Street Cemetery Research Articles

Visualising Heritage: using 3D immersive technologies to innovate, document and communicate rich narratives for HS2

The University of Bradford has established wide-ranging skillsets and capabilities as Visualising Heritage that have been built around expertise with 3D imaging for human bioarchaeology and for contextual understanding of archaeological sites, landscapes, heritage structures and associated artefacts. This paper reflects upon how these have been put to use during enabling works for HS2 and also the potential of this work for analysis, public engagement and legacy. The main focus of this paper covers 3D digital documentation of the world's first railway roundhouse designed by Robert Stephenson at Birmingham Curzon Street, together with immersive content that helps to tell the story of its discovery and exposure. We discuss 3D modelling that helps to link both to the original architectural drawings and to the broader narratives for understanding changes to the design of the building during its working life. We also contextualise its place within the historic environment relative to the Principal Building – the original Curzon Street terminus for the London and Birmingham Railway, the Eagle and Tun public house and the former Park Street Cemetery. As HS2 embarks upon the post-excavation phase, we also discuss the potential that recent investment from the Arts and Humanities Research Council in 'Capabilities for Human Bioarchaeology and Digital Collections' offers, building upon our pioneering 3D work at the object scale with 'Digitised Diseases', to bring within reach the potential for high throughput digital capture. This streamlines high fidelity 3D capture for key human bioarchaeology exemplars as legacy assets that would otherwise be lost to future study as they are destined for reburial.

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom

Teaching Demography and Community Engagement through a Study of Auckland’s Nineteenth-Century Symonds Street Cemetery

The Symonds Street Cemetery Project was initially suggested by Auckland Council, which desired to learn more about this first-generation colonial urban cemetery in Auckland, New Zealand. Undergraduate students enrolled in an Anthropological Demography course worked in groups to transcribe demographic information from existing gravestones. The undergraduates’ assignment was to develop a demographic profile of one denominational section, comparing results from their transcriptions with those based on a database of known burials and considering issues of representativeness and preservation. The postgraduates developed their own original research questions relating to gender, migration, and infant mortality. The final transcribed data and student papers were given to Auckland Council for their records and others’ use. The postgraduate students also presented their findings in a public forum. Observed benefits were consistent with the literature on fieldwork and service learning in anthropology and related disciplines, such as increased interest and motivation associated with working with ‘real’ data with a purpose beyond their own learning and assessment. The project thus accomplished specific pedagogical goals related to course content while developing students’ transferable skills and including them in the process of community engagement as contributors to local heritage knowledge and preservation.

Combined use of ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) testing and digital technologies: A model for long-term condition monitoring memorials in historic Grove Street Cemetery, New Haven

Grove Street Cemetery (GSC) of New Haven is one of the 60 National Historic Landmarks in Connecticut; it is also the ninth such landmark in New Haven since 2000. Besides, the cemetery has an indispensable place in the daily life of New Haven community. The aim of the study is to develop an efficient, simple, and low-cost methodology for the assessment of the level of deterioration qualitatively of the stones of Grove Street Cemetery, which will serve as a model for long-term condition monitoring. The studies included the generation of 3D models of memorials, mapping of visual weathering forms on these 3D models according to the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Stone (ISCS) illustrated glossary on stone deterioration patterns, and evaluation of the level of deterioration by ultrasonic velocity measurements. The obtained results were combined in the open-source software Cultural Heritage-Object (CHER-Ob) for decision-making and monitoring studies. Making direct use of the 3D models for calibrated distance measurements for the ultrasonic pulse velocity (UPV) measurements in situ with the help of CHER-Ob has been introduced for the first time as a facilitating element of the monitoring process.

Memories of Black Indian Materialities in Colonial New Orleans

ABSTRACTThe Black Indian past of New Orleans has received considerable attention in recent years, thanks in part to the Mardi Gras Indians, parading groups known for their elaborate beaded suits, many of which also celebrate Native American heritage. Despite this vibrant living tradition, historians have sometimes been skeptical of the temporal depth or continuity of Black-Indian connections. Archaeological evidence from the colonial-era St. Peter Street Cemetery provides an opportunity to reconsider the ways that material traditions were used to reinforce the connections of the city’s Native and African-descended populations, even as the demographic presence of indigenous peoples was being subsumed by later arrivals.

Microbial life beyond the grave: 16S rRNA gene-based metagenomic analysis of bacteria diversity and their functional profiles in cemetery environments

Recent studies have identified cemeteries as potential environmental reservoirs of multi-drug resistant pathogenic bacteria that could contaminate groundwater sources posing public health threats. However, these findings were based on the identification of culturable bacteria and at times not below burial grounds. Investigation on the bacterial diversity and functional profiles of bacterial communities above and below burial grounds in human cemeteries are few. The current study used high-throughput sequencing techniques to determine the bacterial composition and their associated functional profiles in cemetery soil samples collected at the surface and below burial ground in two South African cemeteries (Maitland Cemetery in Cape Town and Fontein Street Cemetery in Middelburg) to evaluate the potential health threat to surrounding populations through contamination of groundwater. Significant differences were observed between sample depths with the clustering of the surface (0 m) and the 2 m samples into separate groups. Pseudomonas and Corynebacterium were the most abundant genera across all samples. Pseudomonas and Rhodococcus were the dominant genera in the 2 m samples while Prauserella and Staphylococcus were dominant in the surface samples. The 2 m samples showed a lower alpha diversity but recorded higher proportions of human diseases functional classes compared to the surface samples. Human disease functional profiles revealed involvement, in infectious (cholera), neurodegenerative (Alzheimer's disease) cardiovascular (hypertrophic cardiomyopathy) immune system (Systemic lupus erythematosus) metabolic (Type I & II diabetes) diseases and cancer. Antibiotic resistance and antibiotics synthesis signatures were also identified. Thus, cemeteries could be potential sources of microbial and antibiotic pollution in groundwater, especially in areas with shallow water tables such as Maitland. Selection of sites for use as cemeteries should, therefore, require a proper understanding of the hydrogeological characteristics of the selected site. However, further studies are required to trace the actual movement of these pollutants into groundwater resources.

The Osteological composition of the alleged victims of the Xhosa Cattle-Killing Saga from Edward Street Cemetery, King William’s Town, South Africa

ABSTRACT In 1993, the remains of a minimum of 17 individuals from more than 150 commingled human bones were unethically excavated at Edward Street Cemetery in King William’s Town, South Africa. The remains are believed to have been of victims of the mid nineteenth century Xhosa cattle-killing incident, which came as a prophetic instruction through Nongqawuse. The incident led to a severe artificially induced famine among the Xhosa people and some of them died as a result of starvation. The deceased were buried on the unmarked and non-consecrated side of the cemetery. This report presents a detailed summary of the osteological analysis of the remains from the 1993 exhumation. Despite the current historical emphasis on the issue of death due to starvation, the bones do not show any signs of nutritional stress.

No Stone Unturned: Newark’s Grove Street Cemetery

This paper examines the history and current status of Newark’s Grove Street Cemetery, the first section of which was established in 1885. The cemetery, plagued by deterioration and vandalism for more than 50 years, represents a microcosm of the Jewish immigrant experience, with each headstone telling a story. Given the number of people buried at Grove Street, there are more than 10,000 stories that need desperately saving. Drawing largely upon interviews and papers held at the Jewish Historical Society of New Jersey and site visits, this piece evaluates the cemetery’s caretaking efforts and makes recommendations for a path forward.

In a Better and Older Language: The Redemptive Potential of Arabic and Its Translated Fictions

In a Better and Older Language:The Redemptive Potential of Arabic and Its Translated Fictions S.J. Pearce “The dead shall be raised”. —I Corinthians 15:15, inscribed in the lintel of the Grove Street Cemetery gate, New Haven, CT A man in possession of a strange, esoteric and rare medieval manuscript written in an indecipherable old language is approached by a literature-loving friend who beseeches him to make the incredible text accessible by translating it and adding a suitable prologue. It was once a widely-read and -regarded text, but now, owing to social, religious and intellectual controversy, most of the copies have been destroyed -burned or sold for rag- but this hardly matters as so very few people would have been able to read it in its original language, anyway. The man gives in and labors away translating – or does he? The manuscript tells a story of books and death; and [End Page 179] when you read it, you hardly know where its own contours end and where they begin to infiltrate the simulacrum of life that it refracts and sends up as much as it represents. Who, exactly, are the translator, the narrator, and the friend? Sword and lance, or paper and pen? The literary and the literal bleed. O, idle reader, you think you know where this is going, don’t you? You’re wrong. The text is not the last, lost Morisco-Aljamiado translation of the Arab author Cide Hamete Benengeli’s history of a landed son of something (or other) from a place whose name I do not care to recall; but rather, it is one of those texts written in that older and better language that the fictional Miguel Cervantes, narrated to life by the eponymous literary alter-ego of the man who invented him, knew he could have found if he had wanted. Rather, it is an unimagined imaginative prefatory story told by a narrator with a tenuous connection to a flesh-and-blood writer who, like Cide Hamete and like the fictional Cervantes, stepfather of the book and author of its prologue, meditates upon translation, comments on the relationship between the promise of literature and the promise of religion, and offers a throaty, vociferous vindication of the role of the Arabic language and its literary traditions in the salvage and salvation of a second-diasporic national identity of exiled Andalusi Jews in a wider late medieval and early modern European setting. The text purports to be a preface to the Treatise on the Doctrine of Resurrection, Moses Maimonides’ 1198 Arabic-language self-defense against the fanatical anti-rationalist followers of Samuel ben ‘Alī ibn al-Dastūr, head of the famed and influential talmudical academy in the legendary round city of Baghdad that was also home to the scientific academy founded by the Abbassid caliph al-Ma’mūn (786-833), an institution so prolific and rigorous that it came to be known as the House of Wisdom. No, that’s not quite correct. The text is a preface to the Treatise. Clearly it is that; but that is the only thing about the relationship between text and [End Page 180] pretext that is sure. The preface is narrated in the voice of Joseph ben Joel, a name otherwise unattested in co-local contemporaneous sources but quite possibly the literary alter-ego of the otherwise anonymous author; it is dedicated to a patron, a certain Meir ben Sheshet, also otherwise unknown to history. The text is written in rhymed prose with borrowed and original poetry interspersed throughout and tells a story about one particular branch of transmission of the Treatise, a story that raises a variety of questions about the relationship of fiction to historical writing, about reading and reception, and about the place of language choice within individual and community religious identities. It also raises broad questions about the relationship of subject matter to authorial process that are articulated specifically in this case through a complex interplay between not just translation but retranslation and reviving the dead: revitalizing corpse and corpus. By inventing a fictitious process of translating and retranslating and retranslating a seminal articulation of a mostly...

Victims and survivors: Stable isotopes used to identify migrants from the Great Irish Famine to 19th century London

Historical evidence documents mass migration from Ireland to London during the period of the Great Irish Famine of 1845-52. The rural Irish were reliant on a restricted diet based on potatoes but maize, a C(4) plant, was imported from the United States of America in 1846-47 to mitigate against Famine. In London, Irish migrants joined a population with a more varied diet. To investigate and characterize their diet, carbon and nitrogen isotope ratios were obtained from bone collagen of 119 and hair keratin of six individuals from Lukin Street cemetery, Tower Hamlets (1843-54), and bone collagen of 20 individuals from the cemetery at Kilkenny Union Workhouse in Ireland (1847-51). A comparison of the results with other contemporaneous English populations suggests that Londoners may have elevated δ(15) N compared with their contemporaries in other cities. In comparison, the Irish group have lower δ(15) N. Hair analysis combined with bone collagen allows the reconstruction of perimortem dietary changes. Three children aged 5-15 years from Kilkenny have bone collagen δ(13) C values that indicate consumption of maize (C(4)). As maize was only imported into Ireland in quantity from late 1846 and 1847, these results demonstrate relatively rapid bone collagen turnover in children and highlight the importance of age-related bone turnover rates, and the impact the age of the individual can have on studies of short-term dietary change or recent migration. Stable light isotope data in this study are consistent with the epigraphic and documentary evidence for the presence of migrants within the London cemetery.

William Horner Andrews (1887–1953) – First Professor of Physiology at Onderstepoort

W H Andrews qualified as a veterinarian in London in 1908 and was recruited soon after, in 1909, by Sir Arnold Theiler to join the staff of the newly established veterinary laboratory at Onderstepoort. After initial studies on the treatment of trypanosomosis and on snake venoms he was deployed by Theiler in 1911 to start research on lamsiekte (botulism)at a field station on the farm Kaffraria near Christiana, where he met and married his wife Doris. After a stint as Captain in the SA Veterinary Corps during World War I he succeeded D T Mitchell as head of the Allerton Laboratory in 1918, where he excelled in research on toxic plants, inter alia identifying Matricaria nigellaefolia as the cause of staggers in cattle. When the Faculty of Veterinary Science was established in 1920 he was appointed as the first Professor of Physiology. After the graduation of the first class in 1924, and due to health problems, he returned to the UK, first to the Royal Veterinary College and then to the Weybridge Veterinary Laboratories of which he became Director in 1927. After his retirement in 1947 he returned to South Africa as a guest worker at Onderstepoort where he again became involved in teaching physiology when Prof. Quin unexpectedly died in 1950. Andrews died in Pretoria in 1953 and was buried in the Rebecca Street Cemetery.

The North Queen Street Cemetery and the African-American Experience in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

The North Queen Street Cemetery and the African-American Experience in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Ambivalent Heritage

This article examines the significance of colonial cemeteries and explains why they are sites of neglect and decay in contemporary India. By examining the ideological and affective meanings of a colonial funerary landscape like the Park Street cemetery in Calcutta, it shows how monuments of colonial memories have transformed into signs of temporal ruptures, which disturbs the dichotomy between the colonial and the post-colonial. It argues that the discard and abandonment of colonial cemeteries in the postcolonial landscape stems from the ambivalent meaning that such a heritage site generates. Using three pairs of conceptual constructs - Kristeva’s genotext and phenotext; Freud’s melancholy and mourning; and tropological metaphor and metonymy - I demonstrate that this ambivalence is located in an intersection between the funerary monument as a cultural product of a colonial ideology, and as a memorial artifact of personal bereavement.

To Prove I'm Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victorian City by Sylvia M. Barnard (review)

90Victorian Review Ritvo's volume is more exciting to read, though not more original or significant for understanding the shapes and workings of empire. The contributors to both volumes are practicing not just history, but "macropoUtics," bywhich Arac and Ritvo mean "the global transformations of the last five decades, which have powerfully challenged the sovereignty of white, Western males" (2). Insofar as both volumes, in their modest, academic, anti-imperializing ways support that challenge, I support them. Patrick Brantlinger Indiana University Sylvia M. Barnard. To Prove I'm Not Forgot: Living and Dying in a Victorian City. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1990. xix + 212. The Beckett Street Cemetery, Leeds, opened in August, 1845, testimony, Sylvia Barnard argues, to the foresight of the Town Council. Over the subsequent decades the fortunes ofthe cemetery mirrored those ofthe city which grew up around its imposing eight foot walls: in its heyday the site of so many Victorian celebrations of death, more recently the vandalized territory of glue sniffers. At the height of its usage in the late Victorian years around three thousand burials a year were registered; subsequently the pace of interment slowed in the years after the Great War. The unstated intent of this study is to use the cemetery as a means of understanding and, in part, reconstructing the Victorian urban community. Properly handled the rich evidence provided by the cemetery's archives, in conjunction with a wealth of municipal records, might have formed the basis of a highly original and insightful investigation of attitudes to death and its ritual. Sadly, it is an opportunity missed; while full of wonderful anecdotes and sketches which reflect the minutiae ofLeeds's local history, there is no attempt to present a unifying argument. Certainly there is no analysis of the changing perceptions to death, and the consequent implications for our understanding of the mentalité of urban society. The author succeeds in recreating a slice of Victorian Ufe, but it is both static and incomplete. The strength of this study Ues in its often moving vignettes reflecting the personal histories of some of the 180,000 who are buried in the Beckett Street Cemetery. Indeed, when pieced together as a collage these vignettes provide a colorful and instructive view of the diversity of Reviews91 Victorian society. The stories must remind us that the necessity of methodological pigeon-hoUng notwithstanding, a stratified society remained a complex web of individuals. This diversity is apparent in a moving chapter on the, for the most part, unfortunates who were members of the British army. To the uninitiated the brutality and inhumanity of barracks' life is startling. To consider that those wives allowed to foUow their husbands overseas were chosen by lottery illustrates the heartiessness of the system. Yet, no matter how interesting, this chapter also reveals the principal shortcoming of the work: evidence culled from a fascinating source is shoehorned into a general overview of urban Ufe which is not in itself original, and which does not reflect an awareness of much recent research. Throughout the book tantalizing avenues of investigation are introduced, occasionally pursued, but seldom assessed. A chapter devoted to the high number of accidental deaths, particularly among children, might have provided a detailed consideration of such social and familial problems as infanticide. Extracted from local newspapers and Medical Officer Reports, the various incidents are in themselves tragic, but not, as represented in this book, particularly illuminating. The author is unable to tie the deaths together, other than to offer the suggestions made some time ago by historians such as Standish Meacham, that a fatalistic streak can be identified in Victorian society, particularly among the poor. Unfortunately, missed opportunities are frequent The reader is informed that burials were important, but not for religious reasons. Why? We may surmise that the ritual ofburial was an important rite ofpassage, but the author does not. When some of the important issues are addressed, such as who was buried in the cemetery, the results are disappointing. An enumeration of interments by occupation becomes a catalogue of personages, rich and poor, together with an explanation of their uplifting, tragic or pathetic Uves. Indeed, as the book progresses it increasingly develops into a means...

H. G. Wells edited by Brian Murray, and: H. G. Wells Under Revision: Proceedings of the International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986 edited by Patrick Parrinder (review)

92Victorian Review mechanics. While individual vignettes abound, the author is content to use such potential as a vehicle for a straightforward discussion oflife in Leeds. There is no real attempt to use the sources to analyze the relationship either between the cemetery and the community, or the Uving and the dead. Furthermore, given the Beckett Street Cemetery's importance as the first municipal cemetery in the kingdom, it is disappointing to discover so little about the complex world of municipal politics. Indeed, an examination of this subject might have prompted the author to assess the decline of the cemetery, and its implications for furthering our understanding of early twentieth-century Britain, in more detail. Finally, as Roy Porter proposes in his admirable, ifshort, introduction to the book: "our forebears celebrated death as the great climax of the mortal life-span of each Christian soul" (ix). Ultimately, this study is concerned less with the implications of this important line of enquiry, than with presenting a pastiche of Ufe, albeit both colorful and pathetic, in Victorian Leeds. Chris Hosgood University ofLethbridge Brian Murray. H. G. WeUs. New York: Continuum, 1990. 190. $18.95 US (cloth). Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe, eds. H. G. WeUs Under Revision: Proceedings ofthe International H. G. Wells Symposium, London, July 1986. London and Toronto: Associated UP, 1990. 263. $35.00 US (cloth). When R G. Wells died in 1946, his obituaries paid tribute to him as the educator of the age. The Times Literary Supplement (17 August 1946) wrote that "there was a time when Wells spoke more clearly than any other man to the youth ofthe world." However, he had been without much of an audience for some years before his death, and after it his reputation virtually disappeared. A few ofwhat he called his scientific romances kept his name alive as did one or two of his social novels, but the rest of his vast output was quickly forgotten. This state of affairs has begun to change in recent years, which have seen an increasing interest in both his work and his Ufe. The two books under review are both evidence of Wells's reviving reputation. Reviews93 Brian Murray's study of Wells is part of a series entitled Literature and Life: British Writers, though it deals primarily with Wells as a novelist rather than as a writer whose work took many other forms. The most successful part of the book is its first chapter, which describes Wells's Ufe and incorporates many references to his work, not only to his novels, but to his essays, his poUtical and educational commentaries, his histories and, of course, his autobiography. For anyone looking for a brief but comprehensive biographical account of Wells, this chapter will be invaluable. It reUes heavily on Wells's own words and is none the worse for that It describes the astonishing range of Wells's work. It contains enough critical observations to keep the reader provoked. Not the least of its strengths is its reference to many of Wells's lesser known works, among them his early stories, his essays, some of his educational commentaries, such as his now largely forgotten Story ofa Great Schoolmaster, and many of his equally forgotten novels, such as The Bulpington ofBlup, God the Invisible King, and The Wonderful Visit. The rest of the book deals only with Wells's novels, with separate chapters on the scientific romances, the Edwardian social novels, the later novels, and his portrayal of, and attitudes to, women. These chapters are largely descriptive, with relatively little criticism or analysis, but they do serve the useful purpose of introducing their readers to much of Wells's work that has been unjustly forgotten. Who nowadays reads The World of William Clissold, The Croquet Player, You Can't be Too Careful? Despite their neglect, Murray makes a persuasive case that they and other of Wells's books remain worth reading. He could, in fact, have included others, such as The Camford Visitation, Babes in a Darkling Wood, and Bealby. However, although Murray successfully introduces us to much of Wells's forgotten fiction, his concentration on the novels means that he has too Uttle to say...

The Flintlocks of the Fathers: Robert Lowell's Treatment of the American Past

LAND of Unlikeness, Robert Lowell's first book of verse, opened with Park Street Cemetery. The graveyard setting of that poem, its roll call of stern surnames: Adams,/ Otis, Hancock, Mather, Revere, announced, as we can see in retrospect, Lowell's ongoing concern with the fathers of our country, with our native past, mainly as it has been forged in New England. Given Lowell's lineage, this backward gaze, incorporating local and familial elements, seems only natural. Of the prominence of New England Lowells, generation after generation, nothing more need be said. On his mother's side the poet can count among his ancestors Edward Winslow, a Mayflower passenger and governor of the Plymouth plantation, as well as John Stark, a hero of the American Revolution. While such credentials establish

The Jews in Sydney

With the arrival of around 16 Jewish convicts on board the First Fleet in 1788, a rudimentary Jewish community was present from the beginning of European settlement in Sydney. However, it took time before formal communal structures were created. The first developments related to burial, because correct interment of the dead is one of the most important religious imperatives a Jewish community must observe. From 1817, Jews in Sydney came together to perform Jewish burials. In 1832, a section of Devonshire Street Cemetery (where Central Station stands today) was consecrated as Jewish.