Gender and Life Stage

Normally after reading an article for anth I can usually tear apart the article and criticize it for being too beat around the bush, too boring, or too data laden, but I actually found this one to be a good balance of physical evidence, comparison between cases, theory, and tables to present the findings. The article I read was 'Rings of life: the role of early metalwork in mediating the gendered life course' by Joanna Sofaer Derevenski. Her strategy in this article was to present the theory she formulated from study and comparison of two sites utilizing early metalwork in the Copper Age of the Carpathian Basin, and present the data from these  two sites in the same location that existed during two different time periods at Tiszapolgar: Bastanga, and middle copper age culture seen in Bodrogkeresztur culture.

Through cross comparison of two different time periods at very similar sites during the Copper Age, the civilizations on the Tiszapulgar sites, Sofaer Deverenski is able to explore the changing role of metalwork in mediating the age - gender distinctions of social identity. Within each time period she focuses on the skeletal remains and grave goods to serve as an indicator of how metal work/metal possessions differed between people of different stages in the life course, and used the distinct changes in the use of certain grave goods as means to formulate her hypotheses that copper goods were used to convey differences within the complex constructions of female and males gendered experiences.

I honestly thought that her approach in using the position of skeletal remains, compared to the copper goods (or lack thereof) to determine the significance and stage of life that person had entered when they were buried was the best way to approach her theoretical investigation. She compared these behaviours and archaeological finds between the Bastanga and Bodrogkeresztur civilizations and was able to find differences and definite distinctions between important life events of the two cultures that helped to create distinctions between the two civilizations in regard to their importance of certain life events.

Overall I found Sofaer Derevenski's article to be very well thought out and very well supported in her use of archeological finds compared to position of skeletal remains in creating the hypotheses that copper goods were used to signify a particular important life stage, and that the sudden change of these finds indicates an ideological change in the conception and importance placed on certain life stages. I really agree with her that by using an absence or change in a particular funerary practice or grave goods can we can  signify a change in beliefs, just as much as the presence of a particular grave good could provide.

I feel a bit like i'm failing by not identifying any dislikes or cons for this article, but I believe that  Sofaer Derevenski did a great job of creating theories and providing enough evidence to convince me that the presence and change in finding certain copper grave goods when compared with the position of skeletal remains can tell us something significant about the life stage they were in, and the possible dichotomy of gendered experiences signified by these copper goods.

Goodbye reading break, hello last month of school! here's something that sums up how I predict my last month to go....




always trying to catch that elusive red dot....

anyways, hope reading break was great for you all! see you next week

Baylie

Memorial Monument Analysis: Ross Bay Cemetery, Why are there so many dead babies?

      After venturing into Ross Bay Cemetery we settled on a data set of infant graves in the section called Potter‘s Field. A Potter’s Field is a section of graves in a cemetery for people who didn’t have any money for proper burials or family to pay for them either, mainly resulting in impoverished persons, stillborns, and criminals being buried here. This section was located a part F of Ross Bay Cemetery (The Old Cemeteries society of Victoria, 2011). We focused on infant graves from the impoverished section, and wanted to find trends between infant graves between 1867-1900. We decided that comparing it to another group of baby graves would have been too large a task for this project, so we instead tried to focus on Irish infant graves in order to explain irish immigration, and also discovered many anglo-saxon infant graves along the way that helped make up our dataset.

      In the research questions I formulated for looking at the graves, I want to see if I could identify different trends between the grave stones of infants as well as explain why many of the stones had multiple names listed on them, and if I could find out why there were so many baby deaths from 1867-1900.

      From my research on the Ross Bay Cemetery website I was able to find out the section of infant graves we focused on were located in the place for stillborns and the destitute (The Old Cemeteries society of Victoria, 2011). Since I know the origin of the grave site, I feel comfortable claiming that the ten graves we focused on were most likely premature deaths due to the poverty and unsafe living conditions. As we looked at the graves we noticed that a few of the grave stones (#1,2,5,6 & 7) all had more than one name located on the grave stone, which I believe has to do with the impoverished conditions of the burial and a need to save money and time on only one grave. I believe that knowing that the grave is for impoverished persons and finding that half of the graves were for multiple people after studying their inscriptions closely, my question about why so many graves had multiple names is answered. I believe that the high number of grave stones for multiple people,all of which include infants, correlates directly to being from an impoverished family. It's also possible that due to the close range of some of the graves to one another, the bodies of the mass memorial stones may not be buried there. I also believe that because of the impoverished conditions, if a parent was to die and leave an infant behind, the infant may not be recieving the care they need which may explain why grave stone #1 was marked with an inscription that was for a 69 year old mother who died one year before her young daughter, who died in 1900.

 I also looked into the origins of the names on the tomb stones from a basic internet name search, and 4/10 graves (#1,4,5, & 7) were all of Irish descent, and the rest of Anglo-Saxon descent (Name Origin Research, 2009). While this isn't 100% scientific, the knowledge from the database and my knowledge of Irish surnames was enough to make me confident to be able to hypothesize that due to the time period that most of these deaths occurred (between 1867-1900), it coincides with the Irish potato famine that occurred from 1845-1849 (McGowan 2007). Because the Irish potato famine happened under 20 years before the deaths occurred, and knowing that the graves in our dataset were mostly of Irish or Anglo-Saxon descent I believe that the reason for the large amount of Irish and Anglo-Saxon infant graves in Ross Bay Cemetery could possibly be due to the failure to thrive in Canada after relocating from Ireland. As McGown states in his article, Grosse Isle near Quebec was a huge recieving post for people emigrating from Ireland to escape the potato famnine (2007). The harsh conditions of the boats on the way over caused Typhus to spread rapidly in Canada. It's possible that these deaths in Victoria could have resulted from poor health and exposure to Typhus from emigrating to canada in poor conditions (McGowan 2007). He states that by 1861 over 2 million people left Ireland, so immigration was going on until the early 60's, it could correlate with the deaths seen in Victoria seen in our dataset that begin in 1867.

      So although I can't be 100% sure whether our dataset of infant graves were victims of the Irish potato famine and a failed attempt at settling in after immigration, I can be certain that due to the location of the graves in the cemetery, it was most likely impoverished conditions that caused the majority of these babies died prematurely. I also believe that since half of the grave stones were for multiple people, we can claim that this was done to save time and money, and there's a possibility that the bodies weren't buried there at all and we're just looking at a reminder of their lives in cold stone.

here's our map of Irish and Anglo-Saxon infant burials!


View Ross Bay European Infant and Children Burials in a larger map

Bibliography

McGowan, Mark. 2007. Famine, Facts and Fabrication: An Examination of Diaries from the Irish Famine Migration to Canada, The Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 33(2), p. 48-55.


The Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria. 2011, "Religious Partitions at Ross Bay Cemetery", Old Cemeteries Society of Victoria [online] available at
http://www.oldcem.bc.ca/cem_rb_par.htm

Origin Name Research. 2007, "Surname Database: Last Name Origins", The Internet Surname Database [online] available at
http://www.surnamedb.com



what's so awesome about the middle class?

Okay, other than being comprised of the largest group in society, what's so exciting about the middle class? They don't have as cool grave goods, and might not even have any sort of elaborate burial, but studying the middle class of any society is the key to understanding what it a given society consisted of most, and how it operated. Although the rich are interesting, as they often acted like 'I do what I want!' and often had really beautiful and ornate grave goods, as we all know, hegemonic ideals don't always represent what the whole country was like.

So after a bit of research into the subject, i'm having an extremely difficult time finding articles that focus only on middle class burial. The majority of articles i've read, including this one about burials in peru, only really mentions middle class burials when comparing them to high class burials, and why they aren't considered middle class.

http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/pdfplus/4141562.pdf

the only article I was successfully able to find without driving myself crazy was an article about 'the emerging middle class' in Bath which used social history records about the general infirmary at the time. Although I found this article in the archaeological section of jstor, it uses marxist theory and historical records to reconstruct the emerging middle class that developed through this infirmary and no archaeological evidence whatsoever to talk about class or status.

http://www.jstor.org.ezproxy.library.uvic.ca/stable/pdfplus/4286579.pdf

So, I've concluded that middle class burials are rarely spoken about because they come in second to the lavish high class burials, and are usually used to create distinctions between middle and upper class burials, without going into much detail. I can conclude that middle class burials are part of a society that needs more research, as exploring the status of the rich isn't an accurate representation of the society as a whole.