Scattered

Robyn Lacy is a Ph.D. candidate in the archaeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador.Her research focuses on 17th-century burial landscape development in Northeast North America. Robyn runs a business with her partner, specializing in gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces of Canada.

In this episode we talk about:

• How Robyn’s interest in burial ground archaeology began during her undergraduate field school in Ireland, where she participated in surveying burial grounds and transcribing inscriptions on headstones.



• The distinctions between a cemetery, graveyard, and burial ground, emphasizing historical context and regional variations in North America.



• The concept of rural garden cemeteries in the 1830s aimed to address concerns of overcrowding in urban burial grounds, leading to the creation of park-like atmospheres outside city centers.



• 17th-century burial grounds in the North American Northeast and how settlers chose to develop burial spaces in their newly established communities.



• Shifting gravestone iconography and language through time.



• What’s involved in the preservation of gravestones.

You can find more information about Robyn and her company, Spade and the Grave, on her webpage here: https://spadeandthegrave.com/

More information about some items mentioned in the interview can be found here:

• Pere Lachaise cemetery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A8re_Lachaise_Cemetery

• Discovering England’s Burial Spaces (DEBS): https://www.debs.ac.uk/



• Ville-Marie, Montreal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ville-Marie,_Montreal



• Mount Auburn Cemetery, Massachusettes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Auburn_Cemetery

Notes from the start:

Globe & Mail: Multiple sclerosis origins linked to DNA from ancient Europeans

In October 2023, I gave a presentation at the Canadian Association for Biological Anthropology (CABA) entitled Start with the Why: How My Research on Scattered Remains Turned into a Podcast. You can find a recording of that presentation here.

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Transcript

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so, my name is Robyn Lacy. I’m a PhD candidate in the archeology department at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador. My research is looking at 17th century burial landscape development in Northeast North America, and I also run a business with my partner where we do gravestone conservation in the Atlantic provinces in Canada.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what brought you to this because this isn’t the normal sort of archeology stuff that I hear about in Canada. People always want to dig. And you’re not really digging.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, I mean, I guess we dig around the basis of gravestones but it’s not traditional archeology in the sense the most people think of it. Yeah. So I originally got into burial ground archeology and mortuary archeology through a field school that I did in my undergrad. Everyone has to do a field school usually for an archeology program and I decided that I wanted to do mine abroad. I was at school in Calgary and I went to a field school in Ireland and on the Isle of Man through the University of Liverpool. And while we were in Ireland we were surveying burial ground to transcribe the inscriptions on the headstones and document the gravestones as well and do mapping of the site and that kind of thing. I just thought that was the most interesting thing possible. That was not the avenue of archeology. I was intending to go into at all and I thought that was just such a fascinating area of research and it really stuck with me. So it’s what I’ve been doing in grad school. And then with learning about burial grounds, to me it makes sense to have learned about their conservation as well. And there’s very few people that have an archeology background in Canada that do historic stone restoration and graveyard work as well. So they go really well together for that.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Cool, so you did this field school gonna ask you to take your memory back to when you’re in Ireland doing archeology, which sounds amazing and wonderful, but you’ve also had this amazing opportunity to see archeology on both sides of the Atlantic. Are there differences or is archeology archeology no matter where you go.

Robyn Lacy: I think that the basis is the same, it all comes from the same ideas. But the ways that we operate, especially excavation techniques are a lot different in the UK. And in Ireland you’ll see a site being opened, they’ll take all the topsoil off at once and you’ll do a row of people troweling the whole entire surface together. Whereas here we’re more likely to open one meter units or smaller trenches like that. So the way that sites got approached is a little bit different. But also, when you’re in Europe, you have this depth of structural heritage that goes back a lot farther. Like indigenous structures are a lot different than the stone buildings being built in Europe a couple hundred years ago to thousands of years ago. So there’s a lot of differences and approaches to older sites as well, I think.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, we don’t really have those stone walls here, do we?

Robyn Lacy: They’re really nice.

Yvonne Kjorlien: It’s nice when you’re digging and you hit on something stone because when that happens, at least in Alberta,…

Robyn Lacy: Mm-hmm

Yvonne Kjorlien: it’s either, just another rock, glacial till, or possibly maybe even the stone tool. There’s no stone walls here.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I seeing post hole features and that kind of changes to the ground like that, but it’s really exciting when you find something structural, that’s very clearly structural that’s still standing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right cool. Yeah. Yeah for that reason. I like doing historic archeology because of the structural aspect. Yeah, seeing…

Robyn Lacy: Me too.

Yvonne Kjorlien: where the walls are and the post holes. And yeah, that’s always cool.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So let’s get into your research a little bit. So let’s first start off with some definitions the difference between a burial site and a graveyard and a cemetery.

Robyn Lacy: So, I mean in different parts of the world, they have different meetings, of course, so this is mostly for North America. Cemetery is in our context a site that is typically municipally owned or if their owned by a church, they’re often non-denominational. It means a certain type of site. It’s sort of more rural. It’s usually on the edge of town. It’s sort of park-like. They come from this idea in the late 18th century and it was called the rural garden cemetery. So they were planned, organized, but not in the same way that you would see rows in like an older site. There are larger monuments, there’s bushes and wide paths. It’s supposed to have this park-like atmosphere. And that design style didn’t come to North America until the 18 30s. I want to say 1834, possibly or around there, with the construction of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. So for being really annoyingly technical, anything before that date in North America is not considered a cemetery but cemetery is the colloquial word for most burial sites these days.

Graveyard then or churchyard is the grounds traditionally surrounding a church where the dead are buried. Sometimes they’re not directly around the church, they can be right next to it. But that’s what the graveyard is. And then in North America, burial ground can be used as a catch all term, but in the Northeast, specifically for the Puritans and the Quakers, they used burial ground historically to denote to site that they were bearing their dead in but they were trying to do this separation of church and everything else. They didn’t even call their spaces where they had services a church, they called it the meeting house. So the burial ground was something that was not sacred, that’s just where your mortal remains went to didn’t really matter after that. So they didn’t call it a graveyard specifically to say that it was not associated with the church.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So with this creation of cemetery in this park atmosphere, it almost sounds like, back in the 1930s when this was started. and at least in North America that there was almost a desire to promote a relationship between the living and the dead would that be accurate to say?

Robyn Lacy: Somewhat, yea. And the 1830s. But yeah, there sort of came from this concern that people were having with overcrowding in burial grounds that were in the centers of communities. And there’s a lot of articles about this happening New York and places like that that were more urban centres  — Boston as well — where they were like, we have too many people buried in these sites, it’s going to be smelly, it’s going to be making people sick even though that’s not how dead bodies work. And that was something that they thought was going to affect them. So they were like no more burials in the city, we’re going to create these specific spaces outside of the city to bury our dead in. And in Europe, where the royal cemetery movement comes from, it started with — and I’m going to butcher this pronunciation — but Pere Lachaise, which is outside of Paris and that’s the first garden cemetery. So it’s really the model that they were all based off of. And it encouraged people to visit the sites and spend time there, but not a connection to interacting with the space in the same way that it was a hundred or 200 years before that and because it was also removing it from people’s daily viewscape, I would say. You’re not walking by a rural cemetery every day, it’s not something that you’re seeing on your way to the market or on your way home from work because it’s no longer in the center of that town. It would have to be a purposeful trip out there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I just find that interesting that they want to make it more park-like and more palatable to the living but yet at the same time they’re not really encouraging a more engaged relationship with the dead.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, it’s interesting because it’s a park but then it’s not very easy to get to for some people.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So yeah, it’s just interesting that they would go out of their way to make cemeteries, into park-like spaces, make them more palatable, but yet not really being encouraging, I guess, a deeper relationship with the dead because these spaces are removed from urban centers, so you have to travel to get to them but yet they’re nicer.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, and I think a lot of it has to do with the 19th century idea of ‘softening of death’, it’s often referred to in literature. Where you go from seeing these 17^th-18th century gravestones that have the skull on them and the hourglass and they’re momento mori — remember you shall die – to the more early 19th century into the Victorian period of there’s a willow tree to denote sorrow and there’s a mourning figure next to an urn. A lot of classical imagery, a lot more, I’d say, romanticized. The language changes a lot, and that’s really what we’re seeing being used in these park-like atmospheres. It’s more of a calm romanticized space.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So it almost sounds like, I don’t know, they’re, don’t know how to put this into words, but taking the opportunity to use a burial ground. I don’t know maybe a reason to create a park. if that makes sense instead of kind of other way around

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, it could very well be a way to create a public space that’s accessible to everyone while so solving some of the issues of where to put dead people. I’m not too sure, I don’t do too much 19th century landscape stuff, so I’m not sure about they’re wider development. But yeah.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Right, let’s talk about what you are doing. So you’re the time frame, the geographical area, and then also the groups that you look at in your research.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so my PhD dissertation research is on 17th century burial grounds. So I’m in sort of the sites that were established when settlers first arrived in North America when they were coming from settlements they lived in for hundreds of years that been organized for ages — they probably don’t even know why things were in certain places in the communities — to a place that they viewed as completely empty. Obviously it’s not. But when they arrived in North America, they were setting up a community for the first time, and they got to choose where everything went in that community. And what I’m really interested in looking at is how settlers chose to develop the space where they were placing their dead amongst where they were living and where their daily activities were.

So I was looking at settlements founded by the British, the Dutch, and the French in the Northeast. So from Northern Virginia up to Nova Scotia and into Newfoundland, along the coast and then sort of along the St. Lawrence River valley and the Hudson River valley. And looking at how the early settlements from the 17th century there, how they established their burial grounds and then comparing them: what were different religions doing, and what were the different nationalities doing, and if there were any differences seen between those groups or was there sort of like a European conglomerate idea of what to do with your dead? And sort of those kind of theme overall.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So what were people doing with their dead because there are different time frames and different places across the world even now where people are very much in relationship with the dead. I mean, there’s even some time frames where cultures would bury dead under the floors of their houses and actually do their daily living on top of their dead. Tell us a little bit about the Dutch, the British, and the French and how they use the spaces and how they maintained or divorced themselves from a relationship with their dead.

Robyn Lacy: It was pretty interesting. The Dutch and the French, will start with them, what their settlements were very homogeneous based on religion. The Dutch were all represented by the Dutch Reformed Church, which was a branch of the Protestant church after the Protestant Reformation in Europe, which sort of helped form the Netherlands (that’s a whole other thing). And the Dutch Reformed Church was the state religion and that’s what we see reflected in the colonies, aside from a couple Jewish burial grounds as well. And so they were all Protestant basically. And then the French towns, even after the Reformation, Catholicism remains the dominant religion in France. Everyone had to be Catholic in the French settlements as well.

So we have a Catholic conglomerate, a Protestant conglomerate, and then the British towns, they had freedom of religion in the colonies, while that wasn’t the case in Britain. That was something that the British established for their colonists. So we have this hodgepodge of so many different variations on Christianity which all had different ideas of what they wanted to do. We’ve got Protestants. There’s some Catholic influence. There’s some Jewish sites. There’s Quaker, there’s Puritans and those are the ones I look at, but there’s various other denominations in there as well which showed up really interestingly in the data.

One of the variables I was looking at was whether the burial ground was a graveyard or not. So whether it was directly associated with the church spatially, which was what I was looking at. So the Dutch sites the majority of them were associated with the church. There was two sites that weren’t but those two sites were only not associated with church because they were established in such early settlements, so the church hadn’t even been developed yet. The French ones were all associated with the church and there was one that was unknown. And then the British sites were sort of in the middle. They were like some of them were and some of them weren’t, and it was kind of all over the place which was almost 50/50 split which is really interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: What can you, I guess, infer from the association of a burial ground with a church. Because you said that the British was kind of a hodgepodge and I’m guessing that’s in alignment with the multitude of religious beliefs, and what have you, with that. So what can you infer from the placement of these burial grounds and association or not an association with a church?

Robyn Lacy: So what kind of is looking like is the closer a settlement or a people was keeping to an older established religion — like French Catholic beliefs didn’t change too much going into the 17^th century from what they had been for a long time — the closer they were to a group like that, the more they were likely to have this sort of churchyard model. Where, let’s see, I don’t know where the percentages are here, yeah, so those vast majority I think…11 French sites I looked at were associated with a church, one unknown. So that’s 100% of the data that I do have with associated with the church. And then the further you get into religious groups that are changing — so the Dutch Reform — they’re slightly less. They’re still mostly next to a church, but there’s more that aren’t than when you look at the French ones and then you get to the British site and the Puritans are mostly not associated with the church and the Quakers or sort of both, but they don’t call theirs churches, so that’s all another question mark. The British Anglican sites are beside the church most of the time but a couple aren’t. The farther you get into religious groups that are deviating from the long established…is really where you’re starting to get more variation.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And what about I guess that the format of these burial grounds? Were they all in rows? Were people buried facing a certain specific direction? Are the gravestones all the same?

Robyn Lacy: So I wasn’t looking to closely at individual graves, but from the sites that I did have some previous archaeological excavation data to look at, the majority of them are still following the Christian tradition of varying the grave facing east-west. The gravestone styles vary by region, a lot of influence coming from the New England area. There was some really interesting stuff going on in Montreal with, I think it’s Point de Collier, is where the site is called now Ville-Marie was the earliest sort of settlement in that area, and their earliest burial ground had a division in the middle of it, like a fence going down the middle. There was some burials on one side of the fence that were oriented slightly differently than the directly east-west ones. They do have records of the burials of that site and they think that the ones that were oriented the same way were indigenous people that had joined the Mission and had converted to Christianity, so they were buried in the same space in a segregated section of the burial ground

Yvonne Kjorlien: Isn’t that interesting.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, you mentioned you weren’t looking specifically at the individual graves, but did you notice any patterns in, like you mentioned iconography before, how there was this softening of the iconography when cemeteries in the park like structure was starting to be taken up. What other shift in iconography did you notice, if at all?

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so there’s a period where we don’t really have much data for what the grave markers and gravestones would have had. Partially because Quakers and Puritans didn’t like religious iconography. So they often didn’t even mark their graves or they’d mark them with a stick or something. So that definitely plays into what we see for the New England area. But when they did start carving gravestones a lot of for those groups at least didn’t have any imagery at all. So you see a lot of early gravestones, especially around Boston and Massachusetts Bay Area that don’t have any images from the mid 1600s, they just have text. And then they slowly start to have pictures but they are not religious pictures. So there’s very often early gravestones coming out of New England and they shift everywhere sort of on the northeast. We have New England gravestones from the 18th century in Newfoundland, and they have these momento mori images of the winged skull, that also gets called the death’s head. Sometimes the winged cherub, which is also called the sole effigy, which is supposed to supposedly represent the individual’s soul. And then once the 18th century gets rolling you get more images that are less skull-like and more like people. You can see portraitures sometimes and you get into, as it rolls into the 19th century, is when we start seeing that major change to be the softer image and then the text will change from saying ‘here lies the literal body’ or like ‘the corpse of’ to ‘in memory of’ or ‘dedicated to’ kind of thing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: When these people came over and they started to settle did you find that they’re practices or maybe being influenced by the other people and other communities?

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, so I think when people were coming over from Europe they were carrying a lot of traditions with them, but then especially the dissenter groups were using this as an opportunity to be able to practice their own religion and sort of run a community how they would have wanted to. So we’re seeing a lot of new ideas being established at the same time as some groups holding up older traditions as well. A lot of the time people who settle in one area were of a similar background, so lot of Puritans and Quakers in Massachusetts Bay Area, whereas in Quebec in the St. Lawrence Valley River Valley you see a lot of Catholic influence and, to this day, it’s still very divided up like that. So I think that people weren’t moving around quite as much as they do today, so there was a little bit less cross-influence, but it definitely was there. We can see that in the 18th century and after the British took over Dutch New Netherlands, and we see a lot of influence of British ideas and British gravestone carving styles as well appearing in the cemetery.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Very cool. let’s talk a little bit about the work you do with your husband about restoration. What is involved in that? Is it I’m just picturing, growing up in the 80s where it was kind of the thing for bored kids to go in and knock over headstones. I mean, I don’t get it. So other than righting headstones, what else does your work involve?

Robyn Lacy: I mean, I’m sure we’re fixing a lot of problems that were caused by bored kids in the 80s, unfortunately. Yeah, so we do gravestone like cleaning and uprighting and then a lot of repair work as well. Softer stones like marble, specifically marble and limestone, will often crack and break and if the break isn’t too developed, if it hasn’t weathered away too much and is really unstable, we’ll be able to put that back together. But we also do a lot of work with heritage groups and community groups in Newfoundland. So we’ll go out and do workshops and teach their volunteers how to safely clean gravestones so they can upkeep the sites for themselves in the future, and teach other people we’ll do public talks about safety and cemeteries and history about different sites in the work we do and everything as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So how do people go about knowing that, I don’t know, their cemetery or graveyard needs tending to? How do they contact you? What’s involved?

Robyn Lacy: People continuously tell us that there’s no shortage of work initially and it’s true. The joke is that every road ends in a cemetery in the province. Yeah. I’m sure that’s true in so many places. But yeah, because European settlers have been here for so long that there’s quite a history of established cemeteries and gravestone carvers and everything. So yeah people often know about what’s local to them. They know about the sites that are in their community, and often people do go out and try and clean up these sites themselves as well. And so if we’re sort of out there making ourselves known on the internet, we haven’t advertised too much but sometimes we’re on the radio or something and then we’ll get some emails afterwards because we have a little website. Yeah, we’re usually just out there talking about heritage and someone will come up to us and be like, I work with such and such cemetery and I’m on the board and can you come to a workshop for us or something and it usually goes from there.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So, what’s the number one thing that maybe well-meaning volunteers do to try to help preserve their gravestones and cemeteries, but it’s not really helping.

Robyn Lacy: That could be a really long list, unfortunately. …

Yvonne Kjorlien: Oh boy. All these well-meaning things that are not helping.

Robyn Lacy: I mean the main issue is that conservation and preservation, as I’m sure you know, for archeology updates very frequently. It’s a very active field. So the information that’s really available to people, online especially, is often quite outdated. I’d say the biggest issue for gravestones is that people put them in concrete. They’ll try to do repairs using concrete or they’ll set the bases into concrete. Concrete is extremely difficult to remove once it’s on a stone. And you can take it off sometimes but it’ll often take pieces of the stone with it and that’s a huge problem. But it is not water-permeable. And that’s an issue when you’re working with a soft historic stone because it causes water to be trapped inside of the stone which makes it weaker in that area. So if you set up a marble headstone up, and down into a block of concrete, after a while water can’t leech out of the bottom of that stone, it’s just sort of collecting there and that weakens that area, and the stone’s going to break. But now that bottom piece that you need it to prepare with is stuck in concrete and you can’t get it out any more.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Okay, no concrete. Good to know.

Robyn Lacy: No concrete.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I would not have thought of that. Okay good.

Yvonne Kjorlien: And so people can just contact you through your website.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, the business is called Black Cat Cemetery Preservation. If you also Google my name and put gravestone after it. I’m sure something would come up as well.

Yvonne Kjorlien: I think I found you by Googling mortuary archeology because I really wanted to get somebody on here talking about mortuary archeology.

Robyn Lacy: There’s not too many people in Canada that do Mortuary archeology as well as public-facing stuff. So yeah, it’s a small pool.

Yvonne Kjorlien: So why did you want to do a PhD?

Robyn Lacy: I never really intended to go into academia in the sense of being a professor, but I’ve always really been interested in research and writing and that avenue of archeology. So I did my Master’s and then I went to work in Ontario for a couple of years. But I still have a lot of questions from the research I did for my Master’s and I thought the best way to answer them rather than doing it on my own time while trying to work full time would probably be to go back to school. And then there’s a lot of heritage jobs in museums and institutions that do research that even if you’re not like going to be a professor they still want you to have a doctorate. So if I’m interested in doing something like that in the future, that’s like the bonus of having a doctorate in the end.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, I’ve heard that from others that if you want to work in the heritage, in a museum or one of the more I guess a heritage institution of whatever sorts that you really do need a PhD.

Robyn Lacy: Yeah, others like smaller museums and community museums, having a background in museum stuff is great. But if you want to work it like the Royal BC Museum and you want to be a curator of whatever, they want you to have a high level background in it. So they usually ask people to have a doctorate. Yeah, so if I would like those doors to be open to me in the future for sure.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Yeah, especially, with your consulting, you’re very firmly situated within the heritage spheres as far as I can see. So yeah, that makes sense. All right. How when do you defend?

Robyn Lacy: My I talked to my supervisors recently and I said borrowing a catastrophe of hopefully late spring early summer. So I’m on the last couple chapters of editing and then the whole thing will get compiled and sent to my supervisors for a second review and then if we’ve got any change, make those,  I’ll be going out to my reviewer committee.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Damn! Best of luck. That’s coming up pretty quick.

Robyn Lacy: Thank you it’s a little scary but

Yvonne Kjorlien: I feel bad now for taking up your time. You should be writing and…

Robyn Lacy: No.

Yvonne Kjorlien: editing. All…

Robyn Lacy: No, you’re good. It’s nice to not be editing.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Thank you very much. And again, if anybody wants to reach out to you they could just Google Robyn Lacy and, sorry your website again, is Spade and Grave?

Robyn Lacy: Spade and the Grave. Yes.

Yvonne Kjorlien: Spade and the Grave. All right, sounds good.

Robyn Lacy: Thank you.