Mortality, Money, and Commemoration: Social and Economic Factors in Southern California Grave-Marker Change During the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Social and economic factors significantly influenced grave-marker choice in southern California cemeteries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gradual changes in the American way of death since Victorian times underwent punctuated shifts in mortuary attitudes, commemoration practices, and funerary materials following moments of extreme social and economic duress. While the form of gravestones slowly evolved from large monuments to smaller flush markers during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they collectively experienced a pronounced shift during the 1920s, reflecting American responses to the devastating human losses of World War I and the 1918-19 influenza pandemic. Financial conditions directly affected decisions regarding those materials selected to mark the deceased as well. Although overall trends reveal that granite gravestones gradually replaced marble as the marker of choice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pronounced fiscal struggles during the 1907 Bankers' Panic and the Great Depression were evinced in distinct surges in less expensive marble and metal grave markers.

Messy Data, Ordered Questions

“…Analyses of cemeteries and mortuary practices continued to play a role in studying the way past people mediated the contradictions in relationships of power and identity. Certainly, grave markers, as materialized identities, change according to political and social context (Mallios and Caterino 2011) as is the case of Japanese grave markers on Hawaiian sugar plantations (Kraus‐Friedberg 2011). Not all contexts, political or social, are immediately revealed through mortuary analysis.…”

Nate Harrison as Person, Myth, and Legend: Archaeological History and the Apotheosis of a Nineteenth-Century African American in San Diego County

“…Frequency seriations use the same data regarding emerging trends but present it quantitatively. Battleship diagrams-histograms turned horizontally to present multiple sets of concurrent data-are common in historical archaeology 2011). Frequency seriations typically examine relative percentages of material culture by form over time, but they also can be used to study the temporally-sensitive presence or absence of a characteristic.…”

The material culture of burial and its microgeography: A Luxembourg cemetery as a methodological example of an object-centred approach to quantitative material culture studies

“…Art historians interested in the evolutions of style and archaeologists questioning its functionality have mainly addressed the question of materiality, although rarely in terms of agency. The study of graves and gravestones’ material features often produces models of seriation relating observed changes to societal transformations (Deetz, 1996; Mallios and Caterino, 2011; Streb, 2017). The historical evolution of modern cemeteries and the rationality – in contrast to churchyards – of this clearly defined and designated place has attracted much attention (Rugg, 2000; Sörries, 2009; Zentralinstitut für Sepulkralkultur Kassel and Sörries, 2002).…”

“…It is not farfetched to suggest that a cemetery, graveyard, or burial ground is the result of the abovementioned multiple interrelationships between materiality and subjects. However, despite many researchers acknowledging and appreciating such issues, their results are often limited to diachronical presentations of sampled gravestone features, such as the size, material and design, and their changes over time, which originate from James Deetz and others’ seminal works (Deetz, 1996; Mallios and Caterino, 2007, 2011; Streb, 2017; Tarlow, 1999). These authors, for example, applied battleship diagrams to illustrate and support their interpretations.…”

“…Most existing typologies of graves, gravestones and any related paraphernalia are based on data collected in the UK or the USA (Buckham, 2000; Deetz, 1996; Mallios and Caterino, 2011, etc. ), thus losing relevance when applied to funeral and commemoration traditions of other cultural spheres.…”