Commemoration and Improvement: Parramatta St John’s Cemetery, New South Wales in its Context 1788 – c. 1840

Parramatta was the second British settlement established in mainland Australia, and for a time was the largest. Its burial ground and monuments, the oldest surviving British cemetery in mainland Australia, provides important evidence for the aspirations, attitudes and practices within this fledgling community. It reveals the role of improvement concepts and practices in popular as well as governmental culture, representing an experiment in secular control over burial decades before the urban non-denominational cemetery first appears in England. The primary chronological focus here is from the foundation of settlement in 1788 to c 1840, by which time free settlers as well as emancipists had transformed Parramatta from a convict settlement into a colonial town

The Iron Age Today

Thanks to investment in walking the landscape, aerial photography, geophysical survey and excavation, there is a baseline of information on the distribution and types of enclosed settlement and examples of high-quality site-based data, often revealing complex site histories. These are our resources from which to extract meaning about the past — but what can actually be said about the Iron Age from all these data? What are the next stages in moving towards greater understanding? And what is the current management and presentation of the Iron Age to the public in Wales? This contribution reviews our current state of knowledge and its uses so that we can develop strategies to improve the data and communicate what it can tell us about the Welsh past

Mortuary culture

The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe marks the arrival of early modern material culture studies as a vibrant, fully-established field of multi-disciplinary research

Popular attitudes to memory, the body, and social identity : the rise of external commemoration in Britain, Ireland, and New England

A comparative analysis of samples of external memorials from burial grounds in Britain, Ireland and New England reveals a widespread pattern of change in monument style and content, and exponential growth in the number of permanent memorials from the 18th century onwards. Although manifested in regionally distinctive styles on which most academic attention has so far been directed, the expansion reflects global changes in social relationships and concepts of memory and the body. An archaeological perspective reveals the importance of external memorials in articulating these changing attitudes in a world of increasing material consumption