say, and is overly sentimental for my taste. I can understand it though because writing and placing this note would be a source of comfort and closure for my mother. There is also a picture of me as a child on a swing, in the middle of winter while it's snowing, and I have the biggest, goofiest grin on my face and I look like I'm having the time of my life. This would be OK with me...sort of. It sends a message that I was a care-free, happy-go-lucky kid and that perhaps this carried on later in life. I think it's a great representation of my childhood, but I don't think it's a very good representation of what my life is like now. As I've already addressed, I'm somewhat cynical, and rarely does that big and that goofy a grin cross my face. Childhood was full of those kinds of times, and they still happen now, but unlike when I was a kid, these moments aren't the norm and don't characterize my life anymore. But, burial is done by and is largely about the living, and I know my mom loves this picture and it means a lot to her, so if placing it in my grave would help her move on after my death, so be it. (For the record though, anyone reading this knows I don't want to be buried, so if my mom ever tries, please don't allow her to bury me!!!)

My brother, a somewhat cynical, highly unsentimental person like myself, said something quite different than my mom. He wouldn't bury any notes or pictures with me. There is only one thing my brother said he would place in my grave, and this one thing is a turkey. This is something I would be rather fine with having placed in my hypothetical grave. The reason for this is that there is a long-standing joke type thing my brother and I have going on. It started with a Steve Brule skit from "Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job" where Steve Brule, played by the hilarious John C. Reilly,  calls the audience "turkeys." My brother began calling people turkeys, and it became a regular part of my speech pattern, so now my friends identify "turkey" as a word I use more often than most other words. When they hear someone call someone else a turkey, they think of me. It's also something that's important between me and my brother (we're very close, and little jokes like this are a big part of our relationship). I laughed when he told me he'd put a turkey in my grave, and I thought it more appropriate than the things my mother said.

My brother and I have very similar views on death, but the two of us have very different attitudes towards death than our mother (clearly). My views on death made this blog prompt fairly difficult to answer because it's not something I've thought about before and something I wouldn't think about had I not been prompted to do so.

Unusual Body Disposals

Many unorthodox burial practices are not actually offered in Canada because the companies that offer them are foreign companies, and similar enterprises have not yet been established here. However, if you are welling to shell out some cash to pay not only for these methods of disposal but also for the cost of transportation to wherever they're done, then you too can have your dead body disposed of in one of these unusual ways!

Welcome to the House of...Wax?...Nope! House of Liquefied Human Remains: Liquefaction

Video on how liquefaction is performed

Resomation Ltd., a Glasgow-based company, has installed a unit in a funeral home in St. Petersburg, Florida that has the capacity to turn a human body into a slimy liquid -- a process already in use for medical cadavers and livestock. This innovation is part of the green movement -- the company claims that it emits about one third of the greenhouse gases and consumes substantially less energy than cremation does (future of body disposal in Britain?). The body is liquefied by being placed in heated alkaline water that causes dissolution of the  corpse. The bones remain intact and, after the flesh has been dissolved, are removed from the liquid and pulverized in the same way bones are crushed following cremation. This process has been legalized in seven American states and is awaiting legalization in Britain where its patent is held (it's awaiting patents in other countries). A rival company in Australia called Aquamation Industries has already employing this method, and 19 bodies in Ohio were liquefied before it was ruled that this was illegal within the state. (information courtesy of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555)

This Body Doesn't Bounce
Another strange, greener-than-burial-or-cremation method of body disposal involves freezing the body with liquid nitrogen, vibrating the frozen body so it fragments, drying these fragments, and removing metals by passing through a filter before being placed in a biodegradable coffin for shallow burial -- Swedish biologist Susanne Wiigh-Masak, the innovator who has been proposing this for ten years, calls this Promession. The point of this kind of disposal is to be environmentally friendly as the shallow burial is equivalent to using the body as compost. The method has only been tested on pigs, but it is ready for human testing, particularly since the Swedish government is planning on making it easier by allowing people to use a burial tax for promession. (information once again courtesy of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14114555)

I'll Pass on the Yield of These Three Farms...
This will be the last method I discuss, and is my personal favourite -- body farms. No body farms exist in Canada, but there are currently five (one is not yet operational) in the United States, the original being the one at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville (begun in 1981 by Dr. Bill Bass, an anthropologist) and largest being at the Texas State University in Freeman Ranch, measuring 7 acres. The purpose of body farms is to gain a better understanding of decomposition in order to extract information -- for instance, time and cause of death -- from human remains. You can donate your body to these facilities where your decomposition would be monitored, skeleton kept for studying, etc. This is how I would actually like my body to be disposed of. Here is a link to Josh and Chuck of the podcast Stuff You Should Know discussing body farms http://science.discovery.com/videos/stuff-you-should-know-body-farms.html. For more information, I would highly recommend checking out the actual podcast episode. Not only is it highly informative and interesting, Josh and Chuck are hilarious!

Introduction

Greetings classmates. My name is Alysha. I am a third year student, and I recently decided that I will be pursuing a double major in anthropology and history (I was just going to do anthro before, but I just couldn't leave my beloved history out in the cold). Archaeology is probably my favourite subfield of anthropology, so even though I'm pretty sure I've technically fulfilled my archaeology requirements for my degree (I went on the field school to South Africa this summer, and I would recommend it to anyone that likes archaeology and doesn't mind palaeo...) I would like to take more archaeology courses and this one caught my eye as I'm one of the many people these days that has one of those fascinations with death (for instance, last semester in my Soviet history class my paper was on how Russian death culture altered under the Bolsheviks as compared to the last few decades of Imperial Russia). Apart from anthropology I obviously love history, Russian history in particular. I'm a vegetarian (have been for two years), and I have a slight obsession with Charlie Chaplin...