The historical archaeology of mortuary behavior at a nineteenth-century Almshouse burial ground
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Abstract
Archaeological investigations of historical American
cemeteries have not often employed scholarly literature on the history of American death practices. Interpretive frameworks used in archaeological studies of historical cemeteries often rely on models derived from prehistorians.
Documentary evidence has been principally used to answer questions of identification and chronology, and to calculate economic scales of artifacts found in graves. Historical archaeologists and historians have recently called for the integration of secondary historical literature within the interpretative frameworks used to describe and explain
archaeologically recovered historical material culture.
Embracing this suggestion, this thesis examines and
interprets the material culture recovered from the
archaeological excavation of a nineteenth-century
Massachusetts almshouse burial ground in the context of the social historical record on American deathways. Scholarly research on American death practices documents a transformation in social structures, attitudes, and material culture in the late eighteenth and nineteenth century that some historians have called the beautification of death.
Late eighteenth and nineteenth-century Americans created a wide range of decorative arts associated with death and funerals. Some researchers have interpreted this period as a reaction to an increasingly turbulent world, full of changes in social and economic structures. The transformation in death practices was socially pervasive and
fostered the commercialization of the funeral industry.
Partially as a result of the successful commercialization of deathways, specialized ornamental coffin hardware was widely
used, even for coffins purchased for people at the lowest end of the socio-economic continuum. Paupers interred at the Uxbridge Almshouse burial ground were given minimally decent care at death. The minimal nature of their funerary treatment is vividly captured in the archaeological record
of the site, and underscores the historical fact of the dire social and economic circumstances of people who received economic assistance from the town.
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