Ashes and art

So I know this is the end of term and so a good number of you will probably not take the time to read this entry, but I thought I should write it anyway... just in case.

I was watching a live talkshow from Quebec during the week-end and one of the guests was a painter (Marc Séguin) who used human ashes in some of his paintings. I thought it was a neat idea that linked itself to the serie of posts people did on 'different forms of interment' and all that. So there you go, people can have their ashes transformed into diamonds, into pencils, but also... paintings.

I was listening to what the artist was saying and at the same time, trying feverishly to type what I could hear and here is an interesting point the painter made: the problem for him is not using ashes as a medium to paint, but rather it's trying to find a subject that will be appropriate. He was saying how he didn't want to paint portraits of the people to whom those ashes 'belonged' but at the same time, he needed to respect the medium itself. At some point, he mentioned that this situation could prove problematic when the people who gave him those ashes were disappointed at the result of the painting: "Well, I gave you grandpa and you made a landscape painting out of him..."

Another problem created by this choice of painting material was that, for some states, people are not legally allowed to transport ashes from one state to the other. Marc Séguin was saying how it could become complicated to have a painting cross some borders when the medium was 'organic' like that.

I thought it was interesting to see all the consequences of removing ashes from their urn...

Where does the dead cat go?

I promised I would have some courage and ask my mom what she did with the body of our deceased cat as it's winter and the soil is frozen... well, my mother is visiting now, so I finally asked and she answered, a little shy and guilty: "I put it in the garbage!" As the soil was frozen and she didn't want to have a body wait in her yard, unfreezing and refreezing over time, and as the river was also frozen, the garbage (huge bins) was the only place she could put the dead cat.

Interestingly however, my mom made sure to 'bury' the cat in the box she always slept in, with her blankets... My mother also made sure she didn't cover the body with other, more recent, trash bags, as a sign of respect for our cat. She just hopes the weather will stay cool until the trash truck comes, so that the body can remain frozen and undamaged.

I find this story interesting on many levels. The cat is, in the end, only a cat but is 'buried' with some 'grave goods'. The facts that the place of burial is a garbage bin and that the grave goods are in fact simply blankets and a cardboard box are very important. One archaeologist finding a cat's skeleton in a city's garbage might think that this cat was not well respected or loved. If this same archaeologist would find the box and the blankets (which aren't of a very rich fabric or making), he/she might find this to be a confirmation of the fact that this cat was not 'that' important... but that person would be far off the truth. Our cat was well loved and taken care of and this choice of burial is only the consequence of a lack of other possibilities. I'll try to keep that in mind next time I look at a weird, and seemingly non precious, burial!

What about dead animals?

So I talked to my mom back home last week and she told me: "Oh, by the way, I don't have a cat anymore!" It seems our lovely cat 'Numi' (because when you say it quickly and repeatedly, it mixes up to the sound 'minu,minu,minu' which is what 'kitty' sounds like in French... we thought it was funny years ago and it stuck) did not survive her 11th year of living outside in Quebec cold. Yes, I admit, even though I do not see this cat that much anymore, I was a bit sad but then...

I thought of the body. My mom told me she found the cat as hard as stone in her box in the entryway and I did not ask her what she would do with the body (it would have been inapropriate at the time even though my mom is very open and receptive on all topics). I remember that when our previous cat died, it was during the summer and so, my mom buried him somewhere near the house, but during winter?! The ground is quite frozen right now and I don't think my mom has the time to start going through this frozen hearth to bury her cat. But at the same time, I'm quite convinced she doesn't want to keep the body close at hand waiting for spring. I don't see her putting the cat in the wooden stove (oh... as I write this, I'm having goosebumps, this is a disgusting idea to me)! So, what to do with the body as the cat didn't die at the vet and as my mom has to get rid of it?!

So this brings me to two questions:

First, what can we tell about owners from their pet's 'funeral' or 'burial'? As pet spas are now popular and some dogs wear little booties to go outside, I presume some special treatment is available for dead animals in our society...

Second: How does the climate and the context of death influenced the way people were buried, or disposed of, in the past? I'm working on a chapter on Upper Paleolithic burials in Eurasia and it seems quite obvious that most of the burials we find were located in caves (where the ground would not have been frozen) or in special enclosures when in interior Europe... What did northern people do in the cold? Was cremation the best solution? Should we assume that the bodies we find buried in pits in northern regions died during the summer? Can we use climate to explain the fact that we find more 'pit burials' in southern regions than in northern regions? Or is that too easy an assumption?

Well, it seems this topic brought me to more than two questions... it's incredible what can come out of a simple topic such as a cat!

Digging in flesh

Reading Cameron's 'Dont talk about death' post (http://cameronmackintosh.blogspot.com/) made me think of the project in which I took part while in my last year of Undergrad at McGill, as it was in itself a very disgusting (and immensely cool) project to explain to non-archaeologists...

For a term, we had to dig up dead animals in a zoo cemetery in order to map the distribution of the corpses and reconstruct a skeleton (in order, in the end to make an educational display). This project was my introduction to fieldwork methods and... most importantly my introduction to the delights (!?) of digging in a pile of bones and sometimes in stuff that wasn't completely decomposed yet (some of that was affectionately called 'cream cheese', you get the picture!). I'll always remember fondly when my colleague digging next to me shouted "Oh crap! I'm digging in brain!!" (which relates to the picture attached here, as it was the ram's brain that was being 'dug up').

Picture credits to Jess Beck (I think), taken from the McGill Zooarchaeology blog.

For the moment, I'll spare you the details on the leaking plastic bags we found in the pits, and the hair (animal, not human of course) we would find at the end of our trowels. You can ask questions if you want, though!

I'm attaching here the address of the blog we wrote during this project, as it relates to this class in a way (I know, they were animals, not humans but we were dealing with death and decomposition, believe me the smell reminded us of that every week!).

http://mcgillzooarchaeology.blogspot.com/2008/10/week-1-initial-survey.html

By the way, it is still an ongoing project, so you can follow their latest discoveries on the same blog!

Money at funerals

I was taking some relax time while drinking my morning coffee and going through the News Feeds on Facebook, and read this interesting post from a guy I had been in High School with:

"Damn, will I play at the funerals of the whole city? At this pace, there won't be anybody left in a few weeks" (my translation)

It happens that this guy is a classical musician and seems to get contracts playing music at funerals (that I didn't know as I haven't seen the guy in over 10 years). So, today, he's complaining that he has 10 funerals lined up this week-end, including 4 at the same time (oops)... The post itself is interesting, but the comments on it are even better, as some people reflect on how strange it is to make money off of people's death (and mostly, to wish the dead keeps coming so that the mortgage can be paid), and others are simply trying to move their schedule around to take some of the contracts, without really paying attention to the fact that... they're working at funerals.

Well, it also made me re-realize that, at my funeral (if I get one), some people will be sad that's true, but others will simply be there to do business... life keeps on going... with death.

I hope technology will last

So, I read a few of the other blogs and realized that most of the people would like to be buried with books (which is not surprising given that we're all at school at the moment)... I found the idea interesting, and wondered if it would be adequate for me as well, as I clearly have been spending most of my awake time reading articles, books and others. But, I decided to be more specific than that.

Yeah, grave goods are fun, and might be useful to the ones who believe those objects might accompagny them in the 'after-life', but I'm not like that. I do believe that when I'll be dead, I'll be... well, dead. So, I would choose my grave goods in function of what they could tell a potential digger about me rather than what I feel comfortable with. This is why I thought: USB key!!!

Let's be honest here, if I do have the chance to be dug up and my bones do get published in a high-impact journal, that will probably be in at least a few hundreds if not thousands of years. By that time, the books or pictures I could have brought in my tomb with me will be long disintegrated and thus will not help anyone to understand who I was. This is why I thought I could simply put every important thing on a USB key, which would then be placed in a plastic bag (cause we all know how long those can take before decomposing, which in the occurrence is a good point).

On this important key, I could have scans of the book my mom wrote about me when I was growing up, scans of the shameful diary entries I wrote when I was a teenager (I'm not proud of them, but they do represent me at one point in my life). I would also include scans of my favorite books, the ones I could read over and over again... Scans of the journal entries of when I went backpacking in Europe, copies of the major papers I have written at the University and the ones that have been published (let's hope there are some), and of course: pictures of me, my family and my friends throughout the years.

The story of my life on a plastic USB protected from moisture and decay by a plastic bag... It sounds a bit too 21st century, but that's, in my opinion, the most effective way to do it simply without requiring a tomb the size of a house. Then, I just have to hope that future technologies will be able to retrieve the info. But that shouldn't be too complicated, right?!

Doing it for fun...

Here's a brief introduction of who I am and why I am doing what I am doing...

I am technically not enrolled in this class (even though I would have loved to take a class like this one when I was an undergrad); I am actually one of the TAs for this term.

My name is Claudine, I am a French Canadian from Quebec City originally, but as I've done my undergrad at McGill in Montreal, I consider myself a montrealese (or whatever you call it). A quick history of why I am now TAing for this class would be the following: I'm not one of those people who will tell you that they've always known they wanted to be archaeologists... far from it. In fact, if you'd told me 6 years ago that I would, one day, do an MA in archaeology, I would have thought you were completely insane (but I would probably not have said it out loud, I'm not a mean person)! I started my teenage years wanted dearly to be an actress. I studied drama for years and years but then... it didn't work as well as I had planned so I went backpacking in Europe on my own. During the 11 months I spent on the 'Old' continent, I learned about history and prehistory of course, but most importantly, I discovered a passion for travelling. I decided I wanted to travel all my life, but be paid for it (because the state of my bank account wasn't that great when I came back from this amazing trip). That's why I applied to do a BA in, at the time, Anthropology. And then, well, I quickly discovered that the anthro classes didn't appeal as much to me as all the archeo ones. So the choice was made and my future was set. I was to become an archaeologist!

During my undergrad, I had the opportunity to take a directed reading course in which my professor Dr. Riel-Salvatore and I worked on a study of beads in Upper Paleolithic (UP) burials. For this project, I produced an extensive database of the number of beads found in Gravettian burial contexts and analyzed their placement on the body. The aim of the study was to see if practices were the same everywhere (it was doubtful this result would come up) and if differences could be explained by factors such as age or sex of the buried individuals. This class project extended into a study on which my professor and I worked over the years, reinforcing the research and placing it in the broader context. This project has now been presented as a poster at a major conference last year and is now under review for publication... how neat is that, really!?

This project let me with a good understanding of rituals in the Gravettian and was a good starting point for another study I (again with the same professor) am currently working on. At the moment, I am compiling information on burials found in the whole UP in order to produce a synthesis of UP rituals at large. This project will be published as a chapter in an edited volume... and will also be the basis of the presentation I will do in your 392 class later in the term. I hope this will interest you as much as it interests me!

That's that for now. Even though I'm not a student for this class, I will try to take part in the blog experience of it... you know, just for the fun of it! Oh, and I'll read yours of course...