Page 5 - cemetery_tour_curriculum guide

After contact with European Americans, Native American cultures adopted other
practices brought about by religious proselytizing, intermarriage, edict, and enforcement
of regulations. The Hopi, Zuni, and other Pueblo peoples of Arizona and New Mexico
were among the first to experience Hispanic contact in the 16th century, and
subsequently, their ancestral lands were colonized. At the pueblos stone and adobe
villages where Roman Catholic missions were established, burials within church
grounds or graveyards consecrated in accordance with Christian doctrine were
encouraged for those who had been converted to the faith. However, Native Americans
also continued their traditional burial practices, when necessary in secret.

Throughout the period of the fur trade in the North Pacific (and the Michiana area),
beginning in the late 18th century, Russian Orthodox missions were established (in the
Pacific Northwest) among the native populations settled along the coastline and
mainland interior of Russian-occupied Alaska. At Eklutna, a village at the head of the
Cook Inlet, north of Anchorage, an Athabascan cemetery adjacent to the 19th century
Church of St. Nicholas, illustrates continuity of a burial custom widely recorded in
historic times, that of constructing gable-roofed wooden shelters over graves to house
the spirit of the dead.

Colonial and Early American Burial Customs

The earliest episodes of Spanish, French, and English settlement on the eastern shore
of North America followed voyages of exploration in the 16th century. The original
attempts at colonizing were made in Florida, the Carolinas, and Virginia. In 1565, the
first lasting European community was established by the Spanish on the east coast of
Florida, at St. Augustine, which survived attack from competing forces in colonization of
the New World. An essential feature of the fortified settlement was the Roman Catholic
mission church with its associated burial ground. Where they are uncovered in the
course of modern day improvements projects, unmarked burials of the 16th and 17th
centuries provide evidence for identifying the historic locations of successors to the
founding church sites that gradually disappeared in the layering of later town
development. The archeological record shows shroud-wrapped interments were
customary in the city’s Spanish Colonial period. Traces of coffins or coffin hardware do
not appear in Colonial burials before the beginning of English immigration to the area in
the 18th century. Graves of the Spanish colonists occurred in consecrated ground within
or adjacent to a church. They followed a pattern of regular, compact spacing and east-
facing orientation. These characteristics, together with arms crossed over the chest and
the presence of brass shroud pins are a means of distinguishing Christian burials from
pre-colonial Native American burials sometimes associated with the same site.

With the notable exception of the secular graveyards of Puritan New England, the ideal
during the Colonial period in English colonies was to bury the dead in churchyards
located in close proximity to churches. Churchyard burials have remained standard
practice into the 20th century for European Americans and other cultures in the Judeo-
Christian tradition. Early Puritans rejected churchyard burials as they rebelled against