Page 4 - cemetery_tour_curriculum guide

for their clients: William Burke and his gang killed people for sale to Dr. Robert Knox, a
professor at Edinburgh University. Threats of capital punishment and lynch mobs did
not stem the flow out of the cemeteries. Only the passage of measures such as
England’s 1832 Anatomy Act, which provided the anatomist with legal cadavers, did
grave-robbing largely disappear.

Resurrectionists practiced most of their craft in churchyards. Under English law, any
member of a parish was entitled to burial in the local churchyard and this right went with
him when he moved to another spot. A movement away from the churchyard occurred
when Scottish Congregationalists denounced the old hallowed grounds as vestiges of
“Popery.” Why mar the landscape with these grim spots, they reasoned, when you
could just as soon use your own field? And so iconoclasts kept their dead on the farm,
reserving a corner of their land for family plots. Wayward family often did not find their
way back home again for burial. The great battles of the 18th and 19th century led to a
new kind of consecrated ground: that of the military cemetery where the soldier was
buried where he fell.

For many reasons, local officials began wanting cemeteries out of their cities. During
the 1780s, most of the dead of Paris were exhumed and moved into a new system of
catacombs. In 1914, the City and Country of San Francisco decided its rundown
cemeteries were a magnet for disease and delinquency: it closed them down. More
and more, people began looking beyond the city limits as they had in ancient times.

Burial Customs and Cemeteries in American History

Native American Burial Customs

Native American burial customs have varied widely, not only geographically, but also
through time, having been shaped by differing environments, social structure, and
spiritual beliefs. Prehistoric civilizations evolved methods of caring for the dead that
reflected either the seasonal movements of nomadic societies or the life ways of settles
communities organized around fixed locations. As they evolved, burial practices
included various forms of encasement, sub-surface internment, cremation, and
exposure. Custom usually dictated some type of purification ritual at the time of burial.
Certain ceremonies called for secondary interments following incineration or exposure
of the body, and in such cases, the rites might extend over some time period. Where
the distinctions in social status were marked, the rites were more elaborate.

The Plains Indians and certain Indians of the Pacific Northwest commonly practiced
aboveground burials using trees, scaffolds, canoes, and boxes on stilts, which decayed
over time.

More permanent were earthen constructions, such as the chambered mounds and
crematory mounds of the Indians of the Mississippi River drainage. In some areas of
the Southeast and Southwest, cemeteries for urn burials, using earthenware jars, were
common.