Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Death

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
An Archaeology of Australia Since 1788

Part of the book series: Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology ((CGHA))

  • 1758 Accesses

Abstract

Archaeologists have long been intrigued by the remains of the dead. Because skeletons, grave goods and cemeteries represent deliberate disposal, unlike the incidental discard of everyday items, mortuary material can bring us a step closer to the lives and intentions of people and places in the past. Along the way, archaeologists have developed many different approaches to studying the dead. Human bones, for example, can provide evidence of age, sex, diet and disease. Grave goods have been extensively studied as art objects, or ritual symbols, or as expressions of social status. Gravestone inscriptions and artwork can reveal attitudes to death and the survival of the soul. In one famous study, James Deetz (1977) identified the changing frequency of headstone designs in New England cemeteries from the 1680s to the 1820s and linked the popularity of these motifs with changes in contemporary religious views. In Britain, Sarah Tarlow (1999) used graveyard memorials from Orkney to explore changing attitudes to death and bereavement since the sixteenth century, while Harold Mytum (2004) has described the many possible approaches to studying mortuary monuments of the historic period. Recent views of mortuary archaeology in the United States (LeeDecker 2009; Veit et al. 2009) highlight the potential of graves and cemeteries to shed new light on the changing role of religion in people’s lives and the importance of symbolism in burial treatments.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 16.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Ariès, Phillipe (1981) The Hour of our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver, Knopf, New York, NY.

    Google Scholar 

  • Attenbrow, Val (2002) Sydney’s Aboriginal Past: Investigating the Archaeological and Historical Records. UNSW Press, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Baker, Brenda J., Tosha L. Dupras and Matthew W. Tocheri (2005) The Osteology of Infants and Children. Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX.

    Google Scholar 

  • Broome, Richard (1994) Aboriginal victims and voyagers, confronting frontier myths. Journal of Australian Studies 42:70–77.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Byrne, Denis (1998) In Sad but Loving Memory: Aboriginal Burials and Cemeteries of the Last 200 Years in NSW. NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service, Hurstville, New South Wales.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, Ian D. (1995) Scars in the Landscape: A Register of Massacre Sites in Western Victoria 1803–1859. Aboriginal Studies Press, Canberra.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooke, Simon (1991) Death, body and soul: the cremation debate in New South Wales, 1863–1925. Australian Historical Studies 24(97):323–339.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Corfield, Robin S. (2009) Don’t Forget Me, Cobber: The Battle of Fromelles. The Miegunyah Press, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Curl, James S. (2000) The Victorian Celebration of Death. Sutton, Stroud, UK.

    Google Scholar 

  • Curthoys, Ann (2001) “Chineseness” and the Australian identity. In: Henry Chan, Ann Curthoys and Nora Chiang (eds.), The Overseas Chinese in Australasia: History, Settlement and Interactions, pp. 16–29. Interdisciplinary Group for Australian Studies, National Taiwan University, Taipei, and Centre for the Study of the Chinese Southern Diaspora, Australian National University, Canberra.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dalkin, Robert Nixon (1974) Colonial Era Cemetery of Norfolk Island. Pacific Publications, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Damousi, Joy (1999) The Labour of Loss: Mourning, Memory and Wartime Bereavement in Australia. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Dash, Mike (2002) Batavia’s Graveyard. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Deetz, James (1977) In Small Things Forgotten. Anchor Books, New York, NY.

    Google Scholar 

  • De Groot, Jan Jakob Maria (1967) The Religious System of China: Its Ancient Forms, Evolution, History and Present Aspect. 6 vols. Ch’eng Publishing, Taipei.

    Google Scholar 

  • Donlon, Denise, Mary Casey, Wolfgang Hack and Christina Adler (2008) Early colonial burial practices for perinates at the Parramatta convict hospital, NSW. Australasian Historical Archaeology 26:71–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Du Cros, Hilary (2002) Much More than Stones and Bones: Australian Archaeology in the Late Twentieth Century. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fforde, Cressida (2004) Collecting the Dead: Archaeology and the Reburial Issue. Duckworth, London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Garton, Steven (1990) Out of Luck: Poor Australians and Social Welfare 1788–1988. Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gates, William (1961 [1850]) Recollections of Life in Van Diemen’s Land, Facsimile edition. Part I. Review Publications, Dubbo, New South Wales.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gibbs, Martin (2003a) The archaeology of crisis: Shipwreck survivor camps in Australasia. Historical Archaeology 37(1):128–145.

    Google Scholar 

  • Green, Jeremy (1989) The loss of the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie retourschip BATAVIA, Western Australia (1629). BAR International Series 489, British Archaeological Reports, Oxford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haglund, Laila (1976) An Archaeological Analysis of the Broadbeach Aboriginal Burial Ground. University of Queensland Press, St. Lucia, Queensland.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hewitt, Geoff (2003) The former Russell Street Police Garage, Melbourne: a study in the application of documentary sources to archaeological interpretation. The Artefact 26:11–31.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hiatt, Betty (1969) Cremation in Aboriginal Australia. Mankind 7(2):104–119.

    Google Scholar 

  • Holmes, Katie, Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi (2008) Reading the Garden: The Settlement of Australia. Melbourne University Publishing, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Inglis, Ken S. (1998) Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. The Miegunyah Press and Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jack, R. Ian (1995) Chinese cemeteries outside China. In: Paul Macgregor (ed.), Histories of the Chinese in Australasia and the South Pacific, pp. 299–306. Museum of Chinese Australian History, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jalland, Pat (2002) Australian Ways of Death: A Social and Cultural History 1840–1918. Oxford University Press, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jalland, Pat (2006) Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth-Century Australia: War, Medicine and the Funeral Business. University of New South Wales Press, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Karskens, Grace (1998) Death was in his face: dying, burial and remembrance in early Sydney. Labour History 74:21–39.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Karskens, Grace (1999) Inside the Rocks: The Archaeology of a Neighbourhood. Hale and Iremonger, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Karskens, Grace (2003a) Raising the dead: attitudes to European human remains in the Sydney region c. 1840–2000. Historic Environment 17:42–48.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lake, Marilyn (2006) Monuments of manhood and colonial dependence: the cult of Anzac as compensation. In: Marilyn Lake (ed.), Memory, Monuments and Museums: The Past in the Present, pp. 43–57. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • LeeDecker, Charles H. (2009) Preparing for an afterlife on Earth: the transformation of mortuary behavior in nineteenth-century North America. In: Teresita Majewski and David Gaimster (eds.), International Handbook of Historical Archaeology, pp. 141–157. Springer, New York, NY.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Lindenmayer, David, Mason Crane and Damian Michael (2005) Woodlands: A Disappearing Landscape, CSIRO, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lindsay, Patrick (2007) Fromelles, the Story of Australia’s Darkest Day: The Search for our Fallen Heroes of World War One. Hardie Grant Books, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Links, Fiona (2004) Isle of the Dead Archaeo-Geophysical Investigations: Preliminary Results. Report submitted to Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Tasmania.

    Google Scholar 

  • MacDonald, Helen (2005) Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection. Melbourne University Press, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin, Emily (1988) Gender and ideological differences in representations of life and death. In: James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski (eds.), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, pp. 164–179. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  • McCalman, Janet (2005) ‘All just melted with heat’: mothers, babies and ‘hot winds’ in colonial Melbourne. In: Tim Sherratt, Tom Griffiths and Libby Robin (eds.), A Change in the Weather: Climate and Culture in Australia, pp. 104–115. National Museum of Australia Press, Canberra.

    Google Scholar 

  • Meighan, Clement W. (1992) Some scholars’ views on reburial. American Antiquity 57(4):704–710.

    Google Scholar 

  • Merrillees, Robert S. (1990) Living with Egypt’s Past in Australia. Museum of Victoria, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mulvaney, John (1991) Past regained, future lost: the Kow Swamp Pleistocene burials. Antiquity 65:12–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Murray, Tim (2004c) In the footsteps of George Dutton: developing a contact archaeology of temperate Aboriginal Australia. In: Tim Murray (ed.), The Archaeology of Contact in Settler Societies, pp. 200–225. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mytum, Harold (2004) Mortuary Monuments and Burial Grounds of the Historic Period. Kluwer/Plenum, New York, NY.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Nicol, Robert (1994), At the End of the Road: Government, Society and Disposal of Human Remains in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicol, Robert (1997) Fairway to Heaven: The Story of Enfield, Australia’s First Lawn Cemetery. Enfield General Cemetery Trust, South Australia.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nicol, Robert (2003) This Grave and Burning Question: A Centenary History of Cremation in Australia. Adelaide Cemeteries Authority, Adelaide.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pardoe, Colin (1988) The cemetery as symbol: The distribution of prehistoric Aboriginal burial grounds in Southeastern Australia. Archaeology in Oceania 23(1):1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pasveer, Juliette, Alanah Buck and Marit van Huystee (1998) Victims of the Batavia mutiny: physical anthropological and forensic studies of the Beacon Island skeletons. The Bulletin of the Australian Institute for Maritime Archaeology 22:45–50.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pate, F. Donald (2005) Population expansion in early Adelaide reflected in gravestones and cemetery monuments 1836–1865. In: Pam Smith, F. Donald Pate and Robert Martin (eds.), Valleys of Stone: The Archaeology and History of Adelaide’s Hills Face, pp. 56–68. Kopi Books, Belair, South Australia.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peacock, Margaret (1985) Margaret Peacock’s Isle of the Dead. Isle of the Dead Publications, Port Arthur, Tasmania.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ramsland, John (1986) Children of the Back Lanes: Destitute and Neglected Children in Colonial New South Wales. University of NSW Press, Sydney.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ryan, Jan (1991) Chinese burials in Western Australia in the nineteenth century. Studies in Western Australian History 12:8–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Pamela A. (2006) Dry-stone walls and water wheels: managing water in colonial South Australia. In: Pam Smith, F. Donald Pate and Robert Martin (eds.), Valleys of Stone: The Archaeology and History of Adelaide’s Hills Face, pp. 69–92. Kōpi Books, Belair, SA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spicer, Chrys (1991) Boroondara: Australia’s first landscaped garden cemetery. Heritage Australia 10(2):3–7.

    Google Scholar 

  • Talbot, Diann (2004) The Buckland Valley Goldfield. Speciality Press, Albury, NSW.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tarlow, Sarah (1999) Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. Blackwell, Oxford.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tuffin, Richard (2005) Isle of the Dead Comparative Study: Death and Burial of Convicts Under Sentence in Van Diemen’s Land. Report submitted to Port Arthur Historic Site Management Authority, Tasmania.

    Google Scholar 

  • Veit, Richard F., Sherene B. Baugher and Gerard P. Scharfenberger (2009) Historical archaeology of religious sites and cemeteries. Historical Archaeology 43(1):1–11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Watson, Rubie S. (1988) Remembering the dead: graves and politics in Southeastern China. In: James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski (eds.), Death Ritual in Late Imperial China, pp. 203–227. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA.

    Google Scholar 

  • Webb, Stephen (1987) Reburying Australian skeletons. Antiquity 61:292–296.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wegars, Patricia (2003) From old gold mountain to new gold mountain: Chinese archaeological sites, artefact repositories and archives in Western North America and Australasia. Australasian Historical Archaeology 21:70–83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wong Hoy, Kevin (2007) Murder, Manslaughter and Affray: making a cold case of the Buckland Riot, 4 July 1857. In: Keir Reeves and David Nichols (eds.), Deeper Leads: New Approaches to Victorian Goldfields History, pp. 131–155. Ballarat Heritage Services, Ballarat, VIC.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anson, Tim J. (2004) The Bioarchaeology of the St. Mary's Free Ground Burials: Reconstruction of Colonial South Australian Lifeways. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Department of Anatomical Sciences, University of Adelaide, Adelaide.

    Google Scholar 

  • Buckley, Robin L. (2003) Six Dogs: A Saga of Snakes, Dogs and Medical Byways. Unpublished BA (Honours) dissertation, Archaeology Program, La Trobe University, Melbourne.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ross, Lynette (1995) Death and Burial at Port Arthur 1830–1877. Unpublished BA (Honours) dissertation, Department of History, University of Tasmania, Hobart.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Archaeology Program, La Trobe University, 3086, Bundoora, Victoria, Australia

    Susan Lawrence & Peter Davies

Authors
  1. Susan Lawrence
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Peter Davies
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Susan Lawrence .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Lawrence, S., Davies, P. (2011). Death. In: An Archaeology of Australia Since 1788. Contributions To Global Historical Archaeology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7485-3_12

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation