A very interesting debate indeed and so, unbidden, I will toss in my two-and-a-half bits (inflation). Fair warning: I wax a bit long, if not eloquent, and I thank you ahead of time if you get all the way through.
I am finishing my parts of a report on a project that revealed a pre-contact Native American burial location. It necessitated removing 16 inhabitants plus the scattered remains of 6 more individuals, as well as analyzing and reporting on their remains. It also, as one might imagine, involved considerable communication with nearby tribes who might have a claim to the remains (the remains were not found on federal or tribal land and so do not fall under NAGPRA but New Mexico has definitive laws, regulations, and policies for remains on state or private lands).
In New Mexico, the location itself is an archaeological site and, therefore, subject to laws and regulations regarding sites. Human remains, on the other hand, no matter where they are found or how old they are, are not, with regard to law, archaeological items even though archaeologists find, excavate, analyze, and report on them—assuming they are determined not to be modern or modern-ish crime victims, a decision that involves law enforcement officials, the OMI, and the State Historic Preservation Division prior to excavation. Instead, they are legally seen as what they are: the remains of humans. As such, they do not belong to anyone since, pursuant to the 13th Amendment to the US Constitution, it is not lawful in the US for anyone to own anyone else, no matter how dead that person might appear to be.
I say "appear to be" because there are, as we all know as anthropologists, a multitude of cultural ways of perceiving of the dead. Although the tribes consulted during my project were quite cooperative regarding the legal requirements for moving "the ancestors" or "the elders" (we heard both terms), and in the end cooperated with each other to allow one tribe to make a claim to the remains pursuant to New Mexico laws and regulations, we were also made to understand that their cooperation was predicated on the realization that they had no real say-so in how the project itself was designed or carried out on land that was not theirs. Further, and this was revelatory to me, they would actually have preferred that the remains, their graves and grave items, and the entire site be bulldozed rather than being excavated by us and the remains removed from "where they belonged." Why?, I asked, somewhat incredulously but not wanting to appear too startled. Because people to things to the land and they do things to places where the elders lived and still reside, that's just how it is, and those processes are part of what makes their landscapes what they are—Indians, at least in New Mexico, are way ahead of anthropologists in the concept of the "anthropocene." One tribal liaison person explained, carefully, to me that if the site and its inhabitants were disturbed by bulldozers, it would have been little different than if the site had been subject to natural erosion processes that also disturbed and moved the remains but left them reasonably close to where they were placed upon their deaths. The tribe would have mourned the disturbance, to be sure, but they would have known that the elders were still basically where they were buried, basically in their last home. It is, therefore, of considerable importance that the remains be returned to a tribe with a connection to them so that they can be re-interred near their previous home, with the appropriate ceremonial processes to aid the dead in being who they became after they died. The tribes remain very concerned about the remains of the dead who now reside (which is how they are seen) in boxes in repository shelves. That is much more tragic than for them to be disturbed by bulldozers.
In a somewhat similar situation on a different project, my crews excavated the remains of several pre-contact individuals in single-burial settings rather than cemeteries. In consultations with the nearest tribe, which quickly established a claim to any remains that might be found even before our work commenced, the decision was made, on the part of the tribal officials, to find a location on nearby tribal land where any humans could be re-interred; that is, to create a cemetery. This was necessary because the sites themselves were small and subject to development and we all feared there would be no place to re-bury the individuals that would assure they wouldn't be disturbed again. Finding a re-burial place that was close to all the last homes of all the dead satisfied their need to be as close to home as possible as they continued their life journeys (whatever those might be, and that knowledge is carefully guarded).
The point is that, as James has asserted in historic Euroamerican situations, cemeteries are never abandoned. This is certainly true for the Native Americans with which I have dealt over the course of a long career, and applies to the burial locations of individuals as well as cemeteries, including historic and modern cemeteries. As a colleague of mine is fond of saying, for them "the past is the present is the future." The dead might be dead but they are never dead; they still live there and they must be considered when anything happens that might impact them. After all, if the past is the present is the future, and we do something to screw up the present, we not only potentially threaten the future, we also potentially threaten the past. And if we screw up the past, we might also screw up the present and the future. On a personal level, if I screw up the past, I might cease to exist. How can I know I exist if I don't participate appropriately with the past, the present, and the future? And since I am a member of a community, if I screw up the past, the present, and the future, I screw it up for everyone.
Before you scoff, consider that there are far more people in the world who are not nearly so enamored with clocks and NatGeo fold-out timelines as are we who originate from western, Euroamerican, linear-time worldview(s). For many of them, and again there are many of them, space and place are more important than time. Beyond that, the importance of space and place in our western, Euroamerican socio-cultures cannot be minimized. Consider the importance attached to "the old home place," "the old country," decrying how much my neighborhood or hometown has changed since I left (I still live in my hometown and I mourn its passing every day).
Even the concept of "maintenance" of a cemetery is a culturally- and socially-derived one. What constitutes "maintenance"? Heck, in the part of northern New Mexico where I live, cemeteries rarely undergo anything resembling regular "maintenance" until right at Memorial Day, when families converge on the plots of their ancestors, clean the graves—meaning raking leaves, pulling weeds, picking up brush, etc.—sometimes enhance the graves with rock or concrete borders or new paint on an old headstone or plant flowers, place flowers on the graves, tell stories about the dead, and then head off for hotdogs, hamburgers, and so forth, and rarely visit the graves again for another year. Yet if one were to accuse them of not caring for the graves or their inhabitants, or of—God forbid—abandoning the cemetery, one would be inviting violent oral and physical confrontation. We can assuage ourselves thinking that those places live on in our memories but we must consider that for many people, all around us, they live on because they live on; this is particularly true of the places where we bury our dead.
Jeff
Jeffrey L. Boyer, RPA
Supervisory Archaeologist/Project Director
Office of Archaeological Studies, Museum of New Mexico
* The Center for New Mexico Archaeology
* PO Box 2087
* Santa Fe, New Mexico 87504
* e-mail: [log in to unmask]
"First I would learn to dig well and skillfully, then I would become able to analyze archaeological findings, and finally I would become a theoretician." — Richard "Scotty" MacNeish
________________________________________
From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [[log in to unmask]] on behalf of Rich Green [[log in to unmask]]
Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 12:13 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: [SPAM?] Re: neglected burying grounds
Interesting debate here. I tend to agree with James Gibb when he
allowed: "If I bury family members in a small cemetery, then depart to
make a life elsewhere, I haven't abandoned my cemetery. It continues to
serve the purpose for which I intended it." It follows then that if the
property falls in disrepair it is being neglected as Daniel Davis mentioned.
The term "abandoned cemetery" seems to be used as a legal means to
re-purpose a property when the need arises.
Rich Green
Historic Archaeological Research
418 N. Main Street
Brownstown, IN 47220
Office: (812) 919-4122
Mobile: (765) 427-4082
On 8/25/2015 9:33 AM, Davis, Daniel (KYTC) wrote:
> If you bury your family members in a cemetery and move elsewhere and die and leave no living kin in the location of the cemetery, there is no one left to manage your family cemetery. It becomes overgrown and headstones are broken and displaced. In technical and legal terms, the cemetery has been abandoned by the living. Simply calling it neglected isn't correct - you may still have living relatives in the area who are just lazy and don't tend after the cemetery. That's neglect. Abandonment indicates that there is no living person in the area that can claim descent from the interred. We expend a great deal of effort in trying to find next-of-kin, even lazy ones.
>
> Removing all burials from a cemetery doesn't make that area an abandoned cemetery - it changes the purpose of the land and in all likelihood, makes it something else altogether (like a road, a neighborhood, a strip mall, a theme park, etc.). After all, it's not likely that a cemetery would be relocated without the need to re-purpose the land on which it was located.
>
> My point again is that roads are often widened or the geometrics of a curve revised or an intersection reconstructed because of an unsafe condition in an existing road that may have been built in the 1930s. Who needs the road? Anyone who might have been killed without that widening, or revision, or reconstruction.
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Jim
> Sent: Tuesday, August 25, 2015 9:18 AM
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: neglected burying grounds
>
> This isn't a theoretical point--at least not wholly so--for me either. I don't often deal with roads...I deal with developers planning residential and commercial subdivisions. They typically present the community with a two-option solution, when there are others such as changing the scale of the proposed development or not building at all on a particular parcel. They carefully use words to support their particular plan. As an analogy, consider realtors' use of the word 'home.' They say they sell homes, but they sell houses. 'Home' has more nuanced meanings and is best reserved for what families--even families of one--build. If I bury family members in a small cemetery, then depart to make a life elsewhere, I haven't abandoned my cemetery. It continues to serve the purpose for which I intended it. Do we have to build a road through it? Who actually needs that road? More often than not, special interests intent on development need the road. They build, they make money, they l
eave.
>
> I don't want to start an anti-development diatribe...I'm not anti-development...but communities and homeowners need to assert their rights and protect their property and cultural interests. Our profession, anthropologically based as it is, should help them. One way of doing that is to make sure we develop and use terms that are based in science, not commerce or law, and then insist on adherence to those terms in public discourse. I suggest we reserve the term 'abandoned cemetery' for those burial grounds from which an earnest effort has been made to remove all human remains. Neglected cemeteries are those for which no group or individual maintains the cemetery as originally intended. And this definition raises issues with those cemeteries that communities did not originally conceive as fenced and mowed, but as places in which their ancestors returned to the earth whence they came.
>
>
> James G. Gibb
> Gibb Archaeological Consulting
> 2554 Carrollton Road
> Annapolis, Maryland USA ?? 21403
> 443.482.9593 (Land) 410.693.3847 (Cell)
> www.gibbarchaeology.net ? www.porttobacco.blogspot.com
>
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