Harold Mytum

Language as symbol in churchyard monuments: The use of Welsh in nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Pembrokeshire

Graveyard memorials combine form, decoration and inscription to communicate the social persona of the deceased to those visiting the burial ground. In Pembrokeshire, south‐east Wales, a linguistic ...

Public health and private sentiment: The development of cemetery architecture and funerary monuments from the eighteenth century onwards

Abstract With the rapid increase of city populations, the traditional forms of body disposal within European towns became a threat to public health during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once initial conservatism and vested interests were overcome, a new form of mortuary behaviour developed. This involved large cemeteries with private plots and their attendant memorials, following on models already applied in the colonies. These changes certainly led to a reduction in the risks to public health, but shifts in the attitudes to death also hastened the abandonment of crowded city centre graveyards. The cemeteries offered much more scope for exhibition of material success and remembrance of the dead.

Popular attitudes to memory, the body, and social identity: the rise of external commemoration in Britain, Ireland and New England

Abstract A comparative analysis of samples of external memorials from burial grounds in Britain, Ireland and New England reveals a widespread pattern of change in monument style and content, and exponential growth in the number of permanent memorials from the 18th century onwards. Although manifested in regionally distinctive styles on which most academic attention has so far been directed, the expansion reflects global changes in social relationships and concepts of memory and the body. An archaeological perspective reveals the importance of external memorials in articulating these changing attitudes in a world of increasing material consumption.

Ways of Writing in Post-Medieval and Historical Archaeology: Introducing Biography

Abstract Archaeologists use writing as an important method of communicating results and interpretations, but have only recently started to consider what this implies about their research, and the effect that any style of writing has on the intended audience. Whilst public interpretation has widened forms of discourse to include narrative, performance and biography, few such academic and professional outputs have been attempted in British post-medieval archaeology, although in the wider discipline of North American historical archaeology there has been some experimentation. It is argued that biography offers new ways of encountering data, as well as opening up different modes of interpretation and communication within professional and academic arenas.

Biographies of Projects, People and Places: Archaeologists and William and Martha Harries at Henllys Farm, Pembrokeshire

Abstract Extensive excavations at Henllys Farm revealed the remains of a 16th-century house that was continuously occupied until its demolition in the 19th century. For the second half of the buildings life it was the centre of a tenant farm, and the Harries family rented this for several generations. Using the archaeological evidence together with surviving documents, the traditional archaeological narrative is extended by considering the biographies of the research project, the house and William and Martha Harries. The voice of the archaeologist in the present is contrasted with invented responses from past inhabitants to highlight potential differences in perception and meaning, and emphasize lived experience over impersonal structures revealed through excavation

Materiality and memory : an archaeological perspective on the popular adoption of linear time in Britain

Archaeologists increasingly realise that prehistoric peoples had their own ideas about time. The concept of linear, measurable time emerged in learned Europe largely in the first millennium. Here the author tracks how, with the broadening of literacy in sixteenth-century Britain, dates start appearing on numerous items of popular culture. The dated objects in turn feed back into the way that people of all social levels began to see themselves and their place in history.

A Comparison of Nineteenth and Twentieth century Anglican and Nonconformist Memorials in North Pembrokeshire

Memorials recorded at north Pembrokeshire nonconformist burial grounds are compared with those from Anglican churchyards in the same region. Variations are identified over time and space based in part on denomination, but also on location. Welsh was more frequently used on memorials in nonconformist burial grounds, though even this was a minority choice until at least the middle of the nineteenth century. During much of the nineteenth century nonconformists did not use memorials or burial grounds as arenas for materially defining doctrinal differences, even when they acquired their own burial grounds. Tall pedestal monument forms became popular in nonconformist burial grounds, with crosses preferred in Anglican churchyards. The use of decorative motifs was consistently higher by nonconformists, though cross and IHS motifs were largely an Anglican phenomenon. There was also variation between urban and rural graveyards, with Welsh less in evidence in the small town of Newport. Issues of difference and similarity are thus examined over time and space, and comparisons drawn with less intensively studied examples from England and Ireland.

A Tale of Two Treatments: The Materiality of Internment on the Isle of Man in World Wars I and II

The Isle of Man was used by the British government for civilian internment during both World Wars, and in both cases this greatly altered the population levels on the island. The authorities organised, housed, and controlled the internees very differently in each conflict, however. This chapter explores the different material experiences of male internees in the First World War camps at specially built Knockaloe and at a requisitioned holiday camp at Douglas. These will be contrasted with the Second World War when internees lived in camps created from adapted boarding houses at several resorts around the coast. These two internment strategies affected both locals and internees in very different ways.

Mortality Symbols in Action: Protestant and Catholic Memorials in Early-Eighteenth-Century West Ulster

Material culture can carry many complementary and even conflicting messages simultaneously, to be read in varied ways by those observing it. Graveyard memorials link the living and the dead within a communal setting and are active in reinforcing conscious and unconscious values or in challenging them. The graveyard monuments of West Ulster offer an unusually rich sample of monuments with mortality symbols (skull, crossed bones, coffin, bell, and hourglass) as well as texts. Graveyards were the scenes of religious and social tension in 18th-century Ireland, and the memorials with their symbols and texts can be used to investigate the dynamics of identity played out in this arena. Although memorials were important in the dynamics of class and ethnic identities, emphasis is placed on religious identity here, an aspect of great importance in the past but one that has received less attention in historical archaeology than it deserves. Protestants and Catholics chose to use some of the same symbols on their memorials but assigned them meanings and associations appropriate to their theologies. Although they normally were buried in the same Anglican-controlled graveyard, symbol and text reflected and reinforced separate religious identities.

The Pedagogic Value of Field Schools: Some Frameworks

The form and content of archaeological field schools can vary greatly, but with the increased professionalisation of both field archaeology and university teaching, far more sophisticated planning is required for a field school to meet all its many expectations than used to be the case. Issues of breadth and depth of training, the structure and quality of supervision, and the extent to which a field school can prepare students for non-University fieldwork are all debated by both CRM professionals and academics. Few doubt the value of field schools, but what is seen as most important is contentious; these issues vary internationally only by degree, and all directors have to balance student and potential employers’ expectations while creating an ethical project that also contributes to our understanding of the past.