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Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality

Folklore, April, 2002 by Clare Gittings

By Sarah Tarlow. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 207 pp. Illus. 55.00 [pounds sterling] (hbk), 16.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 6-631-20613-2 (hbk), 6-631-20614-0 (pbk)

In the early 1990s, the archaeologist Sarah Tarlow worked on a project to record every surviving memorial stone in the graveyards of Orkney, 3,021 monuments in all. These range in date from the pre-Reformation tombs in St Magnus Cathedral to memorials erected after the Second World War. Her analysis of that material formed her Ph.D. thesis and she has now written this volume based on it. While much of the data collected by the Orkney Graveyards Project was inevitably statistical (see Chapter 3), in the book she has concentrated on a qualitative and discursive approach, illustrated with line drawings and black and white photographs.

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For those who are not archaeologists--no doubt the majority of readers of this journal--what does this book have to offer? Tarlow's approach may find considerable sympathy among those interested in folklore. She argues that "we should be moving towards writing archaeologies of emotion and experience" (p. 19) and that "a failure to consider emotions in the past, especially in a work ostensibly related to death and dying, would be an injustice to the people who erected these monuments" (p. 21). As she points out, the study of graveyards is all too often relegated to school projects and they are seen by historians unversed in the use of material culture as being of a lower order than documentary sources. Nor is she just concerned with elite memorials, as has often been the case in previous (particularly art historical) studies (pp. 16-17). She generally writes in a way that does not exclude the non-archaeologist and includes a glossary of Orcadian, religious and architectural words--but sadly, not of archaeological terms.

In some ways, the resulting book is really two books in one, each perhaps for a slightly different readership. On the one hand, she provides useful outlines of the development and methodologies of historical archaeology, including quite lengthy theoretical discussions of emotion and metaphor. These are obviously of value to archaeology students and provide those from other disciplines with useful insights into areas of current archaeological concern. Her discussion of applying ideas of metaphor to material culture will be of particular interest and relevance to folklorists. On the other hand, the central chapters of the book present the new material revealed by the Orkney Graveyards Project.

While these two different strands can be seen as a strength of the book, adding to its interest for the reader, this does also present some problems. One is with the title, which makes no mention of Orkney graveyards, the principal research material for at least four of the seven chapters (the cover photograph, of war graves, certainly does not suggest Orkney). The title simultaneously misleads and appears to devalue the very approach which Tarlow rightly sets out to promote.

One might also question whether the metaphors employed in the inscriptions found in Orkney graveyards really need such an extensive theoretical introduction, however intrinsically interesting it may be. It is disappointing that Tarlow ducked out of discussing some of the thornier aspects of the problem of style, choosing to relegate much of it to a footnote (p. 45). This is where some historians might well take issue with her central premise that emotional changes can be tracked through monuments. Likewise, her examples of style being message-bearing--neoclassical civic architecture and "farmhouse" kitchens--seem too random fully to convince the sceptic. It would have been helpful in this respect to know more, if possible, about the commissioning of these Orkney gravestones. Who were the makers and what was their relationship to the bereaved?

While the early chapters look at theory in isolation, a more fruitful approach is adopted in the central body of the book where standard ideas and interpretations are explored, and sometimes challenged, in the context of the Orkney material. For the immediate post-Reformation period, the small size of Tarlow's sample makes it difficult to make generalisations, despite interesting discussions of individual monuments, in particular, the imagery of doorways and journeys which she discerns in them.

This study really gets into its stride in the chapters covering the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries, where the number of gravestones rises substantially in a "gravestone boom" (pp. 112 ff.) Here it is possible for her to use the Orkney material to look at a series of key issues: display of social status, affective individualism, romanticism, growing secularisation, attitudes to Victorian mourning customs and the much-questioned twentieth-century "taboo on death." The resulting mixture of detail about Orkney and its people, viewed in the light of wider debates, is the real strength of this book. Throughout, there is a sense of the writer's own humanity ("Love, Death and Shopping" is memorable subheading on page 139) and an evident concern for the long-dead people who are the subjects of her study. There is a great deal of interest to be found in this book and it is to be hoped that it will encourage others who choose death as their subject matter to be as humane in the way they write about it.

Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality

Folklore, April, 2002 by Clare Gittings

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