Grave Markers Research Articles

Function and Meaning of Symbolism in the Memorial Ornaments of Munson and Lyman Tomb Ornaments: A Semiotic Study

This article is entitled “Function and Meaning of Symbolism in the Memorial Ornaments of Munson and Lyman Tomb Ornaments: A Semiotic Study.” The study aimed to describe the from, function, and meaning of symbolism in the Memorial of Munson and Lyman. The theory used to analyze the data was Charles Sander Pierce semiotic theory, using a descriptive qualitative method. The results of the study showed that there were 21 types of from, function, and meanings of symbols on the Munson and Lyman tomb ornaments , Namely : Relief ornaments of the SS Duncan ship & Relief ornaments of Mederika Ship, Releif ornaments of the merchant, Relief ornamen of Munson and Lyman meeting with Datuk Mangkuto, Relief ornaments of barter activies, Relief Ornaments of Martonun, Manduda, dan Paragat, Releif ornaments of going home from the garden, planting rice, Relief ornaments of Munson and Lyman showing the Bible as a sign language and the king’s guard bringing Munson and Lyman to the king, Relief ornaments of king panggalamei asking Munson and Lyman, Relief ornaments of Munson and Lyman in Uning-uningi, Relief ornaments of tragic that resulted in the death of Munson and Lyman & Relief ornaments of the cross Symbol, Relief ornaments of Onan Hariara, Relief ornaments of Nommensen arrival in Batak land, Relief ornaments of the community welcoming the arrival of Nommensen, Relief ornaments of the first church, Relief ornaments of the first Zending school being built and children already started going to school, Relief ornaments of Batak graduates from Nommensen education, Relief ornaments of negotiations and peace between the Batak and the Americans, Relief ornaments of the reconstruction of the padri war, Relief ornaments of the image of Jesus Christ, Tombstone. This research concludes that there are 21 forms of symbol functions that are important to understand the message contained in the Munson and Lyman Memorial Ornament. These symbols were created to represent Munson and Lyman's journey in spreading Christianity in Batak land. There are 21 types of symbol functions, including as means of transportation, trading tools, travel documentation, buying and selling transactions, visualizing weaving activities, agriculture, communication, judicial tools, accompanying traditional ceremony processes, determining the evangelist's burden, bartering places, missionary missions, church monuments, schools, graduations, peace symbols, Padri wars, Christian religion spread, and grave markers. There are 21 types of symbol meanings, including depicting Munson and Lyman's journey, urban trade, community life details, communication visualization, language translation, correct actions in misunderstandings, judicial processes, punishments, traditional rituals, Nommensen's arrival, community acceptance of Nommensen, church construction, community education, educational outcomes, peace, Christian religion spread, and the journey of spreading the Gospel in the land of Batak. Keywords: Memorial, Missionary, Munson and Lyman, Semiotic

A geospatial and archaeological investigation of an African–American cemetery in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

AbstractOberlin Cemetery, located near downtown Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, was founded in 1873 following the American Civil War (1861–1865). This 3.2 ac (~1.29 ha) parcel of land served as the main cemetery for the people of Oberlin Village—the largest freedmen's community in Wake County. Today, descendants of the village founders and other neighbourhood residents, organized as the Friends of Oberlin Village (FOV), are preserving this community landmark and working to have its historical significance recognized. In support of these efforts, terrestrial laser scanning, global‐positioning‐system‐enabled pedestrian and ground‐penetrating radar (GPR) surveys were conducted during the winter and summer of 2016. We inventoried 276 formal grave markers identifying 221 individuals, 296 elongate depressions without a formal marker interpreted as sunken graves, and 130 fieldstones interpreted as burial markers, resulting in an estimate of 517‐to‐660 persons interred within the cemetery. The GPR survey supported the interpretation of topographic depressions as sunken graves; however, the undulating topography, as well as the density of trees and shrubs, limited this survey to ~12% of the site. Based on the birth dates listed on monuments, ~23% of these persons were born before the end of the Civil War. Death dates show the community's continued use of the cemetery throughout the early 1970s and less frequent use after that, with the most recent burials in 2009. A comparison with a 2012 inventory of monuments within Oberlin Cemetery suggests that ~3% of the markers were lost or displaced in 4 years, highlighting the importance of survey and preservation efforts. This work contributed to the FOV's successful nomination of the cemetery to the US National Register of Historic Places and was used to support several grants received for its preservation.

Collaborative multimethod geophysics at the Prewitt Slave Cemetery, Northport, Alabama

AbstractThis paper serves to highlight the partnership built between the Prewitt Slave Cemetery Association (PSCA) and the University of Alabama (UA) through the work conducted by the UA archaeological field school at the Prewitt Slave Cemetery (PSC) in Fall 2022. During this collaborative project, the field school students geolocated, recorded and photographed more than 700 above‐ground grave markers and conducted a multi‐method geophysical survey that included magnetic gradiometry, electrical resistance, electromagnetic induction and ground‐penetrating radar. Results from this survey aided researchers in identifying the locations of over 800 marked and unmarked graves. The benefits of the partnership between PSCA and UA were mutual and multiple. First, the data recorded by the UA field school helped the PSCA achieve its immediate goal of identifying unmarked graves, allowing the organization to move forward with efforts to preserve and protect the PSC. Second, the UA field school students gained valuable experience related to proper cemetery study techniques, including geophysical survey, and learned to conduct community‐based participatory research in collaboration with descendant communities. Additionally, this project allowed for further research related to the use of multiple methods of geophysical instrumentation for identifying unmarked graves beyond ground‐penetrating radar.

A Grave Situation: Burial Practices among the Chinese Diaspora in Queensland, Australia (ca.1870–1930)

AbstractMany nineteenth-century Chinese migrants to Pacific Rim countries died far from their home villages. Diverse approaches were adopted to mark graves, possibly anticipating the subsequent, culturally important, repatriation of their bones. This paper evaluates the morphology of grave markers from eight northeast Australian sites and considers reasons for the variations. Physical appraisal of each site was undertaken and, where they exist, cemetery records and allied documentation examined. In an unusual departure from the norm the inscriptions on most identified grave markers rarely indicate date of death. The seemingly meticulous attention to grave identification in some areas contrasts with others where markers are absent. This study indicates divergent approaches to identification and recording of individual graves over time and place. Rather than indicating full-fledged ethnogenesis, wherein Australian Chinese developed new cultural practices, these behaviors suggest that ca.1870–1930 was a transitional period, during which extant cultural processes were adapted to meet immediate needs.

Loss of identity in nineteenth‐century Norway: Oslo's House of Correction

AbstractIn Norway, there was considerable overlap between the poor house, the workhouse, and correctional facilities. An assemblage of human skeletal remains from Oslo's House of Correction cemetery, largely comprised of individuals disturbed during municipal development in 1989, consists of c. 314 individuals who died as inmates or residents; many were disabled or elderly. Although names were recorded at death, the cemetery lacked grave markers or a map, with no expectation families might one day reclaim relatives. All remains have been aged and sexed anthropologically, with samples collected for biomolecular investigations. Despite extensive archival documentation, including names recorded in the House of Correction church book, their identities are shrouded by time. Observations of age, injury, and disease can suggest why inmates ended up in the House of Correction cemetery. But there, individual stories end and identities are lost.

The Deathscape of Settler Colonialism: Remembrance and Erasure through Cemeteries and Graveyards in the Upper Monongahela Valley

Abstract This article focuses on several cemeteries and graveyards in the upper Monongahela Valley of West Virginia, stretching from the confluence of the West Fork and Tygart Valley Rivers near Fairmont and extending to the confluence of the Monongahela and Cheat Rivers at Point Marion, Pennsylvania, just across the West Virginia-Pennsylvania state line. The authors conducted a mapping project of cemeteries and religious centers from December 2019 until July 2020, focusing on burial grounds that were accessible by automobile. Documenting grave markers, common surnames, and flora on graves or in the cemetery more generally, the authors noticed patterns of flora—particularly the presence of yucca and red cedar—that were closely associated with European settler-colonists and their descendants but that have documented connections to Indigenous and Black burial traditions. Noting that Black and Indigenous burial sites are largely hidden from public view in this region, the authors consider the ways that plant life in cemeteries might shed new light on how settler-colonialism shapes understandings of Appalachian death and burial practices and, in turn, Appalachian history and culture.

Representations of childness: the memorialisation of children in the Australian cemetery 1836 – 2018

ABSTRACT This paper explores the cultural conceptualisation of children’s social identity and status through memorialisation, based on the study of children’s grave markers and plots in five South Australian cemeteries (from colonisation to the present), with an age range from infant (including stillborn) to 20 years. The idea of childness, the differing conception of being or being labelled a child, was used as a measure to identify the degree of variation in child identity realised by child-only and family grave markers, showing both change and continuity in the representation of children through family choices of form, style, wording, motif, spatial arrangement and grave furniture. Archaeological evidence of childness was observed through representations of smallness, innocence, domesticity, play, temporality and the distinct emotional nature of the parent-child relationship. Notably in the latter period of study, within the context of lower child mortality, revised understandings of child identity and status were observed representing the social re-evaluation of prenatally deceased and stillborn children.

Stones in Motion: monuments and chiefly title histories in central Vanuatu

ABSTRACTThis paper addresses the ways in which stones have anchored stories and people in central Vanuatu. Three different sets of stones, and stories about those stones, cast light from different angles on the history of the distinctive chiefly title system of this region. The first set revolves around the fulcrum of Wotanimanu, a pillar of stone that rises from the sea between Efate and the Shepherd Islands. This is the figure of a chief who arrived on Efate by sea, accompanied by his “stones” or people. Senior chiefly titles of this region, which draw on lengthy histories of migration, ground their narrative and genealogical claims in the proof of a second set of stones, including grave markers, magic stones, and arrangements of stones in series that stand for successive holders of each title. The third set of stones and stories was initiated by the first resident Presbyterian missionary in the Shepherd Islands, Oscar Michelsen, who acknowledged the importance attached locally to history by setting up a series of stelae to commemorate the conversion of individual chiefs. The paper concludes with thoughts on the agency and mobility of stone in the Shepherd Islands, and the ways in which stones give substance to chiefly power.

The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State: A History of Montana's Cemeteries by Ellen Baumler

Reviewed by: The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State: A History of Montana's Cemeteries by Ellen Baumler Annette Stott Baumler, Ellen – The Life of the Afterlife in the Big Sky State: A History of Montana's Cemeteries. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 186 p. This slender volume by the former interpretive historian of the Montana Historical Society, Ellen Baumler, covers a lot of ground. It reviews varied types of human burial and commemoration occurring over several millennia across the land that has become the state of Montana. Rather than an in-depth study of any particular part, Baumler gives the reader a broad overview of the subject, stopping to recount fascinating stories she has collected in the past two decades as she travelled through the state. Very few books consider Indigenous deathways or settler cemeteries and grave markers between the Mississippi River and the West Coast states. Baumler helps fill that gap with this engaging survey of Montana, written with a popular audience in mind. The first quarter of the book considers Indigenous burials, from the oldest discovered remains—dating to about 11,000 years ago and now known as the Anzick child—to tree and platform burials of the 1800s. A chapter about epidemics of smallpox and other diseases that decimated tribes after contact with Europeans is compelling. Indigenous death and surrounding practices have become especially sensitive subjects in recent years. Although Baumler mentions NAGPRA—the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act that seeks to respect Indigenous peoples by returning human remains and certain cultural artifacts from museums to tribes—and introduces the Montana Human Skeletal Remains and Burial Site Protection Act, the format of the book necessarily precludes a detailed, nuanced treatment of these topics. The endnotes and bibliographic essay, however, provide places where the interested reader can learn more. With a loose chronological approach, Baumler next considers the early emigrants to Montana, from fur traders and gold seekers to settlers and soldiers, whose actions often led to violent death. As she recognizes, "There is a vast difference between the ambience of cemeteries, where loved ones are carefully laid to eternal rest, and places where lives were lost during violent events" (p. 57). Battlefields such as Little Bighorn served as impromptu burial grounds and are briefly considered, primarily from non-Indigenous perspectives. Some of these burials were moved to cemeteries, but many remain unmarked. In fact, a large number of early graves in Montana Territory were unmarked, including those of outlaws and those without family or financial means, but Baumler provides some of their stories from old newspapers and other accounts. She explains that the first actual cemeteries in Montana were found at trading posts and forts (p. 60) as well as missions. Gold mining camps also buried their dead, usually in boot hill-style cemeteries on high ground. [End Page 181] Montana, like other western territories, has ghost towns and entirely lost towns whose cemeteries are the only remnant marking the place where a community once thrived. In other cases, whole cemeteries have been moved to make way for urban development. Forgotten graves are regularly unearthed and urban legends add to the complexity of the historian's task. The Life of the Afterlife recounts some of these tales, reminding the reader that "eternal rest" is anything but eternal. Another section of the book looks at the development of planned, landscaped cemeteries and Montana's first gravestone makers. Baumler identifies the Helena shop of Kirkaldie and Carr as one of the very first to advertise in 1878, and many other stone cutters and monument firms soon followed. In 1883, when the railroad came to Montana, importation of both raw marble and carved monuments became much more affordable. Residents of Montana's principal cities and several towns will find mention of their cemeteries here. These cemeteries testify to the vast diversity of peoples who settled in Montana from all over the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Veterans' cemeteries, prison and hospital cemeteries, church cemeteries, private family burial grounds, pet cemeteries, potters' fields for the indigent, and disaster site monuments all receive notice in this sweeping history. She focuses on the earlier...

The area around the grave markers: contextualizing a neglected pet cemetery in northern Finland

ABSTRACT The study of pet cemeteries has recently intensified in multiple disciplines. However, the focus of this research has been more on the interpretation of information available on grave markers, while only touching on the geographical context, the land use zone of these sites. The advantages of focusing on the broader context are shown here through a case study focusing on the Hiironen pet cemetery in the city of Oulu in northern Finland. First, by combining a variety of sources – archival documents, photographs, maps, and news reports – with field documentation, a contextual site history extending both before and after the official period of use of the pet cemetery (1971–1993) is established. This history mirrors temporal changes in societal values regarding human-companion animal relations. By defining and examining these changes, the current notion of the increasing status of present-day companion animals as dear family members is confirmed.

9. De la fosse au cimetière juif. Les transferts de corps après la Shoah

One characteristic of the Shoah is the absence of the victims’ bodies. In fact, this very absence is communicated through the term “Holocaust.” However, their bodies—the number of which remains unknown—were not destroyed. The bodies of Jewish victims, most of whom were killed at the very start or at the very end of the Holocaust, were not burned. Rather, they were buried in mass graves. The purpose of this article is to describe the efforts of the survivors to locate, exhume, and identify these bodies and to move them to a Jewish cemetery. While it is difficult to estimate the number of people who have been transferred from mass graves, it is certain that many exhumations have taken place, and some continue to this day. To describe and analyze this phenomenon, we will use a selection of Memorbikher, some of which have already been described by Gabriel Finder, and a few articles from secondary literature source (e.g. Sarah Garibova’s articles on the Soviet Union). In particular, we will use many cases identified during our research, such as 222 examples of exhumations (55 of which are in English) described in the USC Shoah Foundation’s testimonies. The first observation is that these exhumations and transfers are spread out over a very long period of time. The first instances took place in 1940 in Poland in the wake of the first massacres. Jews paid for the right to exhume the bodies and place them in the city cemetery. To our knowledge, the most recent transfer is that of the body of Casimir Oberfeld, who died during his evacuation from Auschwitz to Bohemia. He was buried in a Christian cemetery, and his son repatriated his remains to France in 2018.The article will examine the conditions surrounding the exhumations, and in particular the chain of custody for human remains. Who took the initiative to exhume victims’ bodies, and what negotiations took place with local, national, and even international authorities? What power struggles played out around the issue of these mass graves? What were the technical conditions of exhumation and transfer? This article will also examine the question of how far victims’ bodies were transferred. Many individuals were moved a few dozen feet or a few miles from a mass grave by the Einsatzgruppen to the Jewish cemetery in the village ; others were moved thousands of miles, as was the case for the bones of the Jews who were buried together in a work Kommando in Bohemia and then brought to Israel in 1991 by Jado Weiss. In most instances, the exhumations were perfunctory, without even the intervention of a forensic pathologist. How did the survivors justify moving these remains to a Jewish cemetery? Until recently, there have been very few testimonials about the intervention of rabbinic authorities or justification by religious leaders, but the Jewish traditions of ritual burial in individual graves in Jewish cemeteries were strongly internalized by the survivors. The article will also discuss the graves that were dug in Jewish cemeteries to accommodate the exhumed bodies. What inscriptions were placed on the grave markers? Do they mention where the remains came from?Finally, we will discuss whether or not these exhumations can be considered unique and examine their ability to symbolically replace collective burials, which were impossible due to the absence of physical bodies. This situation contrasts what happened at the Potocari cemetery for the victims of Srebrenica, for example. In the words of the survivors, the transfer of a few bodies served as a replacement for ceremonies that could not be perfumed due to the cremation of the victims.

5. L’Aumônerie générale des israélites de France, la préservation des rites funéraires et l’entretien des cimetières des Juifs morts dans les camps d’internement français, 1940-1944

The Law of October 4, 1940 regarding “foreign nationals of the Jewish race” authorized the imminent internment of foreign Jews in France. The internment camps were quickly filled up. In February 1941, 40,000 Jews were confined to the internment camps in the Free Zone. Jewish chaplains, who had just been demobilized from the French military, were the first people authorized to enter the camps to assist the prisoners. The first chaplains joined in June 1940, even before the official establishment of the Aumônerie générale des israélites de France (Jewish Chaplaincy). Throughout the war, chaplains assumed numerous and varied roles covering spiritual aid, material assistance, rescue, and resistance. However, the Vichy government only authorized them to act in a religious capacity. The official responsibilities of the Jewish Chaplaincy consisted of providing spiritual support to the prisoners, organizing religious services, and overseeing religious rites within the camps. The difficult sanitary conditions, overcrowded barracks, and spread of disease led to the deaths of 3,000 Jews in the internment camps in France. The elderly population, especially in the Gurs camp, was particularly vulnerable. In this camp alone, 1,000 deaths were recorded. Respect for funeral rites became a concern for the Jewish Chaplaincy throughout the war. Chaplains worked hard to protect this basic right despite the many obstacles standing in their way.As part of a larger study of the efforts of the Jewish Chaplaincy in southern France during World War II, this article focuses specifically on the role of chaplains with respect to the burial rites of Jews who died in French internment camps between 1940-1944. Their efforts went beyond performing funeral rites, as they also worked to establish cemeteries and provide grave markers in accordance with Judaism. Moreover, when the camps closed, the chaplains became concerned about the fate of the abandoned cemeteries and helped maintain these burial sites.By relying on archival documents, especially the abundant correspondence of the chaplains (with each other, with Catholic and Protestant religious leaders, with family members of the deceased, and with the Vichy authorities), this article demonstrates how important burials and the preservation of customs were to the chaplains throughout the war.

Forgiving the Unforgivable

Forgiving the Unforgivable Anna Badkhen (bio) oklahoma to texas On a Monday in early August I find myself spooning soil from Geronimo's grave at a prisoner-of-war cemetery in Oklahoma into a double Ziplock bag I bought at Target. I will carry this soil, by car and bus, to Guachochi, a town in the Sierra Madre Occidental. There, three Mexican sisters who have recently traced their ancestry to the famous Apache medicine man are about to hold a Ceremonia del Perdón—Ceremony of Forgiveness. The soil is my gift to them. Geronimo's grave is inside Fort Sill, a US Army base, so I must first stop at the visitor center to obtain a pass. The United States staked out Fort Sill in 1869, as a staging ground for punitive raids against the Native Americans who had survived deportation to Indian Territory, and even though the base dates back more than a hundred years, its visitor center bears the ubiquitous hallmarks of military efficiency that scream temporariness: insulated white metal wall panels mounted on a concrete foundation and facing a parking lot paved with ankle breaker gravel. I have seen structures and parking lots exactly like this on US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, which also were staging grounds for raids into quasi-occupied lands; most of those are now gone. Inside the visitor center, a jovial military policeman hands me Form 118a, Request for Unescorted Installation Access to Fort Sill. This is to ensure somehow that I am not a terrorist. I enter my full name, date of birth, driver's license number, social security number, gender, race. Under "purpose of visit" I check "other." Beef Creek Apache Cemetery was established in 1894, the year Geronimo and 341 other surrendered Chiricahua Apaches—adults and children—were transferred from a prisoner-of-war camp in Florida to Fort Sill under military escort. Here, in the foothills of the Wichita Mountains, Geronimo's insurgency against white colonists came to an end. It had begun in 1851, when Mexican soldiers massacred more than a hundred women and children in Geronimo's encampment, among them his mother, his first wife, and all three of his young children. At Beef Creek, rows of identical upright headstones of white marble poke out of a manicured sloping field of green; think Arlington Cemetery minus the color guard. Among this impersonal personal misery, Geronimo's tomb stands [End Page 1] out, a pyramid of granite boulders perhaps five feet tall, topped with a stone eagle. A small grove of white hibiscus and fragrant abelia screens it slightly from the rest of the burial ground. Geronimo died technically of pneumonia but ultimately of the humiliation that accompanied his imprisonment. To be a POW of the United States back then was different than at Guantánamo: Apache prisoners could set up villages within the perimeter of the army base. They could marry and raise children and bury them. I check the stones. One couple lost three children in five years. Many grave markers have only one date. Some Apache prisoners got to travel outside the wire. With Pawnee Bill's Wild West Show, which advertised his cameo as "The Worst Indian That Ever Lived," Geronimo hawked his legend at county fairs. And he was one of six Native men to ride horseback in Teddy Roosevelt's inaugural parade through the streets of Washington, DC, in 1901. When someone asked Roosevelt why he chose this "greatest single-handed murderer in American history" to join his parade, the president replied, "I wanted to give the people a good show." To the left of Geronimo's is the grave of the sixth of his nine wives, Zi-Yeh, who died in 1904 at the age of thirty-five, of tuberculosis. To the right, the grave of their daughter Eva Geronimo Godeley, who was forced to attend one of the Indian boarding schools the US government had created to strip Native children of their roots; her school was almost two hundred miles away. She was twenty-one when she died, in 1911. Eva's daughter, Evaline, died at birth the year previous; she is buried here, too. Geronimo was...

THE CARISBROOKE HAND: ANGLO-SAXON SCULPTURE AND THE HAND OF GOD?

This paper discusses the significance of a fragment of stone sculpture built into the north wall of the churchyard at Carisbrooke, Isle of Wight. The sculpture depicts an open right hand that is larger than life-sized and is probably of late Anglo-Saxon date. The size and character of the sculpture favours a manus dei (hand of God), forming the upper element of a large rood assemblage. The authors consider allied sculpture in which such a hand appears on Anglo-Saxon grave markers and in similar low relief depictions where Christ is figured on the Cross. At Carisbrooke, this architectural sculpture would have formed a significant feature of an Anglo-Saxon minster church that was rebuilt in the early Norman period. The siting of this building and the extent of its parochia is briefly considered. Supplementary material reviews the probable significance of the sculptural use of Quarr stone at Carisbrooke and elsewhere.

Forgotten in Life, Celebrated in Death: Romany (Gypsy) Grave Markers from Northern New Jersey

Forgotten in Life, Celebrated in Death: Romany (Gypsy) Grave Markers from Northern New Jersey

Angels in English and Welsh churchyard and cemetery memorials, 1660–2020

Churchyard and cemetery memorials are increasingly important to historians for themes such as family and community history, demography, artistic styles, and changing attitudes to mortality. In this article, via analysis of 250 Anglican, Nonconformist and cemetery burial sites in England and Wales, the authors investigate the use of angels and cherubs as gravestone features and look closely at the chronology of such representations. Building on historical, ecclesiastical and literary scholarship, they shed light on the phenomenon of these ‘winged beings’ as grave markers, and evaluate well over 1,000 memorials to reveal distinctive trends affecting gender, changing styles, and survivals. The authors consider denominational and Welsh-English cultural differences, and highlight an extraordinary array of angelic/cherub representation in gendered child and adult gravestones from the early modern period into the twenty-first century. Memorialisation via angels long survived the Reformation and is flourishing today - the article discusses why.

The Branches that Bind

The Branches that Bind

Islamisation and the formation of vernacular Muslim material culture in 15th-century northern Sumatra

ABSTRACT This study presents a distinctive type of Muslim gravestone found on the northern coast of Sumatra, Indonesia, that dates to the 15th century. These grave markers, locally known as plang-pleng, provide evidence for the formation and disappearance of an early form of vernacular Muslim material culture in Southeast Asia. We documented over 200 of these gravestones during a large-scale archaeological landscape survey. In this article, we present a typology of these gravestones based upon shape, morphology and ornamentation. We then discuss their geographical distribution and periodisation based on examples with dated Arabic inscriptions. Our results show that these gravestones were initially a cultural product of the historic trading settlement of Lamri dating from the early 15th century. By the middle of the 15th century, variations of these stones started to appear widely near the Aceh river. The plang-pleng tradition was displaced in the early 16th century by the batu Aceh gravestones associated with the Aceh sultanate, which became a standardised part of Muslim material culture in the region for the next two centuries.

Memories Carved in the Wall : A 16th-Century Type of Funerary Monuments in Transylvania

Graves for the deceased were usually cut into the floor of churches, created in churchyard cemeteries or in the newly established public cemeteries in Transylvania in the sixteenth century. Not all graves were marked with stone funerary monuments. Wooden memorials were presumably widespread, but no contemporary sources inform about these. Grave markers from the cemeteries are simple or coped headstones and coffin-shape stones, preserved for example in Cluj (Kolozsvár) and Târgu Mureş (Marosvásárhely). These gravestones display commemorative inscriptions and simple imagery. A funerary inscription recently discovered in Ocna Mureş (Marosújvár) was carved into an ashlar within the external buttress supporting the choir of the church. This stone bearing an inscription represents a specific type of funerary monument from early modern Transylvania, most examples of which are known from Cluj. The paper presents these stone memorials: who and why chose this form of commemorating the dead.

ՆՈՐԱՀԱՅՏ ՈԻՇՄԻՋՆԱԴԱՐՅԱՆ ԵԿԵՂԵՑԻ ԹԵՂՈՒՏՈՒՄ (2010 թ. պեղումների արդյունքները)

THE NEWFOUND CHAPEL OF THE LATE MEDIEVAL PERIOD IN TEGHUT (The Results of the Excavations in 2010) In 2010 in the results of the excavations carried out at the site of "Lands of Gharakotuk" in Teghut a cemetery chapel with almost a square floorplan (8.7x7.7 m2) was uncovered. The chapel has a rectangular apse highlighted from both inside and outside which is not common in Armenian architecture. The architectural plan of the chapel was distorted in the result of multiple and often incorrect reconstructions. The excavations revealed a variety of tombstones of the 14th17th centuries, including two grave markers with Georgian inscriptions (deciphering and commentaries by Temo Jojua), two complete and two dozen fragmentary khachkars (two of them dated 1513 and 1604), ceramic and metal artifacts. Based on the analysis of the found materials and the architectural structure, the chapel dates to the 16th-17th centuries. According to the environment ‒ sacred trees (Celtis caucasica) growing around the chapel and the cemetery, as well as a collection of specially hidden metal objects (human figurines, animal shoes, lock etc.) which had protective significance from the evil eye or various diseases, the chapel served also as a place for pilgrimage.