Brady Tomb: Old Cathedral Cemetery

On my way back from laying out the Peschke show at Bryn Mawr College, I stopped at the Old Cathedral Cemetery, next to Our Mother of Sorrows church on 48th & Lancaster Ave. There's a monument there that matches a type I referred to as "Steeple Cross Grave Monuments" (Dec. 14, 2011). The tomb belongs to Owen Brady (+1891) and his wife Mary (+1887). On the right side of the monument, two additional family members are marked, John I. Brady (+1907) and his wife Mary (+1906).

This tomb is much much larger than the other two at Laurel Hill and Woodland. The columns are a red granite and the cross is engraved with a cross, an inscription "Dux Lux Rex Pax" and a crown. The base of the monument contains a small identifies its maker as "Billings & Co., Phila." This little detail should offer some insights on the dissemination of this type, its appearance and disappearance in the 1880s and 1890s. I did a quick sketch of the whole monument below:

Tombstone Project

"Master Builders of Lancaster," my methods seminar on architectural history had its second meeting. Last week, we spent sometime in Lancaster's cemetery, where students took measurements of assigned graves. Using their measurements, they were required to build a 3D-model of their tombstone. The exercise was intended to teach students basic tools of documentation (measuremnt), as well as, to learn Google Sketchup. The results were amazing. One thing I've learned about my students is that if you give them practical tasks, they make great leaps. Here is an example of a 3D model. Students with no previous training in 3D modeling, learned how to use the software and construct virtual realities.

J. Harry Hartman

Quick stroll through Lancaster cemetery before the rain broke out. Picked out one funerary monument, vaguely related to the steeple type discussed previously. First, I was tempted to sketch the grave of Frederick Rauch, F&M's first president and co-founder of Mercersburg Theology. This is the only grave I've ever seen to reflect on Hegel. But I held back. Instead, I admired the 1881 tomb of J. Harry Hartman who died at the age of 18. J. Harry's father, Samuel, became well known in the pharmaceutical industry as the creator of PE-RU-NA, a potion that cured catarrh. Dr. Samuel died in 1918 and was buried next to his son, as did J. Harry's mother in 1930. Below the statue and above the inscribed plaque, there is a circle with J. Harry's monogram. It's not the most readable of monograms, but it combines "H" and "J" and "h" in an ingenious way.

Steeple Cross Grave Monuments

One of my favorite grave monument types incorporates a plinth, a plain cross, compressed columns at the corners and a massive steeple. So far, I have found three examples of this monument and it's likely that they were produced by the same company: Harrington Monument (left) in Woodland Cemetery, Hand Monument (right) in Laurel Hill Cemetery, and another example at Old Cathedral Cemetery on 48th and Lancaster Ave., Philadelphia. I am assuming some Frank Furness influence.

Stone Monuments in Bronze

The late-19th century is wonderful in two tendencies that seem contradictory from our modernist perspective. With the advent of the industrial revolution, new materials emerged in every aspect of life. Molding bronze into traditional stone forms was one such innovation applied in sculpture and sculptural relief. Dyeing the bronze gray completed the illusion. The advantage of new technologies was their ability to out-due traditional materials in decorative detail. If new technologies allowed you to fill even more surfaces with decoration, so much the better for industrialization. The Victorian sensibility also had no scruples in shifting across material without any concern for honesty. Whereas each piece of stone had to be uniquely carved, the molded pseudo-stone could be mass produced.

During a morning walk through Farm Hill Cemetery in Middletown, I discovered something I had never noticed before. What I always thought was a particularly hard form of granite turns out to be cast bronze. Consider the Crook/Grosley family monument (above) , erected in 1884. It looks like a spectacular stone monument. Looking more carefully at its rusticated base, we read the maker's mark MONUMENTAL BRONZE CO. BRIDGEPORT, CT.
Bronze funerary monuments present an interesting problem. Family tombs served for multiple burials. Space was provisioned on the stone surfaces and the carver inscribed the names and circumstances of each new burial sequentially. But this is not possible when your monument is made by an industrial mold. These bronze monuments came up with a good solution. The inscribed panels within the ornate architectural frame are actually bolted onto the monument with screws. If you look closely at the panel of Oscar Crook, Ellen Crook and infant (below), you'll see three bolts disguised in floral design.
The Crook/Grosley monument has two sides naming deceased family members, but the remaining two panels contain visual images, a cross draped with garlands (visible in the first image above) and a classicizing maiden holding an anchor (below).
Although beautifully designed and contributing to the overall narrative of the monument, the visual panels must have also served as place holders. In a wonderful way, they are simply waiting to be replaced by a future family member. The visual message awaits for the text.

Location: 41°32'08.1" N, 72°38'26.1" W
New Farm Hill Cemetery, Middletown, CT 06457

Medieval Fonts: Prior Tomb

In an earlier posting on Wesleyan University's 1868 Memorial Chapel, I mentioned that the font used in the datestone is typical of brownstone funerary monuments of the period. This morning, Popi and I went for a walk at Farm Hill Cemetery, and I got a chance to photograph some of these examples. The tomb of Josiah Prior (1808-1886) and his wife Sally (1897-1856) is of the draped obelisk type. The names of the deceased are carved directly on the obelisk, but the family name at the base of the monument protrudes from a recessed frame. Like the Memorial Chapel font, the carver removed the stone around the letters rather than the letters themselves.
Location: 41°32'07.0" N, 72°38'26.4" W
New Farm Hill Cemetery, Middletown, CT 06457

American Home Burials

If you think about it, funerary art and architecture make up a large chunk of our studies of ancient and medieval material culture. Whether churches, mausolea, tombstones, or statues, our surviving specimen of funerary treasures had a prominent public presence. Death and commemoration was dealt as a public endeavor and involved redemption, communal memory and visible inter-generational responsibility. But most of funerary practices took part in the private rather than the public realm. Thinking publicly about death in antiquity conforms to our own customs, which are higly sanitized and subcontracted to professional strangers. Incidentally, the professional strangers call their industry funeral "homes." A newspaper report on the rise of private burials in the United Sates offers a conceptual entryway into the private realms of the past. The medieval home was certainly a multi-functional realm lacking the modern divisions between private and public realms.

The average American funeral costs $6,000. Given the economic downturn of many households, some families are taking burial practices in their own hands bringing costs down to $300 but, more importnatly, enganging intimately with the life cycle. Katie Zamie of the New York Times reports on this phenomenon, in "Home Burials Offer an Intimate Alternative," (July 20, 2009). A few years earlier, Elisabeth Westrate's documentary "A Family Undertaking" explored this phenomenon on PBS (Point of View, Aug. 3, 2004). The funeral industry is naturally lobbying heavily against home burials; as a result, Oregon just passed a bill requiring professional certification. Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska and New York already have laws that require funeral directors to handle the dead. But in all other states, the family can take over the preparation of the body and its burial. Consider, for example, what the state of Vermont says about the issue here. Paying close attention to home burials today might bring us closer to the actual practices of the past.

Where to Be Buried: The Immigrant's Choice

During my last visit to Fernwood Cemetery in Philadelphia, I noticed a new memorial in the Greek-American section. My visits here are personal (upkeep of family grave) but also academic (analyzing diaspora material culture). See posting, Buried in Bottles (June 7, 2008). New monuments come with a dose of sadness as, in many cases, I know the deceased individuals, and I learn of their death at the cemetery. One recent burial that I noticed during my visit was Fotios Karalis, who died five months ago at the age of 86. The tomb's meticulous upkeep, the constant burning of the candle and the fresh flowers reflect the family's commitment to the upkeep of memory. The Karalis monument contains typical features found in Greek tombs, even when the options are constrained by the regulations of a historical Protestant cemetery. One source of tension seen frequently in Greek-American tombs is the Greek desire to fence off the human body to avoid stepping (a sign of desecration), which contradicts the idyllic park aesthetics that require the uniform coverage of grass. Any kind of enclosure is a nuisance to the cemetery authorities who must regularly mow the uniform lawn. The fence seen in the Karalis monument is a common compromise between cultural traditions, limiting enclosure to the concrete base of the future tombstone. The fence communicates the desire to protect the body without actually demarcating the body and violating cemetery rules.

Pictures on tombs tend to be portraits of the deceased. The Karalis monument is extraordinary in its visual images, namely two laminated photographs nailed on the cross. Both images show the deceased in his village in Greece. The lower photo (left) is framed by a vertical wooden post belonging to a porch in the village. The person who took the photo stands under the porch, shooting Karalis in the distance. Once nailed on the cross, the wooden post captured in the photograph runs parallel to the wooden post. The real wood (of the cross) and the wood from Greece (holding up the house) reverberate with each other. The pins that hold the image of Karalis on the cross also reverberate with the image of Christ on the cross represented in an icon. The photograph surface is plastic. They have been laminated to protect the image from the rain. A close up of the laminated surface shows specks of grass, thrown up on the image from the mechanical mowers cutting the cemetery's lawn. Grass from the ground has invaded the vertical image giving it, at the same, time a three dimensional texture and dimension of reality. Such art-historical readings were not certainly not intentional. The haphazard juxtapositions between real and unreal, present and past, here (Philadelphia) and there (Greece) animate the monument as a work of cultural production.

The inclusion of photos from the deceased individual's homeland is on its own interesting. The Greek American immigration narrative expressed in songs and attitudes inlcudes a yearning to be buried in Greece. Such a return of the body brings closure to the immigrant journey. Being buried away from the extended family also translates to a fear of not being remembered ritually. Burial in the "xenitia" (foreign land) means that the tomb will be forgotten among strangers. The extended family will not be able to perform the continuous rituals of commemoration, the trisagions, the continuous lighting of the candle and the visual upkeep. Most Greek immigrants of Karalis' generation faced a powerful dilemma. If they were buried in the U.S., their tomb could be visited by their immediate loved ones (spouses, children) but not by the extended kin. With geographical mobility in the U.S., the next generation might not even be anywhere close to the city that the deceased was buried. Burial back in the village of birth in Greece, nevertheless, guarantees a locus of visitation, a point of origin. After all, you would be buried next to your parents, grandparents, siblings and cousins. The photographs in the Karalis tomb resolve the dilemma in an interesting way. Although physically buried in the U.S., the photos on his tomb have transported him back to his village. The photos, in other words, facilitated that final journey home. Karalis is at both places.

My family is a good example of the geographical tensions of immigration. Like many immigrants, my father wished to be buried in Greece. Greek-American funeral homes, interestingly enough, do this frequently and have mastered all the bureaucratic steps along the way. It's not an easy matter to transport a corpse across international boundaries. For instance, the corpse has to be embalmed, a practice not common in Greece, and placed in a special metal coffin that is sealed and airtight. The special transport coffins are larger than the typical coffin used in Greece and, therefore, cannot fit in the pre-existing tombs. Commonly in Greece, the bones of the ancestors are interred and the new deceased is buried in the same location. When my father's coffin arrived, we had to excavate a new burial large enough to accomodate the high tech coffin. Having been embalmed, moreover, means that my father's body will probably never be interred because the body will take decades to decompose. But these are gorey details. The important conflict is that he is buried with his relatives (most importantly with his parents) but his immediate family can only visit him whenever they go to Greece, about once every two years.

My mother, on the other, hand was so patriotic towards her adopted country that she wanted to be buried in Philadelphia. Even though neither my sister or I live in Philadelphia, we still manage to visit her grave about once a month and perform the regular upkeep. My mother is the first member of our family to be buried in the U.S., so she has no family kin next to her. She's buried in the Greek-American section, but she is surrounded by strangers. My mother's family is from Athens and everyone has been buried in a family mausoleum. By choosing to be buried in the U.S., my mother is the first family member of many generations to be missing from the mausoleum in Athens.

This geographical choice of burial is not only complex but difficult to communicate. Consider the difference between my father and mother. Since we were little children, my father would take us to his village cemetery and involve us in the rituals of visiting the ancestors. After each annual visit, he would remind us that one day his bones would rest next to his parents, suggesting indirectly that one day, it will be us (my sister and I) visiting him. So when he died unexpectedly from a heart attack, there was no question about what his wishes regarding country of burial. My mother, on the other hand, had never expressed any choice to either her children or her siblings. When it was obvious that her cancer was terminal, we were placed in the rather sad position of having to ask her directly. Her choice to be buried in Philadelphia upset the rest of the family back in Greece. Not only had the immigration deprived them of their family member, but they couldn't even express their final farewell.

Cypriot Tomb Scratchings

Tassos Papacostas' monograph-article, "The History and Architecture of the Monastery of Saint John Chrysostomos at Koutsovendis, Cyprus, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 61 (2007) pp. 25-148, reprints a photograph by Cyril Mango from a medieval tomb slab (fig. 28), first published in Dumbarton Oaks 44 (1990) fig. 186. On the left, I have sketched out the general elements of the slab. The lines on the upper left represent the entombed human. The figure is drawn so scantily and reminds me of medieval graffiti. A couple of additional lines, moreover, add complexity to the reading of the piece. First, there are drilled holes parallel to the oval that frames the figure. Scratchings inscribing an arc across the slab suggest the slab's placement under a swinging door, a threshold (whether of primary or secondary setting). A clef-like symbol tops the upper right edge. The vertical lines are cuts along the slab.

Isn't this a puzzling image? Its haphazard (dare, I say) vernacular character introduces questions about the nature of funerary demarcation in the Byzantine and Latin Middle Ages. Is a childlike scratching sufficient to outline the bodily character of the deceased, lying below? Is the funerary image simply indexical, pointing a finger to the body underneath the slab? In order to place the slab in context, I have followed the comparanda in Brunehilde Imhaus' authoritative catalog of Cypriot funerary inscriptions, Lacrimae Cypriae: Les lamres de Chypre, 2 vols. (Nicosa, 2004). This is a spectacular publication. I am pouring over the 564 comparative pieces, relishing in the beautiful combination of clothed human figures, insignia and text.

The examples from Lacrimae Cypriae, however, are much more articulated. Consider the figure on the left, (no. 166, v. 1, pp. 87-89, pl. 78), the tomb of a knight from the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, dating to 1370. The inscription identifies the figure as Messire Ansiau de Moustazou. Although carved with incisions similar to the Koutsovendi slab, the iconography is elaborate. We can identify a full figure whose features (face, hair) are stylized to fit the elaborated dress (chain link, armor, shield). The composition is framed by a Gothic triangle with floral decorations and heraldic shields. Around the iconic field we have a Latin insciption wrapping around the edges of the slab.

Compositionally, we are in safe art-historical territory and can say lots about iconography, status, identity, and style. Although found in a provincial setting, the slab derives from a rich tradition of medieval funerary art that depicts full bodies. For a comparable crusader example, see tomb of William of Saint John, Archbishop of Nazzareth, from Acre, illustrated in Jaroslav Folda's, Crusader Art in the Holy Land: From the Third Crusade to the Fall of Acre 1187-1291 (Cambridge, 2005), p. 495, fig. 337. These inscribed slabs are related to the graphic techniques of manuscript illuminations. Other tombs pop out into the third dimension; one of my favorites such sculptures is a recumbant knight from Normandy (ca. 1220-1240) at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The art historical context shows a range of representation, from three-dimensional physicallity to two-dimensional stylization. In lacking elaborate artifice, the slab of Koutsovendis disrupts our expectations of beauty. Whether talismanic, cartoonish, accidental, or uniconic, the slab expands the margins of what the medieval viewer of Cyprus would find acceptable for monumental, public commemoration.

I must stress that I have NOT seen the original piece, so my observations here are very tangential, perhaps fitting the incomprehensible character of the piece. Nor am I an expert on Lusignan Cyprus. Superficially, the slab connects to a body of haphazard visual notations that I've collected from Corinth and other Byzantine sites. See discussion on graffiti and street art in this blog.

Spolia in the Garden: Fernwood Cemetery

This is a quick posting inspired by Bill Caraher's "Spolia in the Garden" (The Archaeology of the Mediterranean World, August 13, 2008). During my sporadic visits to Philadelphia, I've been trying to care for the dead, i.e. the traditional Greek duty of keeping parental tombs well tended. See, for instance, earlier posting Buried in Bottles. Part of this upkeep involves caring for flowers and burning the flame. The Greek section of Fernwood Cemetery is caught between two monument traditions. It's a predominantly Protestant cemetery, where the tombs receive no adornment beyond the tombstone and endless grass. The Greek section is a lot more monumental with a hodge-podge of installations trying to replicate Mediterranean customs, which involve demarcating the whole length of the tomb and reassuring that nobody ever walks over the burial.

For my mother's plot, I decided to go half way and leave most of the area covered with grass (hence regularly mowed) but demarcate a small flower plot with one perennial (mums) , one annual (chrysanthemum) and one plastic flower (respecting my mother's friends who brought it; old Greek-American ladies argue that plastic flowers are far superior to natural ones--they have a point). In order to protect the little garden from the wrath of the lawnmower, however, I built a tiny submerged brick enclosure, just like the one that Bill and Susan Caraher made in their garden at Grand Forks. Rather than buying new industrial bricks from Home Depot, I, too, recycled. I salvaged seven 19th-c. bricks from the back of my house.

Note the candle holder in the picture. The good upkeep of the plot is done just as much for the living visitors as for the dead. Americans go nuts over their lawns at home; Greeks go nuts over their cemeteries. A well-kept tomb (i.e. by a family that cares) has a lit candle. The candle holder in the photo is a gift from our friends, the Zogas family. The candles are basically Latin American votives, which I buy from my local Latin American grocery store. Celina prefers the ones covered with gaudy Catholic iconography (sacred hearts, etc.), I prefer the simple red. Not to be macabre, or anything like that, but burial plots come in pairs, an upstairs and a downstairs. If for whatever reason, I happen to pass away unexpectedly, I find it comforting that I might be resting here, too. But I'll stop here. On grass, Elizabeth Kolbert's article is a MUST, "Turf War," New Yorker (July 21, 2008).

Byzantine Children Burials: Feedback

A main reason that I keep a blog is to communicate and exchange ideas with friends and colleagues. After my last posting "Byzantine Children Burial," I received an email from Amy Papalexandrou that is full of new information, so I've decided to start a new practice of posting email responses. So here is Amy's interesting follow-up:

On Sun, Aug 24, 2008 at 10:30 AM, Amy Papalexandrou <apapalex@yahoo.com> wrote:

"Kosti!!! I thought I would mention in the context of burials that we are scratching away at the mass of burials at Polis - many of which are children, and that our bioarchaeologist (Brenda Baker, of ASU) is a specialist on child burials. She hasn't had time yet to really attack this particular material but we are lucky to have her on board now with the Byzantinists and she will have much to add to future discussions of this little subset of material. At Polis we have a cemetery (no children in the narthex) to the east of our basilicas that may have been used exclusively for child burials for a time - either that or the inhabitants just didn't dig as deeply for these

graves. At any rate they are mostly together in this case.

Brenda and I (together with an anthro grad student) have done a little article on a single burial at Polis (not a child, though) in which we try to expand the way we archaeologists/Byzantinists have typically looked at the human remains. My goal is to eventually publish the
burials at Cyprus in a somewhat similar way. We had a poster at the APA in Philly in 2007: "Sew Long: A Seamstress Buried at Medieval Polis, Cyprus" and have done a little article: 'The Osteobiography of a Woman from Medieval Polis, Cyprus,' to be published in The Bioarchaeology of Individuals, eds. Ann Stodder and Ann Palkovich (University Press of Florida).

As for the stele, Nassos and I are working on this. I've got good visual material dating from before the fire, of course (including a scale drawing that looks a lot like yours!). We gave a paper on the subject at the AIA in Chicago way back in 1997: "Ancient Images—Byzantine Responses: A Hellenistic Stele from Orchomenos and Its Afterlife" and have since tucked it away on the back burner."

In addition to Amy's response, I also learned that the Greek Archaeological Service has excavated a burial in the narthex of Skripou. And Bill Caraher mentioned an an infant burial at Pyla-Koutsopetria. How could I forget to mention Joe Rife's amazing work on the cemeteries at Isthmia (forthcoming Isthmia IX)? For a progress report on Joe's field project, see "Multidisciplinary Excavation Launches at Kenchrai,"also in Akoue 57/8 (2007), p. 13.

Camilla MacKay also sent me the following note (email, Wed, Aug 27, 2008 at 10:30 PM)

"Kostis, I liked your post on the burials. Not even close to Byzantine, but when I was in the Agora this summer, Maria Liston was working on the baby well--6th c. maybe? I've forgotten--excavated years ago, with hundreds of newborn to infant baby skeletons and also puppy skeletons, that she thinks represents a couple of midwives over several years. Susan Rotroff is doing the pottery. It will be very interesting..."

Byzantine Children Burials

When I visited the Byzantine church at Skripou, near Orchomenos on May 27, 1999, I noted in my sketchbook (left) a classical relief immured in the east wall of the narthex, on the south pier, as the viewer moves from narthex into naos. The relief depicts three figures and a child reaching up from below to touch the primary figure, the woman on the right (the relief is worn and hard to decipher). The scene depicts a funerary banquet, and the presence of a child further suggests that the main figure died at childbirth; on the iconography of childbirth funerary scene in ancient Greece, see Celina Gray (yes, my wife) “Confronting the Other: Childbirth, Aging, and Death on an Attic Gravestone at Harvard,” with Andrew Stewart, in Not the Classical Ideal: Athens and the Construction of the Other in Greek Art, ed. Beth Cohen (Leiden, 2000), pp. 248-274. The stele was obviously taken from next door, the ancient cemetery of Orchomenos, and placed in the church; its new setting adds a new interpretive spin on the figures, a reading that must be squared away with the functions of a narthex.

I haven’t thought about this relief for a while and I really ought to inquire further with Amy Papalexandrou, the expert on both Skripou and Byzantine spolia; see, Amy Cassens Papalexandrou, “The Church of the Virgin of Skripou: Architecture, Sculpture and Inscriptions in Ninth Century Byzantium (Diss., Princeton University, 1998). I was reminded of this relief in connection to children and their burials in peculiar places after reading two excavation announcements in Ákoue, the Newsletter of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA). Both reports deal with some aspect of Byzantine child burial, a subject that has hardly received any scholarly attention, since careful excavations are so rare. Ákoue has a small readership outside of classicists; since final archaeological publications take so long to appear in press (because even academic publishers has given up on archaeology), the two reports are of critical importance.

John McK. Camp II, “2006 Agora Excavations Break New Ground,” Ákoue 57/8 (2007), pp. 5, 8, includes the work in Section BH supervised by Ann McCabe and assisted by Matt Baumann. Camp's final report appeared in "Excavations at the Athenian Agora 2002-2007," Hesperia 76, pp. 627-663. McCabe, the long standing Byzantine specialist of the Agora, continued to excavate the Agora's booming Byzantine neighborhood. Thanks to the foundations of modern buildings, only the lowest courses and foundations of the Byzantine houses survive. Typically, the houses contain subterranean storage pythoi with openings level with the original floors. In 2006, work expanded under the modern buildings at St. Philip’s and Hasting Streets. In the corner of one Byzantine room, McCabe excavated a coarse-ware cooking vessel originally buried under the house floor. The pot contained the remains of a 32-week-old fetus. A similar burial was found in earlier seasons, suggesting that this was a common practice in Middle Byzantine Athens. In the Hesperia report, Camp explores the rationale for domestic burial. Although the ban against urban burial was lifted by Emperor Leo, it's possible that a taboo may have still existed. The foetus may have been buried here secretly to avoid social stigma. These are all good hypotheses and require further exploration.

The material dates to ca. 1000 CE. Fetus remains are so fragile that it’s most likely that many such burials exist throughout Greece but have not been carefully noted. Baby burials in amphoras are common in ancient sites. In 1999, I was working in a trench next to Deb Brown-Stewart, while she carefully excavated a Late Roman amphora burial at the Panayia Field in Corinth. The Corinth burial was not in a domestic context. The Byzantine practice of burying fetuses and infants within the family’s home is quite noteworthy. Another amazing project is the Astypalaia Bioarchaeological Project. Simon Hillson (UC London, Institute of Archaeology) has been studying the remains of a children's cemetery. I saw Hillson present this material at an AIA talk at McMaster Univeristy (April 12, 2005)

There has been some work on child cemeteries in antiquity but domestic burial in Byzantium is a topic that needs further attention. I’m currently studying the architecture of a Byzantine house in Chersonesos, Ukraine, where here, too, we have domestic burial. The University of Texas at Austin has excavated 70+ internments in a private chapel within the residential complex. Project director Adam Rabinowitz has presented these finds in public lectures (AIA, Dumbarton Oaks, etc.), but the Chersonesos material is largely unknown to Byzantine scholars. The UT Austin excavations are unique as the most thoroughly excavated domestic complex in the entire Byzantine world.

Now to the next archaeological case study. Paraskevi Tritsaroli was the ASCSA’s Wiener Lab Research Associate for 2006-2007, where she investigated the osteological remains of a cemetery dating to the 10th-11th c. at the site of Xironomi, Boeotia. Tritsaroli reports her finds in “Child Protection after Death in Byzantium: The Bioarchaeological Evidence,” Akoue 57/8 (2007) p. 30. The evidence is fascinating, including common pathologies, lesions, weaning-related infections, nutritional deficiencies (vitamin C and D), scurvy, rickets, etc. Equally interesting is the fact that many children under 4 years of age were buried within the narthex of the church. The shear concentration of children around the church itself is indicative of cultural choices, perhaps spiritual protection before baptism or catechism. Cemeteries exclusive to children is not unusual. I use one example from Leda Costaki’s dissertation, “The intra muros road system of Ancient Athens,” (Universityof Toronto, 2006), p. 437, site IV.20. This cemetery was located on Panepistimiou 31 and it was used exclusively for infant and children burials in the Early Byzantine period (5th/6th c.).

Tritsaroli’s report places the narthex in a different architectural light. Sarah Brooks has studied funerary portraits in the Late Byzantine narthex and associates such elite burials with new liturgical practices. See Sarah Brooks, “Commemoration of the Dead: Late Byzantine Tomb Decoration (Mid-Thirteenth to Mid-Fifteenth Centuries,” (Diss., New York University, 2002). And Princeton University graduate student Nebojsa Stankovic is embarking on a dissertation that focuses on the monastic narthex. Recent archaeological evidence should rescue architectural historians from the deadly formalism of plan typology. If the narthex is the place to bury your infants, it must have been a locus of extraordinary emotional power (trans-generational, familial, mystical). If we return to the child depicted in the spolia of Skripou, we may have struck a golden connection.

Children’s bones are much more difficult to detect in an archaeological context than fully formed adult skeletons, making this young population highly underrepresented. Add to this a general disregard for physical anthropology in most excavations in Greece and Turkey (monumental art architecture trumps all other material culture), and you have a scholarly vacuum. The work of Wiener Lab associates, most notably Sherry Fox (Wiener Lab director) Sandra Garvie-Lok (University of Alberta; (Wiener Lab Fellow, 1996-1997), are changing the scholarly landscape. Most recently, Fox presented the study of 200 burials from Early Christian Cyprus at AIA Meetings in Chicago: Sherry Fox (ASCSA), Ioanna Mataffi (Sheffield), Eleni Anna Prevelorou (Arizona State), Despo Pipilides (Dep’t of Cypriot Antiquities), “The Bioarchaeology of Early Christian Cyprus: The People from St. George’s Hill, Nicosia” (see abstract). More bioarchaeological data from Cyprus was presented by Papalexandrou in the 2007 Byzantine Studies Conference, Toronto: “Contextualizing the Tomb: ‘Bowl Burials’ from Polis, Cyprus."

Sandra Garvie-Lok has been building the most extensive data base of osteological data from Early Christian, Byzantine, Frankish and Ottoman Greece. Among other tools, she employees stable isotope analysis to decipher diet among populations. In a fascinating poster at the AIA Meetings in Philadelphia (2002) Garvie-Lok analyzed the dietary rivalry between Greeks (vegetarians) and Latins (meat eaters) during the Frankish period. I cannot wait to see the full publication of "Loaves and Fishes: A Stable Isotope Reconstruction of Diet in Medieval Greece," (Diss., University of Calgary, 2002) . The great thing about Garvie-Lok's research is that she has been collecting an extensive array of evidence starting from the Canadian excavations in Mytilene and Stymphalis. I'm having the pleasure of collaborating with Garvie-Lok and Demetris Athanasoulis in Glarentza. Here, Athanasoulis has excavated Frankish elite burials in the Cathedral, under lavishly painted arcosoleia. The new finds will see their U.S. debut in May 2009 at the Dumbarton Oaks annual conference devoted to the Frankish Peloponnese. Any mention of osteological analysis in medieval Greece would be incomplete without the mention of Ethne Barnes and Art Rohn, the power-duo of medieval skeletons. Ethne and Art are world authorities in American Southwestern archaeology. See, for example, Ethne's most recent book, Diseases and Human Evolution (Albuquerque, 2007) and Art's extensive publications from Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. Ethne and Art were discovered by Charles K. Williams, II ca. 1996 and crossed the Atlantic in order to excavate (Art) and analyze (Ethne) the hundreds of burials that Mr. Williams discovered in a plot next to a monastic structure in Frankish Corinth. As it turned out, the burials were associated with a hospice and were, thus, chock-full of diseases (i.e. interesting bioarchaeological data). The Corinth material has been published in Hesperia and is best summarized by Ethne in, "The Dead Do Tell Stories," in Corinth, the Centenary 1896-1996, ed. C. K Williams II and N. Bookides (Princeton, 2003), pp. 435-443. Ethne and Art proceeded to work on other American projects, such as Mount Lykaion, Petras, and Panakton, see “Panakton: Preliminary Report on a Late Medieval Village,” Hesperia 72 (2003), pp. 189-195. And I must interject here, they are two delightful scholars, a breath of Southwestern air in the Mediterranean pond.

Despite the necessary brevity of reports in Ákoue, Ann McCabe and Paraskevi Tritsaroli have truly added volumes to the study of Byzantine funerary practices archaeologically fixed inside the house and the narthex. At a time when Byzantine art history seems to be floundering, it’s great to see a booming archaeology.

Buried in Bottles

Eleftheria Kourelis, the fearless lady that was my mother, loved to save bottles. This would drive my sister and I crazy as kids, a familiar source of embarrassment with parents or grandparents raised during the Great Depression or the World Wars. Now, of course, bottle hoarding is socially acceptable, hip and ecological. Elie, as Mrs. Kourelis was known to all her American friends, passed away in December, 2006, but some of her recycled bottles, filled with spices like eucalyptus or oregano, survive in our kitchen cupboard. We fondly look a these bottles now with the meticulous marking by her own hand. A bottle of oregano, for example, notes "8/18/05, brought by Popi." The spice had been bought by our Aunt Popi at the "Ecologists,"an organic store on Omonia Square, Athens, and brought in her suitcase during her last U.S. trip before it was jarred by my mother in an airtight reused container.

At the beginning of summer last week, Celina and I visited my mother's grave at Fernwood Cemetery in Landsdowne, PA, on the edge of Philadelphia. We went to water the flowers planted last spring, light the candle and simply say hello soon after our arrival in Philadelphia. Fernwood Cemetery contains two sections belonging to Saint George and Saint Demetrios, the two major Greek Orthodox Churches in Philadelphia and Upper Darby. the previous summer, we had observed that adjacent Section 186 was being surveyed for expansion. This time around, it was booming with burials. Out of curiosity, we approached two of these newly prepared graves plots (their funerals took place on June 1, 2008). The excavated heaps took us by surprise. Mixed with the dirt was a massive array of bottles, plates, iron objects and other pieces of historical garbage. Clearly, this section of Fernwood Cemetery was a dumping ground during the 19th and early 20th centuries. This must also have been the case with the area around Elie's grave, and it dawned on us that Elie was buried in bottles. Her tomb, pictured here, is located at 39°56'48.9"N, 75°15'17.4"W and can be seen with these coordinates in Google Earth.

Fernwood cemetery dates to 1870 with sumptuous tomb stones along its earliest paths. Once an idyllic suburban cemetery along Cobbs Creek (of Fairmount Park), it was encroached upon by an expanding city. Unable to suppress our archaeological training, Celina and I became fascinated by the historical potential of all the bottles sticking out of the fresh dirt piles, such as the blue Milk of Magnesia bottle from the 1940s (left). We thought it would be fitting to clean them up, photograph them and see what kind of information they might yield about the archaeological history of Elie's graveyard. As with Philadelphia's better known cemeteries (Laurel Hill, Woodland), Fernwood has beautiful tombstones of prominent families, Civil War heroes and famous Philadelphians. My favorites are social reformer Wiliam Sylvis (1828-1869) and Major League player "Yaller Bil" (William Harbridge, 1855-1924). Far from its original rural beauty, Fernwood now has a distinctively inner-city flavor with adjacent basket-ball courts, lower income houses and urban blight. In order to get to it from Center City, one has to process along Baltimore Avenue from 38th to 63rd Streets, which is a grounding and deeply humbling experience. The Greek section is onthe northwest corner and visually stands out through the liberties taken while investing the Protestant grounds with Greek iconographies and rituals. As with cemeteries throughout Greece (or Spain and Italy, for that matter), the Greek section of Fernwood is bustling with social activity. We have never visited when some family member was not tending a nearby grave. When we first asked the cemetery officials about the rules for monuments and landscaping at Fernwood, they conceded that none of the cemetery rules mattered at the Greek section. The tone in the officials' voice suggested exacerbation; the Greek did not follow the cemetery rules, they built monuments, planted cypress trees, brought in gravel, built grave boundaries. Celina enjoys serving the funerary duties of a Greek bride, but also enjoys discovering similarities with the Ancient Greek cemeteries of her scholarship. In our last visit, for instance, we noted that many graves had planted mint, which may be connected to the myth of Hades and the nymph Menthe. During the 2007 Annual Meetings of the Archaeological Institute of America in San Diego, Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory gave a fascinating paper on her fieldwork and Ph.D. thesis on East Korinthia and Cythera, "Remembering and Forgetting: The Relationship between Memory and the Abandonment of Graves in 19th- and 20thCentury Greek Cemeteries." Lita's paper gave us incredible insights (and analytical tools) in understanding the modern Greek cemetery from an anthropological point of view. Discussions with Lita about grave maintenance, grieving rituals and diaspora communities, moreover, was personally therapeutic. Elie had been buried in her Fernwood plot only a few days before this conference. The paper will be published in a special issue of the International Journal of Historical Archaeology that I have just finished editing.

Especially since Celina and I are not going to Greece this summer for fieldwork, the bottles of Fernwood put us in an archaeological mindset, while we both work on our books and get in touch with Philadelphia history. The rapid growth of the new cemetery sector is striking. It does not appear to be ethnically Greek. The Greek sector seems much slower, which is perhaps indicative of the shrinking Greek community in Philadelphia and its dispersal into the suburbs.