Scattered Episode 26: Burial Grounds, Space & Preservation – Interview with Robyn Lacy

Robyn Lacy is a Ph.D. candidate in the archaeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.Her research focuses on 17th-century burial landscape development in Northeast North America. Robyn runs a business with her partner, specializing in gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Robyn’s interest in burial ground archaeology began during her undergraduate field school in Ireland, where she participated in surveying burial grounds and transcribing inscriptions on headstones.
• The distinctions between a cemetery, graveyard, and burial ground, emphasizing historical context and regional variations in North America.
• The concept of rural garden cemeteries in the 1830s aimed to address concerns of overcrowding in urban burial grounds, leading to the creation of park-like atmospheres outside city centers.
• 17th-century burial grounds in the North American Northeast and how settlers chose to develop burial spaces in their newly established communities.
• Shifting gravestone iconography and language through time.
• What’s involved in the preservation of gravestones.

You can find more information about Robyn and her company, Spade and the Grave, on her webpage here: https://spadeandthegrave.com/

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

• Pere Lachaise cemetery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A8re_Lachaise_Cemetery

• Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (DEBS): https://www.debs.ac.uk/
• Ville-Marie, Montreal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville-Marie,_Montreal
• Mount Auburn Cemetery, Massachusettes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Auburn_Cemetery

Notes from the start:

Globe & Mail: Multiple sclerosis origins linked to DNA from ancient Europeans

In October 2023, I gave a presentation at the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology (CABA) entitled Start with the Why: How My Research on Scattered Remains Turned into a Podcast. You can find a recording of that presentation here.

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Transcript

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so, my name is Robyn Lacy. I’m a PhD candidate in the archeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. My research is looking at 17th century burial landscape development in Northeast North America, and I also run a business with my partner where we do gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces in Canada.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what brought you to this because this isn’t the normal sort of archeology stuff that I hear about in Canada. People always want to dig. And you’re not really digging.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, I mean, I guess we dig around the basis of gravestones but it’s not traditional archeology in the sense the most people think of it. Yeah. So I originally got into burial ground archeology and mortuary archeology through a field school that I did in my undergrad. Everyone has to do a field school usually for an archeology program and I decided that I wanted to do mine abroad. I was at school in Calgary and I went to a field school in Ireland and on the Isle of Man through the University of Liverpool. And while we were in Ireland we were surveying burial ground to transcribe the inscriptions on the headstones and document the gravestones as well and do mapping of the site and that kind of thing. I just thought that was the most interesting thing possible. That was not the avenue of archeology. I was intending to go into at all and I thought that was just such a fascinating area of research and it really stuck with me. So it’s what I’ve been doing in grad school. And then with learning about burial grounds, to me it makes sense to have learned about their conservation as well. And there’s very few people that have an archeology background in Canada that do historic stone restoration and graveyard work as well. So they go really well together for that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool, so you did this field school gonna ask you to take your memory back to when you’re in Ireland doing archeology, which sounds amazing and wonderful, but you’ve also had this amazing opportunity to see archeology on both sides of the Atlantic. Are there differences or is archeology archeology no matter where you go.

Robyn Lacy: I think that the basis is the same, it all comes from the same ideas. But the ways that we operate, especially excavation techniques are a lot different in the UK. And in Ireland you’ll see a site being opened, they’ll take all the topsoil off at once and you’ll do a row of people troweling the whole entire surface together. Whereas here we’re more likely to open one meter units or smaller trenches like that. So the way that sites got approached is a little bit different. But also, when you’re in Europe, you have this depth of structural heritage that goes back a lot farther. Like indigenous structures are a lot different than the stone buildings being built in Europe a couple hundred years ago to thousands of years ago. So there’s a lot of differences and approaches to older sites as well, I think.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t really have those stone walls here, do we?

Robyn Lacy: They’re really nice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice when you’re digging and you hit on something stone because when that happens, at least in Alberta,…

Robyn Lacy: Mm-hmm

Yvonne Kjorlien: it’s either, just another rock, glacial till, or possibly maybe even the stone tool. There’s no stone walls here.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I seeing post hole features and that kind of changes to the ground like that, but it’s really exciting when you find something structural, that’s very clearly structural that’s still standing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right cool. Yeah. Yeah for that reason. I like doing historic archeology because of the structural aspect. Yeah, seeing…

Robyn Lacy: Me too.

Yvonne Kjorlien: where the walls are and the post holes. And yeah, that’s always cool.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s get into your research a little bit. So let’s first start off with some definitions the difference between a burial site and a graveyard and a cemetery.

Robyn Lacy: So, I mean in different parts of the world, they have different meetings, of course, so this is mostly for North America. Cemetery is in our context a site that is typically municipally owned or if their owned by a church, they’re often non-denominational. It means a certain type of site. It’s sort of more rural. It’s usually on the edge of town. It’s sort of park-like. They come from this idea in the late 18th century and it was called the rural garden cemetery. So they were planned, organized, but not in the same way that you would see rows in like an older site. There are larger monuments, there’s bushes and wide paths. It’s supposed to have this park-like atmosphere. And that design style didn’t come to North America until the 18 30s. I want to say 1834, possibly or around there, with the construction of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So for being really annoyingly technical, anything before that date in North America is not considered a cemetery but cemetery is the colloquial word for most burial sites these days.

Graveyard then or churchyard is the grounds traditionally surrounding a church where the dead are buried. Sometimes they’re not directly around the church, they can be right next to it. But that’s what the graveyard is. And then in North America, burial ground can be used as a catch all term, but in the Northeast, specifically for the Puritans and the Quakers, they used burial ground historically to denote to site that they were bearing their dead in but they were trying to do this separation of church and everything else. They didn’t even call their spaces where they had services a church, they called it the meeting house. So the burial ground was something that was not sacred, that’s just where your mortal remains went to didn’t really matter after that. So they didn’t call it a graveyard specifically to say that it was not associated with the church.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So with this creation of cemetery in this park atmosphere, it almost sounds like, back in the 1930s when this was started. and at least in North America that there was almost a desire to promote a relationship between the living and the dead would that be accurate to say?