Oh hey, it's those discount Halloween socks that you'll buy November first and then wear all year ali ward back with a spooktober October finale. That's honestly maybe gonna give me nightmares. I've already had recurring night terrors about grave sites and tombstones and cemeteries and burial grounds. Oh boy, howdy shaver me timbers. Now, Halloween doesn't get much more on the no's than this episode. Will it be goth? Will you be surprised? Will you never think about some
things the same? Forever? All of those answers during this delightful discourse with an ologist who got her bachelor's in archaeology and a master's in historical archaeology, leading whole excavation team for months looking for lost burial grounds from the sixteen hundreds. And she also does ongoing research on gravestone symbols and iconography and preserving historical burial sites. So this woman digs graves. Don't have plans for Halloween, don't worry,
She's got you covered. But before we dig in quick Thanks to patrons at patreon dot com slash ologies for making the show possible. You can join them you can hop in there for a buck a month. My love is not expensive. And thanks to everyone who tells friends about the show and rates and tweets and grams and reviews of course, so I can snoop them each week and then Dad barrass you by reading a fresh one like this. Obix Benge wrote, Hey, pod Dad, that's me.
I had to listen to every last episode just to be extra certain before rating ologies. Spoiler from Munkenology to Kinetic Saltaicidology, it's been a solid five stars. What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life now in between Tuesdays? Obix Bene, I don't know. Re listen, there you go and thank you. Also, okay tofology. Straight up Greek word here tafos means funeral or grave or tomb.
So let's just get into this wonderful episode in which we discuss trap saying, past tombs, the ethics of headstone cleaning, picnics in the graveyard, poltergeists, Goths, the best epitaphs, coffins and caskets, Puritans, witch trials, cemeteries versus graveyards. Is their difference?
What is it?
And why you'll want to spend Halloween font spotting among the dead in an episode that I'll be honest, kind of fuck me up a little bit in terms of graveyard history, but I am richer for it. With archaeologist, tombstone conservator, scholar, and tafologist Robin S. Lacy. Okay, first thing, if you could pronounce your first and last name and your pronounce.
Yeah, Robin Lacy.
She here awesome, Robin Lacy. Do you know that there is a word and its tafology is the study of graves?
Yes? Yeah, I've heard of that one you have.
Okay, is this a commonly used word or is it pretty obscure?
I see it a lot on like Instagram and stuff. People will describe themselves as like a taffa file, but I don't see it as much in like archaeology.
I would imagine as an archaeologist, you would be more apt to describe yourself as a tafologist and a tapha file. You're not just tripping about a cemetery taking photos, right.
I mean, I feel like that's half of my research, just stumbling around the gravestones. I would more just describe myself as an archaeologist though.
Right would are you a goth. No, I'm straight up asked that question.
No, I'm like the least a goss graveyard person.
Basically, do you find that a lot of other archaeologists who work in the burial space, both figuratively and academically, do they tend to be more of the recreationally spooky or are they history and arts?
I think definitely both. Everything we do in archaeology deals with basically deals with death. Everyone that we study, for the most part, unless you're dealing with the living community, everything that comes out of the ground is from someone who's already died. So even if you're doing archaeology and you're not even looking at burials per se, you're still in some way dealing with death as a theme.
Yeah, I guess archaeology is like one big est state sale, you know what I mean? Like what they do with this? What kind of a person were they? What narrative can I try to understand based on these artifacts?
Right?
How did you end up in this space? Are you from the Eastern Seaboard? Did you grow up around spooky cemeteries?
So I'm from Halifax, Nova Scotia originally, but I grew up in BC. I wouldn't say, I grew up in cemeteries, but during like family trips and stuff, my family would always go to historic sites and if there was like someone really interesting buried or somewhere, or people told us that, like the monuments in a specific graveyard were very impressive, we would go look at them. So it's definitely like something I was comfortable going to and being interested in.
But initially I wanted to do either maritime archaeology, which I know you talked about on the show before, or
archaeology in meso America. And then I did a field school in my undergraduate degree through the University of Liverpool, and we were doing the surveys of graveyards in Ireland and it was like rainy and cold, and I sat down and we started recording like everybody's names on the stone, what styles headstones they were, and I was just like, well, I think this is where I'm gonna be for the rest of my life.
I asked Robin if she ever listened to the Smiths cemetery gates like on repeat.
So we go inside and were grave stones all those people below those lives were they know, oh the loves just back none they were born.
And so.
Gone she was like, no, and I can't blame her. I listened to Morrissey before he crumbled before our very eyes, like ancient marble. So being sixteen watching her crushed smoke clothes and complain about his dad in a cemetery was not something that we had in common. That's fine. There was a lot of recreational graveyard hanging in my own particular youth, But straight off the gate. As someone who studies burial grounds, cemeteries, graveyards, are they a good place to picnic or is that very rude?
It definitely depends on the site. I know that some larger sites like Mount Auburn and Cambridge don't let people do that just because it is such a significant historic site, and like you wouldn't go sit and have a picnic in downtown Boston, other like rural sites, if you're going there to visit family members, I think definitely you can have a picnic in a cemetery. I've known that when we're doing field work and graveyards, you are just going
to eat your lunch there. It's in the Victorian period they would have they would go and have picnics and can go for walks and graveyards very regularly, so kind of doing it now is almost keeping in that tradition.
Okay, that makes me feel a little better because out here in LA we have the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, which is like a straight up night life than you. Like, I saw a concert there a few weeks ago. They have screenings and so cool, right, But it seems like there's different schools of thoughts in terms of, hey, everyone buried here would have wanted to go to a party, so why not have a party. And this is very
very you know, sacred holed ground. But how does it differ in different cultures, different parts of the world how we dispose of bodies. Is it a very Western thing to bury your whole skeleton and have like a plot of land or is that pretty worldwide?
I mean definitely, everybody around the world has different burial customs and funerary customs and even ideas about what dying is and how it takes place when death happens. But it's definitely a very like North American idea that when you buy a plot of land and bury an entire body in it, that that is something that you own
for all of eternity. Basically, we have so much space in North America, and this idea of burial and perpetuity and like your final resting place is sort of ingrained into how we see a funeral and how we see
a burial space. But if you go to Luxembourg or places in Europe that don't have as much space, the burial space for the body itself is something that's temporary, and after not too many years, like a decade or so or twenty thirty years, they'll ask the family if they want to renew basically a lease on that burial space, and often the families don't want to anymore, so like once the body's decomposed, they cremate them and then the remains are put in a sort of like a mass
burial space for cremated remains.
Oh, I didn't know that that makes a lot of sense, though it always seemed a little odd that were like, this is my plot of land, because if everyone did that for the last several million years, there wouldn't be any space that wasn't a graveyard.
It seems exactly. I mean, I feel like a lot of Europe there isn't a lot of space. It's not a grave yard. But yeah, it's very like a North American idea that that's a space you get to own, or your corpse gets to own for hundreds of years after you're no longer there.
M h.
And what's the difference between a graveyard and a cemetery and a burial ground? Walk me through literally trapes me through some of these different plots.
Yeah, So the terminology is like in some ways interchangeable depending on what country you're in. But in my research, a burial ground is a space that could like that term could be used interchangeably, like in seventeenth century New England, which is one of my study areas a burial ground, that term was used by Puritan settlers specifically to mean an unconsecrated space for burials, because that was something that
they did. But if it's space for graves that is around a church, that would be the churchyard also the graveyard. Graveyards can also be not attached to the church but still directly associated with the church, whereas burial grounds and cemeteries are often like municipally owned. That's not always it's
all murky. But cemeteries as a term is really interesting because a cemetery is sort of comes from this like rural garden burial space aesthetics, the rural garden cemetery movement, and that didn't come to North America until eighteen thirty one when Mount Auburn was constructed in Cambridge. So anything older than that it is technically not a cemetery in North America.
Oh fun fact, I am sitting between Cambridge and Watertown outside of Boston. I just looked it up and I'm one mile away from Mount Auburn Cemetery and it's dark out, I'm not wearing pants, and the cemetery is closed. I'm in a hotel recording this right now. I leave Boston tomorrow and I'm a mile away from Mount Omborn Cemetery. There's five thousand trees there and ten miles of winding roads and bird watching. From what I gather, it is like
the Disneyland of old Coool cemeteries. Even the word cemetery was a rebrand in this era and it means a sleeping place in Greek.
Nice.
Yeah, what happened in the eighteen thirties where suddenly there was this shift was were there like some bros that were like, We're here to disrupt the graveyard industry I.
Feel like probably yes, you hear about like the changing ideas of death in America and in Canada as well. It was a lot of people being kind of freaked out about bodies after a while. Whereas you used to be buried a little bit closer to the areas that you were like living in, when those spaces got full, people got a little bit freaked out when they could smell the bodies. Sometimes these burial grounds and there were some in New York like this that got so overcrowded
that you could smell the decomposition. Oho, and when people started getting sick, they were worried it was from with air quotes, the miasma coming from the bodies. So they were like, there are no more bodies allowed to be buried inside of New York City. Let's move the graves. So yeah, it was like this movement to sort of pastoralize I guess, the graveyards by making these more open, like beautiful airy spaces. But at the same time it came a little bit from people being scared of bodies.
Oh wow. So it was a little bit of a column a column bee like we just are honoring you, please turn into liquid and fungus elsewhere absolutely makes sense. Okay, so you're getting your PhD right now. How did you narrow down your studies.
With great difficulty? I'm going to say so I did my masters at the same school that I'm at right now,
Memorial University of Newfoundlands and Lambrador. And for my masters, I was looking at sort of seventeenth century burial landscape development, as usually the short form of saying it, which is like how burial spaces were organized in communities, and then how that related to other communities, and if you can take that information and see if there were overarching trends like did everyone in the seventeenth century put all of
their bodies in the center of town? And for my PhD, I was like what were other countries doing in North America at the time, because I'd only really looked at
British sites at that point. But then also I was really interested in sort of looking at ways that these burial spaces that were established through colonialism, how you could see bodies represented in them that weren't just of white sellars, because that's sort of the narrative that we get fed that all the sellers were white, which they clearly weren't, and a lot of them were there against their will and being buried in spaces that weren't traditional to them.
And how how visible that is m or not visible?
Right?
What kinds of facts and history and narratives have you been learning about doing that.
I've been doing a lot of reading on the African burial g found in New York City and the community archaeology that was sounded like a little mismanage at the beginning, and then they brought in a lot of community partners to make it the National Park site that it is today.
Okay, this information is going to be rough, but it's terrible that more people don't know this. So thirty feet below Broadway in Manhattan, excavations uncovered a six acre burial plot with, according to the National Park Service, fifteen thousand intact skeletal remains of enslaved and free Africans who lived and worked in colonial New York dating from the sixteen
thirties to seventeen ninety five. So, in nineteen ninety three the remains were sent to Howard University in Washington, d C. To be examined by archaeology teams, and in two thousand and three they were reinterred in Manhattan in what was called a ceremonial cradle moving event. So the discovery rocked a lot of historical assumptions and it's caused historians to
rethink their understanding of enslavement in the area. So it's a reminder of just how much history is covered up and buried in many cases quite literally.
And so far it's been quite difficult to find any evidence from the seventeenth century, which is the time period I'm really interested in looking at showing black or indigenous people being buried in these spaces because a lot of times they didn't get grave markers, or they weren't the ones writing the records, so they're not the records we have.
Yeah, how far back do a lot of records go? How were they even kept? Are there books that have survived in either municipal records or in churchyardyard records?
Yeah, so there definitely are books. It helps if people were wealthy and had the money to record things properly, Like there's a book that Samuel de Champlain wrote about his trips to North America. It's just called I think Voyages.
So for those not well versed in their French colonists. Samuel D. Champlain was a French colonist. There you go. So he sailed across the Atlantic over or twenty times and founded Quebec. He was like Bocher, he's very cold.
And from that we have maps of Quebec city and we have maps of an island called Saint Croix from like sixteen thirteen, so we know exactly where on that island. In particular, they had a graveyard and they had a church,
which is amazing. And for other sites that I've worked on, we have no records all from the time period talking about that kind of thing, and yeah, if stuff survived well enough in perfect circumstances and or if the people were really important is often a good example of things that will have been kept from the seventeenth century, because that's four hundred years ago by this point. And one of my favorite documents is the diary of Samuel Seawall, who he was a judge and he was a participant
in the witch trials as well. But he kept a diary from It's on my desk from sixteen seventy four to seventeen twenty nine. He wrote about like all the funerals he attended, which was like all of them apparently, because there's hundreds of records in there. It's amazing.
Wow. What were the funerals like back then?
Well, Seawall was a Puritan, very very Puritan judge person, so he writes not too much detail. They didn't really have too much like pomp and ceremony in the earlier seventeenth century with that religion, so they would be like church bells, maybe people would like not even say a
prayer over the coffin. And then that started to change, and you can tell in his writings that he doesn't like that very much, and he'll be like, talking about a coffin going in the ground, tod be like that one had a cross on it, and I've never seen that before. It's really funny, Okay.
So I found a passage of this, hoping for some Darwin level emo laments, but rather it's stuff like October eleventh, sixteen ninety two. Went to the funeral of missus Sarah Oliver widow age seventy two years, buried in the New Burying Place, a very good, modest humble plane, liberal matron scarves and gloves. So I guess it was early October,
just under the falling golden leaves of a graveyard. And you know he wanted to write like, holy shit is pumpkin weather y'all, but he was like scarves and gloves, keep it low key. Come on, When did coffins and caskets get more and more elaborate.
That's not something that I study like specifically. I'm more of a landscape above the surface in that respect, But there are a lot of really interesting examples going back to like the sixteenth century of coffins. There's seventeenth century lead coffins that exist. I know. In the nineteenth century they started standardizing like coffin hardware, like the handles and the little like filigrees you could nail on the top
to decorate it. There would be catalogs of them. So it definitely went from a period where not everyone could afford one, or they're even be a communal coffin that would open up and put a person in the grave and then they'd take this like store coffin. Wow, yeah, those there is like a parish coffin. It was amazing you could borrow it. But like as the seventeenth and eighteenth century happened, it became something that was more affordable
for everyone. So you thought, start seeing a lot more like simple coffins or just like ornate coffins that have these objects on the outsides that are like mass produced.
Basically okay, so some fun trivia caskets are four sided and square, think of like a banana loaf, and coffins are hexagonal and they fit your shoulders and then they taper the feet and they look like, ah, scary. So why the trend hopping? Well, the violence and all the bloodshed of the Civil War changed the way that the funeral businesses sold their goods. So embalming took off because soldiers' bodies needed to last the trip back home, and
coffins were deemed kind of creepily body shaped. Suddenly people want to death to seem a little bit less deathy. Speaking of horrors, how old were you when you saw Poltergeist?
I have never seen polter get.
What how is that possible?
I know, I don't like a horror movies. I'm a very I think odd person who studies great.
I mean, do you know what it's about? Oh my god, Oh my god, Robin. It's about a family in the suburbs who buys a house and then they find out that they didn't properly move the graveyard. Hence they get Poulter goosted hardcore excellent, Like, how much of your work deals with moving gravestones or moving cemeteries? How often do they just move the gravestones and not the bodies A.
Lot of the time, Yeah, a lot of the time. If you weren't wealthy, your grave just stayed right there and they would just put some more dirt on top of it to sort of level out the gibbots in the ground. Often when you see records saying that they moved a graveyard, they just moved the headstones.
Oh my god, the bodies, the bodies, and you only move that sounds move that.
Okay. So that was from the film Poltergeist, co written by Steven Spielberg. And yes, tiny spoiler, but y'all have had thirty years to catch this flick, okay, so see it at your own risk. It's the worst. It's so scary. Also, they used real human skeletons in it, which the actors who were working with the skeletons didn't know until after. So zero out of ten do not like or support that practice. But yes, gravestones way easier to move than graves. No spoilers there, I mean.
Because most of the time.
So does that mean in certain parts of the world, particularly this newly colonized continent we call Merca, that as they were moving westward and maybe cities were getting more congested, they just built right on frickin' top of stuff.
Oh yeah, definitely.
Do archaeologists ever Are they ever called to construction sites? Is like a big oopsie. Definitely a lot of bodies down here.
Yeah, So like in commercial archaeology, if if there's a body found, we would get called for sure. That's not what the construction people want to hear. So there's sometimes you get stories of people like sort of cutting straight through graves, which is really unfortunate. But typically, like if a skull were to come out of a little bank of a ditch someone was digging with an excavator, everything
would stop. The police would be called first, is usually what happens, to make sure it's not homicide, and if it's deemed to be archaela, then the archaeologist would be called in and we would excavate out and make sure everybody was out of there before any more construction happened.
Wow. If whoever's running that excavator, I hope they, I don't know, burn some incense, get a lucky crystal, just to be like, hell, did everybody know that underneath Washington Square Park in Manhattan are twenty thousand unmoved bodies from what was once a potter's field or a graveyard for
the impoverished. Nobody told me that. Nobody said anything. People were just like, we've got the best bagels, and no one can say shit about it because there are bodies under our feet in like every city and it's just staggering. And I guess there's nothing anyone can do. But I hope that those people turned into fungus and worms and frogs and leaves, and that their bones don't mind being underneath all those sex in the city shoots and New Yorkers being like, hey, I'm walking on your graves. Well,
I'm from the West coast. So when I went back east, or if I've ever been to older cities where there are gravestones that are tilted and covered in moss, the one thing that really spooked me was this coffin sized depression in the ground that I feel like I didn't see so much on the west coast. Is that just the wooden box collapsing on itself. Is that what's going on?
Yeah, there'd be a number of things. The coffin falling it on itself definitely would cause some of the ground to slump down. A lot of it also could be from when they dug the grave, air gets mixed into the dirt, and when you put it back in the hole, as it sort of settles, it can definitely depress because you can never get quite all of it back in there.
In more modern cemeteries, we don't see that same type of depression because there's all these rules about having concrete lined grave chef, which is basically a vault underground, and its purpose is nothing to do with the burial itself. It is literally so that we don't get drivets in the grass, so that lawnmowers can have an easier time.
Oh my gosh, I didn't know burial vaults were even a thing. So they put your casket in a concrete casket so that your casket doesn't leave a casket shaped depression, just double bagging your actual ass right into heaven.
You know.
How have gravestones changed over the last several hundred years. I'm sure lawnmowers and John Deere mower tractors have changed the way that we mark our graves, right.
They definitely have. They don't have old stones at all. So in the seventeenth century in North American settlements, and the oldest settlements in North America from the British were
like Jamestown and Plymouth. And then in Canada we have Cupid's Plantation which was sixteen ten and Farlands from sixteen twenty one, and we see at Farryland examples of the oldest British gravestones in North America which were carved in the sixteen twenties on site from local slate, and they sort of reflect the style that was really common at the period in the UK, which is sort of like
a curved top and like all capital letters. And then as you go through the seventeenth century into the eighteenth century, you see a lot of mortality symbols they're called, which is like the skull with the wings and the hour glass and that kind of imagery that sort of really projects this idea of like your mortality to you, which
is exactly their point. They're supposed to remind the viewer who's standing in front of the grave that the person below them is dead and that they're going to die too, and sometimes they literally say that on them helpful.
I mean, you know, live for today. I guess it's saying like get in a claire, you know, tell the neighbor you're in love with them, whatever.
Those really famous epitaphs that have lines like as I am now, so shall you be kind of thing, which are nice and spooky for spooky season. But then it's sort of it's called like the softening of the ideas of death. So you see these like the skulls become sort of like cherubs, and sometimes they're like pictures of the deceased themselves kind of represented with wings, and that's supposed to be like the soul going to heaven, and you get like more plant life on there and basically
less less morbid pictures. And then in the nineteenth century there's like willow trees and urns and the sort of romanticizing.
I'm always so curious how long ago in Europe did they start using two stones.
So I can really only answer this for the UK in Ireland, but the use of grave markers definitely goes back.
I mean, what we think of as a gravestone today probably came around in like the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and it could have been earlier, but we don't really have too much evidence from before the Reformation when it changed from the Catholic to the Anglican Church, and lots of stuff was wrecked, basically the monasteries were all shut and smashed up, a lot of monuments were defaced and destroyed.
So there isn't the idea that there could be older traditions of like what we expect to be a gravestone, But before that there were like they're called effigies, like a big carving of a person laying on the ground, a big slabs that date to the medieval period called ledgers that still exist today, and like larger monuments than crosses, and like gesturing as the shape of it, like a big mound burial and stuff. So it's definitely a tradition marking where and in every country, marking where a grape
is is often quite common. But what we think of as a gravestone today is sort of like a sixteen seventeenth century thing, and of course.
This varies according to era and religious rights and even soil temperature and composition, and some religious practices like Judaism, traditionally call for a simple wooden coffin or casket. Other rights forego the box and just go for a shroud. In some Islamic burials, the grave site is traditionally marked with a border so as to protect it for many
foot tread and then. Unlike historical Islamic and Jewish death rituals, Hinduism typically involves cremation, although some sex favor burial and sometimes sitting upright in a meditation pose, which I'll be honest, I think that's kind of a neat way to do it. Nobody asked me though, But this is all, of course
incredibly general. But my point is death care varies by region and by history and by culture, and the more we appreciate the meaning and the intention behind the customs, maybe the more we'll just appreciate being on the flip side of the grass, as my dad says, just where we are today, just still living and breathing, making the most things, telling the people that we love that we love them. Now, before I start crying too much, let's
change the topic to typology. Were there specific fonts that were just used or reserved for tombstones or was it really standard back in the day.
I don't think any were reserved for the gravestunes themselves that they're There were booklets that gravestone carvers use to be like these are the scripts that I can do kind of thing, And once they started printing stuff like that, they were getting a little bit more standardized, and in what you would see on the gravestone, like when you see a script with saraffs on it, the way that they would carve these letters was a little bit similar to the way that you'd expect them to be written.
So my wonderful friend Colin Perry of the Fanatology episode about Death and Dying also studied typography and she created her own font called Mausoleum, and she sells pens that say in that font, I don't have time for bullshit, because really none of us do. So Cole echoes her love of cemeteries, and she told me or text that when people visit a cemetery they often feel more present
and thoughtful about life. So stroll through one and listen to a bird and enjoy the breeze, or get nerdy about San Serah lettering, And if you want to fall headfirst into a post mortem font hole, check out Monument Letteringcenter dot com, which studies and preserves monument typography so many type faces. It's a wealth of information on how type and lettering has evolved as our technology has. Also real sad that there's a cool cemeterium all away from
you right now. And you know, when let's say colonizers go into a new place, are they doing anything in terms of indigenous burial grounds or practices, any adoptions of it, any kind of respectful hands off. Has your work uncovered anything about that intersection of colonists and indigenous burials.
I wouldn't say they were very respectful.
Unfortunately, that was going to be my guest.
Yeah, So a lot of the time there'd be like missionaries going in and sort of trying to eradicate a lot of indigenous traditions in Labrador. The Moravian missionaries arrived in the seven seventeenth and eighteenth century, I believe, and they were sort of changing a lot of burial practices, and I don't believe they were adopting any of the
indigenous practices themselves. There's a mission a Jesuit mission near Quebec City that was established specifically to christianize the Indigenous people, and they had within the palisade of their site a burial ground for converted Indigenous people, which is something I'm going to be looking at in more detail because that's a space that was separating them in depth and sort of like marking these people that that wasn't their burial tradition as a separate group now whether or not that's
something they wanted.
How is the techology community? Do you share resources or do you take rubbings? Do you take extensive photos? Are there databases where someone's looking for, Hey, I'm looking to find out a little bit more about this person or this site where you share information.
Cemetery Twitter as we call it, is a really great community. I was like, one thing that COVID has been good for and the Internet has been good for overall, is networking online. Like a lot of people that study graveyard stuff aren't anywhere near me, so being able to connect with them over the internet has been great. So like people will be like, oh, I'm looking for other examples
of this type of gravestone. But there's also databases like find a Grave and billion graves that are all online, and those are sort of like community driven uploading that we don't take rubbings. Rubbings are very bad for the conservation of historic stones.
Oh, tell me more about I had no idea.
Yeah, So it used to be super common. It was like something that people did all the time. But after a while, when you push on the stone that much, it is actually physically wearing away pieces of the stone, especially when it's something really soft and a couple hundred years old, like a marble or a limestone or a sandstone. There's an example in Sleepy Hollow, New York, at the
old Dutch Reform Church. I think it's called the grave of Katerine vent Keel, who was possibly the inspiration for the character in the Sleepy Hollow book.
Oh wow.
Her grave used to be pretty legible. It's sandstone, so people would go because it's possibly like this literary connection and take rubbings of it. And the state of the gravestone if you look it up now it is almost completely illegible, literally just from rubbings, which is really unfortunate.
I had no.
Idea, yeah, As I always encourage people to like understand that pushing on it couldn't do damage, and that's something we want to avoid, like going forward as a as a graveyard community.
Now I have done or I had a rubbing done of an ancestor's gravestone that was hard to find for my dad. Do family members ever do like a one off? Is it kind of is it discouraged for really noteworthy touristy type of attractions or if you've got one of like a family member, is that okay?
It's okay, already have it, of course, but I wouldn't recommend, like going forwards, that people do that for any gravestones. Some stones will weather much better than other ones. Like if the gravestone is granite, it's not going to be too much of an issue, but it's more for like these old historic ones. Pushing on marble headstones too hard can break them in half unfortunately, so doing a rubbing on it can do some significant damage, which sucks because I look really cool.
Right Well, okay, in old cemeteries, how come a lot of the gravestones are like crooked teeth going every which way? Are they sinking into the ground? Are raccoons vandalizing them? What's happening?
It would be much cuter. If it was a raccoon, I would love that. So some of them are literally sinking straight down. Some are because the coffin has collapsed or because the body has decomposed, the ground shifts, they start falling over. A lot of it depends on the style of gravestone as well. Where these older styles that went they were quite long, like what you see on the surface, goes down into the ground like two feet.
I find those ones to hold up a lot better actually, and more modern styles will be like stuck in sort of a key we call it, like they go in
a couple inches and it's just this little base. And those are often set on big blocks of concrete underground, and the problem with that is it's so heavy the dirt underneath it isn't going to support it forever, and then that starts to sink, and then the whole stone goes down, and then people like me have to come in and dig a gigantic lot of concrete out of the ground and replace it with something that's actually going to hold the gravestone up for more than like fifty years.
Oh wow, Yeah. Have you ever been in a cemetery or graverard doing the work and just been at all overwhelmed by mortality or by history or by a particular person's story. Does the work ever get to on a personal level.
Definitely. Sometimes. The first excavation I was involved with where we were exhooming human remains because there was a development going in. I had a dream that night about the skull that I had exzoomed that day, and that took a minute to like consider and stop and remember that these are people, and they have ancestors in the area probably, and that's like something you need to be really aware of when you're working with burials, for sure.
Have you ever gotten creeped out at all? Or is it just purely science and history for you? Are you able to walk through a cemetery after dark and be like, it's just a place.
I feel like it's just a place because it's something that like everybody is going to end up in a place like this, So to me, it feels like a really natural place to go hang out, I guess, but I probably wouldn't walk through it after dark because I'm definitely a whim right, yeah.
Same, Do you think you're going to be buried in a cemetery or do you want to be ashes, they get launched into space. Your plan, my plan.
I remember hearing in elementary school, which really just tells you that this is exactly what kind of job I needed to be doing. Someone said that your ashes could be put in a concrete block and it could be put in the ocean to help grow coral reefs, and I thought that was the coolest idea ever. And I was like, I want to be in like a blue orb in the ocean, So I probably want to be cremated.
And I keep telling my husband I want to be cremated in an open air pyre on a beach, but that is not legal, so I guess that's not going to happen.
Think it.
But there is a process called acquamation or alkaline hydrolysis, which is also known as water cremation, which is a little more environmentally friendly than fire cremation, and it is legal in a couple provinces and a couple of states now, so I think, like, that's probably the route I would want to go.
Okay, I discussed this in the Santatology episode, but the TLDR short version too long didn't read of alkaline hydrolysis is a metal the cylindrical chamber is slashing full of warm water an alkaline lie and you you're in there too, and then you kind of dissolve into a syrupy liquid and then you get flushed down the sewer system, which is the same place your blood goes if you get embalmed, no, biggie, same place your burrito goes. Five minutes ago. It was
part of your body. It's not a big deal. So after hydrolysis, some of your bones, though, might remain in the chamber, and then those are ground up into dust. So think of it as kind of like a final worm bath as you tuck into your eternal bedtime. Maybe grow some sea polyps on yourself after I don't know, it's your life, and by life I mean death. If you had a concrete block in the ocean, would you want it etched with like your name and like a pithy epitaph.
I hadn't actually thought about that, but I feel like that would be an awesome idea.
Yeah, I mean, just in case anyone ever for some reason is studying coral and they're like, oh my god, this is rob and lacys.
Yeah, throwing that's awesome.
How do you feel around Halloween when people set up prop graveyards on their lawns, does it ever make you do double takes? Like oh, what's that cemetery? And then you're like, oh, man, that's just the Robertson's front lawn.
I mean, I love it, but I'll definitely be the person walking around being like that's not accurate.
What kind of what is it? What's a Halloween amateur our mistake when we're putting up fake graveyards.
Well, just like when it says like just rip across the stone or something, I'll be like that that would just be in the top, where like that would be only on the bottom. And I've actually seen very few gravestones that actually have rip on them. Really, I'm like it should say this other thing.
What are some things that you've seen in historical maybe a little bit creepy tombstones.
Anything that says like here lieth the body of or like beneath the stone lies the mortal remains. Anyone's like that or.
My favorite, Yeah, that's already that's pretty dark and spooky. That immediately makes me think of a corpse for sure, But in the respectful way, is there a graveyard that you really really want to go to it's on your own bucket list.
Oh yes, I would love to go. I'm going to butcher the name because I don't know any French at all. I'm a terrible Canadian. Pierre Lechez. I think beer luses, Okay, something like that.
Beer lush is.
It's in Paris and it is technically the first garden cemetery in the world, and it's supposed to be amazing. Lots of important people are buried there, but it's like the start of the rural cemetery movement globally, so it'd be really exciting to see that.
One for sure got to go there. Can I ask you questions from listeners?
Absolutely?
Okay, they know you're coming on. They've submitted hundreds of questions. So before that, some words from ology sponsors who make it possible to donate to a charity of Robin Stores, which is in unis F Canada's COVID nineteen vaccine initiative to provide vaccines to countries that haven't been able to get enough for their citizens. So let's get those burial rates down by getting some vaccine rates up. Literally life saving work. So there'll be a link to that in
the show notes, and that donation was made possible by sponsors. Okay, let's dig deep, let's dish the dirt as we answer your tafyological questions. Okay, Paul Smith wants to know what's the funniest epitaph you've ever seen? Have you ever seen one that made you chuckle?
I didn't see it in person. I read it in a book and I wish I had a copy of it exactly here I can try and remember the whole thing. It was a joke about these gravestones that would be like basically being kind of pompous about the burial space. And there was one that was like, oh, I remember the whole thing. Here lie the chancel door. Here lie I because I'm poor. The further in the more you pay. But here Lie I as warm as they nice.
That's a that's a really beautifully thought out fuck you to classism.
Yeah, it's amazing.
Yeah, like a post mortem treatise on the ills of classism and death is the great equalizer. So some patrons had durability questions, including Meghan McLean, Margaret ibaccher Rini, Carol Wolf from Olivia, Flick, Asia Yeager Lung, Ox, Grace Robischow, Mary Liby, and Meghan Stinkle wants to know what kinds of stones are air quotes best for longevity of a gravestone.
Definitely granite, which is like the most common thing you see in North America today. It weather is very slowly. That's what the Egyptians use for a lot of statues. They look great. Your gravestone will look great too. I also really like Welsh plate that is very durable material and it's very clean looking. I don't like all the speckles in granite. Sometimes the Welsh plate is also really good.
Yeah, good to know. I love that. You're just like, here's the answer you.
I've thought about that one.
Heathcliff the Cat wrote in to say history of Zinky's When did zinc headstones first become popular and how prevalent are they today? Do people still use them?
I don't actually know when they started being used specifically. I know it was in the nineteenth century and they were mostly made on the Eastern Sea board.
Okay, I looked up and yes, you can still spot zinc tombstones by this really characteristic bluish white color, kind of like the light sapphire tones of a glacier. Think of that and according to the Tomb Tone a better place Death and Burial in nineteenth century Ontario by Susan Smart, the main zinc headstone producer in North America was Monumental Bronze Company, Bridge Park, Connecticut. Shout out to I guess Bridge Park, Connecticut, and that company opened up in eighteen seventy four.
They had a secondary factory in Saint Thomas, Ontario, which is near London, Ontario. For a while they were it's been moderately popular. You do see one or two in graveyards, sometimes a couple more than that, but like I can think of one in all of Saint John's, Newfoundland where I live. So they were like things that happened, but they aren't the most prevalent type of gravestone from that period. But they do hold up beautifully there. They just look stunning. Wow.
Do you call them zinkies or is that just a heathcliff the cat.
No, people, I don't call them that because I think it's it sounds funny, but that's like one of the nicknames for it. They're like zinc is the material they're made of. But historically they were called white bronze because they were trying to make them sound very like high lass and fancy, but they are made of think that's where think You's come from.
Oh, I think it's I think it sounds kind of cute. It also sounds like a party drug. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna lie to you.
It does a little bit.
Yea, yeah, like dude, he was rolling on Zankees and uh anyway, Emma Fitzpatrick, I thought this was an awesome question. So awesome it was on a lot of mine, such as Earl of Gramulkin, Leanna Schuster, Jessica Ward, Polly Roberts, first time question asker Lydia, Katie Coast, Hannah Dent, Racial Kasha, and Casey Kenton, many of whom wanted to know about grave makeovers, or they were referencing someone on TikTok named Lady Taffo's. So yes, Emma Fitzpatrick asked, have you seen
the gravestone cleaning tiktoks? If so, how do you feel about them? I've heard people say they're bad because of chemicals and increased weathering, but what's the truth.
So I actually recently gave a conference paper about the Gristi cleaning TikTok.
You came to the right person.
So the lot of people that are doing it are doing it correctly. They're using what looks like a chemical the non ionic biological solution, the main one in North America is called D two biological solutions. So what that is is a THH neutral cleaner that won't introduce any salts or acids to the stone while safely removing environmental
staining and stuff like like in growth. And then it also sits in the stone and inhibits further like in growth and staining for like several years after you use it. But what I think the problem with the TikTok videos is that they're so short and a lot of the times they don't have words in them, or they don't have enough time or space in the caption. I think the TikTok caption length is quite short. They aren't able to really explain what it is they're doing and what
they're using and how they're using it safely. And we've noticed, like me and other people in sort of history and cemetery archaeology have noticed that throughout like the lockdown, people have been seeing videos like that and being like, that's a cool thing I can do while we're all trapped at home and maybe not knowing exactly what they're doing going out and causing some damage, unfortunately to gravestones. So I think I would want to say, like, those videos
are cool, they're really good. I've done a couple of HI talks. I'm not very good at it, but it's so difficult to explain exactly what you're doing. So I would definitely say, like, if you want to go clean gravestones, get training from someone who is a grave stone conservator. Email me I'm a gravestone conservator, and get the information and then get permission from the fight that you want
to clean up. Because if you don't have permission from the people that are managing that graveyard, you should not be there, got it.
So don't like roll up with an sospad in a bucket of place. You should just go to town.
Absolutely, do not do either of those.
Don't do that.
It's made me cringe.
Yeah, I had a feeling. Speaking of dos and don'ts of the dead. Cosmo wants to know is there any graveyard etiquette most people don't know, Like if you're walking through a cemetery should you try to walk on perimeters, so not over the graves.
I don't personally see a problem with walking over graves, but I know a lot of people find that for themselves is very disrespectful. I know people that will apologize if they step on a grave. I do try to avoid walking through lots that have like gravel and sort of the curbing around them. On those ones, I typically, unless I have to go look at the gravestone, will walk around them. But if it's a grass lawn area, it's really difficult to avoid stepping on a grave occasionally.
So just be respectful while you're in the space as best you can.
Basically mm hm Okay, good to know. Don't pee on one unless you have a personal vendetta, in which case that's between you and the dead. Probably don't pe in idea, it's probably talk to therapists. Okay. So long Ox wants to know, is there a go to source for decoding the symbology of Victorian gravestones all those vases and dogs o coachant and lamps and plants. Long ooc says that they need a website or a pamphlet or a decoder ring.
A decoder ring would be sick. I would love that there are a lot of resources online, and there's a lot of different books that will talk about the different sort of iconography and stuff. A lot of it you sort of get from reading these older books like Henrietta Forbes Gravestones of New England and the Men Who Made Them is like literally the start of a lot of graveyard scholarship in North America. And she does talk about the symbology a little bit, but yeah, I can't think
of a specific resource online. I would avoid ones that talk about Puritan gravestone art because that's not a thing.
Oh yeah, they were very very minimalist, right.
Yeah, they were either minimalists or you hear that terminology applied to like the skulls and stuff specifically. But it's been disproven that was like a theory in like the seventies, but it's been disproven that that mortality like symbology is directly related to the Puritans. And it comes up a lot because of this like old study that was done and popularized it. So you see it a lot online and I have a personal pandetic and it's.
Good to know and speaking of that kind of symbology, jess One had the question, are there any trends in gravestone imagery in the last decade? Are there jokes about millennials putting QR codes on their gravestones or having little TVs with memes playing, But is there anything real in terms of changing styles.
Yeah. So a lot of graveyards and cemeteries will have rules about the style of headstone you can have. They'll be like, you can only have these materials or it has to be one of these specific shapes because they're trying to like keep it looking cohesive. But what that allows is people to do a lot more creative things with like laser etching pictures that are more personal to them than this like stock set of images that they
used to get like a couple hundred years ago. So we get to see a lot more like portraits of people photos. I saw one recently that was like someone's cabin definitely, and there was like a boat in the water, and you could tell that that was probably a place that was really important to them. So that's I think the biggest trend that you see on the last decade or two is like a lot more personalization in the headstones.
I have seen more pictures and it really does personalize it and make you reflect on your own life as well.
It's beautiful.
Victrona wants to know what's the most interesting ritual you've come across. Example, placing a small polished stone on top of the headstone is popular in Judaism. Anything like that.
Hmm, that's a tougher one.
Yeah.
How do you feel about fake flowers on gravestones? I have mixed feelings.
I don't mind them. They do last a bit longer, but also plastic.
I know that's how I feel too. And of course Cole and Perry, herself a death worker and president of the Board of Overseers at historic Lynden Grove Cemetery in Covington, Kentucky, wanted to toss in a question Cole and Perry death expert panatologists. She says, Okay, gravestones at her cemetery, which she works as like a conservator up two, only about five thousand of our twenty thousand permanent residents have headstones.
Some of the people without headstones today likely had wooden headstones. Was that actually a thing? Wooden headstones?
Yeah, so a lot of like and we can see this archaeologically. A lot of the time, people would be marked with maybe a cross or just a little tablet or something, and what that shows up as in the archaeological record is a post pole. So where that piece of wood has decomposed in place, that changes the composition of the sediment that it's in a lot of the time when there's unmarked graves, maybe they were unmarked originally.
Maybe they had a marker that was biodegradable and has gone for like one hundred years or more.
That's interesting. I mean, if you think about how many people probably also just dealt with surprise deaths and did something kind of just with whatever they had. I'm sure that there are a lot of unmarked out there as well.
Absolutely, gravestones are very expensive. They weren't and they weren't cheap too hundred years ago as well.
That was actually going to be my final listener question. Several people, including Val McKelvey, Alisa Williams Pears, Rachel Phelps, Julie McDonald, and Alia Myers all wanted to know how much have things changed in terms of cost. Why are they so expensive? Rachel asked, are there any stats on how many families opt out of burial marking or plaques for reasons, including costs or besides costs. So, yeah, tell me a little bit about how class and expense comes
into play when it involves your final resting place. If no one built a condo on top of you.
That's the goal. Yeah, So it definitely is something that you can see was based on your economic status. When you have an unmarked grave or an unmarked burial ground, a pauper's grave, they would be unmarked, they would be marked with something like a cross, or wouldn't wooden board or something. And then the fancier a monument is the more money either the person had who died or the family or whoever their benefactor was they put this monument up.
So that goes from like the little tiny like tablet ones with just a couple of lines on them. The more types of fronts you had on a gravestone, the more expensive it was.
Oh it costs more because of the parent, Yeah, rightfully.
So when the bigger, like the more pieces went into it. If it was a ledger, which is like the big flat thing on the ground, or a table tomb which had legs, or a chest tomb which had walls as well as a liam, you can just tell how much money people were putting into it, and a lot of that was because people wanted to show how much like look at our material care for our deceased loved ones. It was like almost a way of showing off. And you can kind of people do that today as well.
And some aspects of the funit the funeral industry, you're kind of predatory, unfortunately, and people get told like, oh, but like you would want to honor this person this way, so you should splash out and pay like five thousand dollars for this gigantic granite, thaying that maybe you can't afford.
Yeah, Gracie Zurin phrased it are elaborate gravestones, a power play of wealthy families. Well yeah, but it might also be just the industry pulling at your very raw open heart strings too. Yeah. And last questions, I are actually I'm going to ask this one super quick. Case I just saw Casey Wendy's longtime listener. First time question asker says, my husband showed me a gravestone locally that's actually a
hidden chamber. You flip it over and it holds I guess contraband have you ever seen a gravestone.
Like this, I require photos. That's amazing. I've never seen one like that that. I have heard that the that the zinkies were used during Prohibition era to hide alcohol and then like as a drop point to sell it to people, And I would die to find one unintended.
Maybe, I mean my assessment that it sounds like a party drug not that far off. Now, something's got to suck about what you do. What is the worst part of your job or being a tofologist tathologist. What's the most annoying or bummer thing about your work?
I mean, it's not like it's not super cheery. Everyone we work with is dead. I have a good time usually with that, but sometimes you're like, wow, this is like especially with stories like Robert, but really like takes you back a step and consider the type of work you're doing, just like what it means to people. But also when we're doing Graystone conservation, it's a lot of unglamorous, heavy listing of really heavy rops that don't want to
come out of the ground. And I mean a lot of archaeology is digging holes and this is no different and it's incredibly tiring.
Sometimes I bet do you bother with manicures or are you like, you know what that's.
Not so nail polish can come off if you scratch it on marble. It can stand the marble. So no nail paint during the field season.
Oh good too. What about your favorite thing? What do you love about? Gravestones, cemeteries, all of that.
All of it.
Being able to work in these sites that have so much history, especially in smaller communities, people are so invested in their local heritage and being able to sort of contribute to the knowledge that people have about a community's history, about individuals, and just like being able to be involved in the continuation of protecting that heritage for the future. And when we repair gravestones, they're often stones that have been neglected, they've fallen over, no one has seen the
names on them for ages. So being able to sort of clean them and put them back up and have them back in the public eye like they were supposed to be originally is a really nice feeling.
Yeah.
What are your Halloween plans?
Ooh?
My husband and I are currently making Tuscan raider masks nice out of cardboard and three D printed their spiky things that come out of their heads. And my friend is having a pumpkin carving party, so lovely.
No graveyards though, huh.
Actually the Talk Death, which is a Canadian death positive group, they do a online scavenger hunt in cemetery, so you like go to a cemetery and then at a certain time they release a bunch of like scavenger hunt things. You have to send them photos and then there's prize packs that we'll probably be doing that as well, and like everybody should participate in that too, because it's oh.
That's great. I'm sure you just gave a lot of people ideas of what they're doing this Halloween.
I hope so so I won it last year, so.
Like, whoa, watch out, watch out, you're going down. You're going six feet under. Also, uh, step up people, step up your cardboard headstone game in your front yard this year. Step it up. Spoiler bigger words GTFO with the rip. Thank you so much for doing this. I love that I now know a techologist.
Yeah, no problem, Thank you for having me.
So ask smart folks simpleton questions because they are just faults of information. And you can follow Robin at Graveyard Underscore Arch on Twitter and Instagram. Her website is Spade inthegrave dot com, and she and her husband Ian Petty have a gravestone conservation website at Blackcatseemeterypreservation dot WordPress dot com. So those links will be up at my site alliwarn dot com, slash Ology, slash Tefology, and we are at all Je's on Twitter at Instagram. I'm Ali word with
one L on both. Thank you to Aaron Talbert who admins the Ologies podcast Facebook group, with help from Bonnie Dutch and Shannon Faltis of the podcast You Are That. They also help with merch. Emily White of the Wordery makes our transcripts and Caleb Patten bleeps him. Noel Dilworth handles scheduling and so much more. Susan Hale is on the other side of some merch emails and ologies business. Stephen Ray Morris and Sigurodriguez Thomas are working on newsmologies
for your kiddos coming out very soon. Nick Norburn made the theme music. Right hand man Hunk Jarrett Sleeper of mind Jam Media put it all together while I am on the other side of a continent in this case this hotel in Boston for a few days shooting for CBS. Oddly also not very far from where my ward ancestors were buried in the seventeen hundreds, will be shooting two miles away from them tomorrow. Bananas. Now, if you stick
around through the credits, I tell you something spooky. Two things, all right, Okay, Jarrett and I drove past Forest Lawn Cemetery in Burbank last week and we both spotted a frickin' casket abandon mid burial with the top off on the lawn, just strewn about the lawn ten feet away. It was almost dark out, there was no one working on it. We freaked out. We were driving past, Really did you see that?
Did you see that?
We wanted to go back, but we were late to see dune. Anyway, we agreed, the one thing you don't want to take its own top off is a coffin. Then, in researching this, I realized it was probably the burial vault being put in place the day before a funeral. That way a casket could be placed in it the next day, which then became not creepy but sad. Also, when I was a kid, I had these recurring cemetery nightmares, and I would have these anxiety attacks just driving past graveyards,
and my dreams sometimes involved caskets flying open. Somehow I got over it. I think I had to go to like an open casket funeral of a relative, and I just realized everyone in a cemetery is just someone's relative. But that being said, I've watched a lot of I think you should leave in the last few months, and I don't know if I've ever left harder than the coffin flop sketch. It was everything my brain fears. Uh
and wow, the catharsis anyway. Happy Halloween, exund spoop to Ober, Bye bye hacadermatology, hobiology, ordo zoology, lithology, new technology, meteorology, people of paratology, nathology, seriology, selenology.
What do you want on your two stone?
Pepperoni and cheese,