Graveyard Convention

I recently came across a BBC article documenting a huge argument over a graveyard that had began in a small English town between the city council, local residents and parents of deceased children. In short, after complaints the graveyard and the city council had banned the presence of a number of decorative objects including wind chimes, lights, balloons and teddy bears particularly on the graves of young children and the graveyard had been dubbed ‘tacky’.

It made me question what the protocol around death is and how to commemorate a loved one? And who gets to choose for us how it ‘should’ be done? I’m sure most of us believe we live in a particularly open and accepting society now, that we have moved on from the days of austere Victorian mourning and that one might be free to celebrate death how they see fit. However, I think that a lot of those century old ideas about death are still deeply engrained in us.

This article followed a recent English television documentary about the (Irish) traveller community in England; one episode showed a memorial that one father holds for his son every year at his grave. Hundreds of friends and family show up, they play ‘the son’s CDs’ from the car and there is lots of drinking. After this was shown there was huge uproar about how disrespectful and tacky such an exhibition was, yet I think we should all be free to commentate our loved ones in the way we see fit.

It made me wonder about such protocol in ancient societies and what the repercussions may have been for people breaking such protocol, additionally I wonder if such examples of going against social convention are visible anywhere in the archaeological record? What will future archaeologists think when they come across this particular grave site, with all these items, will it be an anomaly, how will they try to explain it in a similar manner as they do today?

This really made me re-address how I personally think about archaeological burials. There is obviously the tendency to distance ourselves from the dead in our society, particularly the ancient dead. I have often noticed that my ideas about the treatment of ancient remains differ quite a lot from my fellow classmate, a result I’m sure of being English and growing up exposed to a different set of social conventions about such things. For me now I find it important not to try and place distance between me and the dead, because the idea freaks me out. Instead I find myself wondering about their lives, who they were, who placed their particular grave goods with them and why? What did they mean to that person? What did they mean to the person who put them in? Do we have the right to take them away from that person, isn’t this like stealing. I had a very different approach to such things before, but when I sat down and really thought about it I began to think that we should really be a little more thoughtful to treat these burials as the people they were rather than just viewing them as objects without life.

Picture courtesy of; http://www.rationalskepticism.org/news-politics/should-graveyard-wind-chimes-and-plastic-displays-be-banned-t19290.html