Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper examines how culturally, treatment of the body post-mortem may provide insight with how humans perceive the concept of death. I briefly examine the history of cemeteries, how corpses have been treated (from a textual perspective), historical differences with the issues of death and finally, I conduct an analysis of gravestones at a local cemetery to shed light on how human beings ritualistically symbolize, and memorialize themselves and others. This historical information can be applied to end-of-life matters to indicate a serious societal lack of communication about death as a natural process and the use of euphemisms. Additionally, we can understand how humans bring meaning to their own lives and others by the memorials left afterwards.

Publication Type: Invited Paper
Abstract: Cemeteries are a wonderful source of information. Black cemeteries are that and much more. These sacred sites are the resting place of our ancestors, the ones who came before us to establish communities and make significant contributions that have helped shape the world as we know it. The history of Canadians of African origins is being re-discovered and restored thanks to the efforts of several individuals searching in abandoned cemeteries in Essex County, Ontario.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Do liberal states have a legal obligation to provide their citizens with the means for an appropriate religious burial? Or would such state involvement violate liberal democratic principles of secularity as the French setting dictates? This paper investigates the nexus between religion and politics, in Netherlands, Norway and France through the lens of burial laws. Each of these countries represents one ideal-type in a tripartite typology; France being ‘separatist’, Norway having an ‘established national church’, and Netherlands being a ‘selective cooperation country’. The paper seeks to understand what the political and legal dynamics are in these three secular democracies when it comes to decisions about limits on religious burial practice. And, secondly, it aims to link this clash between law and religious practice to a discussion about secularism in liberal democratic theory. To what extent can we observe different secular and legal narratives about the required neutrality of the public cemetery? With this empirical information it aims to interrogate, and criticize, a dominant conception of secularism (as strict separation) in political theory. The paper thus combines comparative case analysis with political theory.

Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: By the end of the Old Kingdom, Osiris became the principal deity at the site of Abydos, but the chronology of this religious shift has never been entirely clear. Excavations in the Middle Cemetery in Jan.-Feb. 2007 have shed more precise light on the early 6th dynasty timing of and motivations for this change, on the concomitant development of the cemetery as a political landscape invoking two dimensions of the royal past, and on the role played in these processes by two generations in the family of Weni the Elder.

Publication Type: Abstract Proposal
Abstract: In the 1990s, the Egypt Exploration Society sponsored three seasons of survey at the Gebel Sheikh el-Haridi, on the eastern side of the Nile at the ancient border between the Ninth and Tenth Nomes of Upper Egypt. This paper focuses on the examination of two contrasting necropolises at the site, that of Ezbet Zohary, in the modern province of Asyut at the north end of the site (29 extant tombs recorded), and Gebel Abu el-Nasr to the south (in Sohag Province), the most substantial necropolis on the headland with in excess of 100 recorded tombs set either in rock terraces at the top of the slope at the base of the vertical cliff or in rock outcrops scattered on the slope beneath. The original date of the majority of the tomb groups ranges from the later Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom but as was the case with most cemeteries in Egypt, the inhabitants were not left undisturbed.
Robbed, quarried at least from the New Kingdom onwards, and occupied as living spaces by Copts, the rock-cut tombs of the Haridi headland still provide important information about tomb construction and decoration in this area during the transition from the Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom, and some evidence of mummification. They also reflect the political and social picture of this part of the Nile Valley in the frontier zone between the Tenth and Ninth nome. The cemetery at Gebel Abu el-Nasr, in particular, features a tiered system of tomb size and at least one large tomb, perhaps that of a provincial governor, as well as another with elaborate (if very fragmentary) wall and ceiling paintings that may belong to a successor. At Ezbet Zohary, by contrast, the tombs tend to be more uniform in size and their undeveloped and unfinished interiors, although there are clear distinctions in the quality and ambition of carvings on their façades. Among these tombs, several had niched façades, false lintels, and torus rolls over the doorway.
This report on field work will include a discussion of the two cemeteries in terms of their architecture, tomb decoration (relief carving and painting), and small finds, as well as a consideration of the post-cemetery usage of the site.