The young, beautiful and rich widow Giertrud Birgitte Bodenhoff was buried in Assistens cemetery, Copenhagen on 23 July 1798 but was she dead? Family stories claimed she had been buried alive but unconscious (skindød in Danish) from an excess of opium. They suggest that when grave robbers opened her coffin to steal her jewellery, she woke up and they killed her to conceal their crime. An exhumation on the 9 January 1953 took place to investigate the stories. […]

This paper will be delivered as an illustrated talk, using contemporary and historical images of St George’s Field and images of the artwork I have made in response to it. St George’s Field is now a disused cemetery within the grounds of Leeds University. Using Barthes Camera Lucida as a theoretical starting point and an interdisciplinary approach, it will contain an overview of St George’s Fields rich historical and social narrative and  will concentrate upon its transformation from farmland to cemetery to public park during the last two hundred years.  […]

In 2016, the Scottish Government updated the laws governing burial and cemetery management. The previous primary legislation, drafted in 1855, enshrined the ability to purchase burial rights in perpetuity. The 2016 act enables grave reuse and seeks to clarify procedures for burial authorities to deal with ‘ownerless’ graves and gravestones, many of which are historic in date. Local communities tend to perceive historic burial grounds as different from their ‘modern’ counterparts by virtue not only of their age but also by their incapacity to provide new burial space and it can be argued that this has resulted in a more ready acceptance of their greenspace and heritage values. […]

At the end of the Second World War the next of kin of American service men and woman who had been killed during the conflict, had a choice to either have the body repatriated or for the remains to be permanently interred in one of 14 Military Cemeteries and Memorials that would be created by the American Battle and Monuments Commission (ABMC). This paper draws on the memoirs of Major General Thomas North who in 1946 was appointed by General Eisenhower as Secretary of the ABMC with responsibility of overseeing the development of these new military cemeteries.  […]

This research explores the space of the cemetery and the importance of its role within today’s consumer culture in Germany. It acknowledges the cemetery as a heterotopia (Foucault, 1967/1984) – a material site which embodies a multiplicity of meanings that attach to a range of functions beyond “the disposal of human remains” (Rugg, 2000:260). Previous research has identified cemeteries as spaces of connectedness (Francis et al., 2000), of re-negotiation of the deceased’s identity (Francis et al., […]

The expansion of London during the early part of the nineteenth century prompted the opening of the first wave of proprietary cemeteries such as Kensal Green, Highgate and Abney Park. These were followed by Burial Board cemeteries established under the Burial Acts 1852 and 1853, along with a further raft of private burial grounds in the 1870s. However, after intensive usage for around sixty to seventy years it would be the interwar period when a third wave would emerge as burial grounds were nearing capacity; […]

Britain holds many early Victorian burial grounds that were built as a private speculation to house the dead of the growing and modernising cities. To mention them today is to conjure up images of un-maintained memorials falling into decay and submerged in undergrowth, while the site is neglected and bankrupt. A commonly-accepted wisdom is that this state came about as a result of a fundamentally-flawed business model. This argument assumes that the success of a privately-run cemetery was premised on a continuous supply of virgin land, […]

Detailed study of the St John’s Cemetery, Parramatta, New South Wales, reveals the rapid development of a regulated system of interment in a defined burial ground physically separated from the church. This is in sharp contrast to the first burial grounds in Sydney, now built over, which continued the British tradition of interment around Anglican places of worship and a pattern of overcrowding. Sydney was founded in early 1788, with Parramatta following by the end of that year as a farming centre. […]

Many people today imagine that cemetery tourism is a new phenomenon, part of the ‘heritage industry’. But some nineteenth-century cemeteries were intended as tourist attractions right from their earliest days, not just as places for the bereaved to mourn. Visitors would be improved by reading epitaphs, admiring the art of the memorials, and escaping the noise and pollution of the metropolis. Guidebooks were published and some cemeteries became so popular that ways had to be found to keep visitors out. […]

The National Association of Cemetery Superintendents (NACS) was founded in 1913 as a professional association to improve British cemetery facilities, benefit bereaved families and advance the training, quality and recruitment of cemetery managers. With the increase in provision of local authority crematoria, the NACS changed its title to the National Association of Cemetery and Crematorium Superintendents in 1932. (Its current title the Institute of Cemetery and Crematorium Management.) Whilst the NACCS was organised regionally as well as nationally, […]

Cemetery literature to date has consistently overlooked the importance of gravediggers, which is surprising considering that their activities mediate and shape many aspects of funerary history and archaeology. Full-body burial has been the preferred mode of disposal of the dead in the British Isles from at least the introduction of Christianity in the seventh century AD, up to the mid-twentieth century. Yet we know virtually nothing about gravedigging practice. Since the 1980s, the process of gravedigging has become increasingly mechanized, […]

The University of Luxembourg’s research project titled “Material Culture and Spaces of Remembrance”, co-funded by the FNR (National Research Fund), focuses on the spatial and material attributes of graves in Luxembourg’s Greater Region (Luxembourg and its neighbouring country regions and provinces of Germany, Belgium and France). The project is three-pronged focusing on (1) data gathering and spatial analysis, (2) history and (3) qualitative social research. As the project is in its initial phase, we want to outline the “necrogeography” of a small nation state and to present preliminary results and research question in context of our project.

Until the 1980s, visual media coverage of funerals in the UK tended to be restricted to high-profile ceremonies. As far as can be ascertained, the first documentary that included an ‘ordinary’ funeral can be traced to ‘Walk Down Any Street.’ Made in 1965, this fly-on-the-wall production with minimal commentary was filmed in south-east London and captures a family during two contrasting rites of passage: a funeral and then a birthday. The film commences with the former and shows the family viewing the deceased in the home before the cortege leaves for the cemetery; […]

A focus on the physical context of the cemetery has both shaped and restricted the way in which Spanish cemetery sculpture has been understood until now. My paper considers the cemetery as a changing and expanding exhibition space with unique characteristics, in which the sculptor’s identity was erased in favour of the deceased, and in which most viewers of the sculptures were not predominantly motivated by artistic appreciation. I explore how sculptors sought to compensate for this by exhibiting these monuments in more conventional art spaces, […]

In 1989 Alan Macfarlane posited that ‘In answer to the question, “What did people feel about death in this period and in what way did the feelings change?,” an obvious source of evidence is the poetry of the period.’ Taking as its starting point the assumption that literature can operate as a source of information about attitudes to death and burial practice, this paper will argue that William Godwin’s 1809 Essay on Sepulchres is positioned at the interstice of war, […]

The municipal cemetery of Mount Saint Lawrence opened on the 29th of March 1849. Located on the periphery of the then city, the fourteen-acre site initially proved unattractive and the ‘new’ cemetery had to wait until 1855 for its first burial. Burials gradually increased over the ensuing decades, averaging at about 600 per year from the 1880s to the 1950s. The cemetery eventually became the key burial place for all classes of society in Limerick and as such mirrors the social geography of the city over the last 150 years. […]

In the early nineteenth century, the cemetery of Père Lachaise was perhaps the most famous in the world. One of the sights of Paris, it was claimed to be the model for numerous private cemeteries which were being established in England. Indeed, some have seen it as the impulse for the whole private cemetery movement. But isn’t it odd that, given the traditional antipathy between the two countries – and so soon after the Napoleonic Wars – the English were happy to openly model their cemeteries on a French example? […]

My previous work examined the usage patterns and social characteristics of those interred in the catacombs at Highgate Cemetery in London. It revealed a definite rise and fall of catacomb usage in the middle of the nineteenth century and how it was influenced by legislation. Most users of Highgate loculi were prosperous families from the local area, with a surprising number of deposits being moved to other locations. My recent work looks at Brompton Cemetery, the last of the ‘Magnificent Seven’ garden cemeteries. […]

This paper draws from a qualitative research study that investigated the irreversible incorporation of human cremation ashes into a wide range of objects and tattoos in British contemporary practices. Referred to collectively as ‘ashes creations’ the practices in the research included human cremation ashes incorporated or transformed into: jewellery, glassware, diamonds, paintings, tattoos, vinyl records, photograph frames, pottery, and mosaics. The study explored the experiences of two groups of people who participate in these practices: people who make and sell ashes creations and people who commission ashes creations incorporating the cremation ashes of their loved ones. […]

Excavations within the modern cemetery of Assistens Kirkegård in Copenhagen created a new and more tangible aspect to the cemetery environment. 1000 burials and cremations and any surviving gravestones dating from the 1800s to the 1980s were recorded and analysed before the bodies were reburied.  The archaeological perspective includes the above-ground materiality and extends three-dimensionally into the below-ground contexts giving a rare integrated insight into funerary material culture of this period. The gravestones and plot decorations are interpreted together with the surviving burials highlighting differences in public and private material expressions of death combined with chronological change. […]