Final Thoughts... What could they be... READ ON

My original plan was to do two last blog posts one being on personal adornment and the other my final thoughts on the class, but looks as thought I have run out of time. With a rush of papers, projects, and exams in the last two weeks my blog as been put on the back burner slowly simmering and waiting to be brought to a boil again. So here we go, my final thoughts.  

Well as the semester comes to a close I thought I would share a few last thoughts on the dead and the stories they tell from my perspective. It has been an absolute pleasure to learn and understand what we can tell from the dead from Dr. McGuire, but its my turn now. So far we have looked at 10 different themes that have to do with the dead. They are;

Ethnoarchaeology

Treatment of Dead

Status

Landscapes of The Dead

Gender

Life-cycle

Kinship

Death Through Time

Politics of Death

and Memory

These themes have given me a good understanding of why we should look at our dead and how thy effect the decisions we make about of dead today. Surprisingly or so I thought we all buried our dead the same way over time, not the case. This may seem like an ignorant thought but I, as you know if you have been reading my blog, have not really been exposed to death passed someone close dying or visiting a cemetery. My eyes were opened, so much thought used to go into where someone was buried, what they buried with and how they were buried. It seems these days you are lucky if you have a family plot that you can get put into. If not you are on your own to find a place to dispose of the remains, if you so wish. Make sure you don’t break any laws, as there seem to be many out there prohibiting certain ways of disposing your deceased.

     It makes you have an appreciation for what the people before us did with their dead and understand why they did it that way. After learning about the many different things that happen and what they mean I look at our system of burying the dead and it seems so cold and unpersonable. While I get that times have changed and the ways in which we live our daily lives have changed we have become so cold and unwilling to deal with our dead in a respectful manner. I feel like those that were here before us, long before us, would frown upon the way we deal and dispose of our dead. We don’t get me wrong have come up with some pretty interesting ways to get rid of our dead. Overall what meaning does a simple gravestone mean these days?? Is there any way to really get someone’s status, gender, kinship, life cycle and landscape all in one?? Not even just the personal headstone but in a grave.

This I hate to say seems almost impossible. As I wrote in previous blog entries the things I would want to be buried with but that was only a few, but do those items say anything again about my gender, status, kinship, and life-cycle?? Not even close. I understand that those would be hard things to wrap up into a few items these days but the people before us left so much behind that could tell us these things. Here we are how many years later evaluating their remains, the graves, and the grave goods to see what their lives were like, where they ranked in society and who their kin were. It sounds like such an easy thing to put together yet somehow we can’t recreate that today. No single items could explain the complexity of the world we live in today. It helps a little that we have writing, language and communication but what if years from now like we evolved before evolve again into something different. What would massive cemeteries say about us??

There is so much to ponder about this topic, especially talking to someone who is not comfortable with it. The whole semester I have had people looking at me like why would you want to take that, and people saying that’s a class?? Yes, believe it or not it is. This class has truly opened me up to the idea of death and what I want to leave behind; not only in the elaborate grave and party I am planning for myself but what I want to leave behind in the world.    

Love me some Nat Geographic.

What’s better then National Geographic??

Let me tell you… Not much.

I should probably expand on this, I LOVE NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC. I think I always will. They are always incredibly interesting, doesn’t have to be the cover story but there is always something I am going to learn out of those magazines. Ever since I was a little girl I remember there being stacks of them at my grandmas house. Didn’t matter if they were old or new at the time I loved to look at the pictures and read what was in them. Now of course I have probably read most of them and they kind of have to be new for me to look at them. As you can tell National Geographic has a special place in my heart. 

As I goggled the site that we a examining for our case study called La Doncella one of the first websites to come up was none other then National Geographic. Did I expect nothing less, not really. Check it out here  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/09/photogalleries/mummy-pictures/index.html

Our rubric is divided into 6 different categories or headlines. They are topic choice, overall appearance, content, quality of sources, mechanics, and cooperative work. Some of these categories are a bit hard to evaluate from our rubric, as some of these categories would not apply. For instance I have no way to see how the cooperative work played out on this article the authors produced. The article and website are easy to navigate and very informative. The wed page dedicated to this site has pictures for what it is talking about, as well as very informative pieces to let people know what it is about. While this page is mostly fact based and does not go into detail about the site I feel like there is limited information. I think there could be more information shared about what they found and the specifics of their findings rather then a basic introduction to what they found. The sources for the website are completely reliable as they reference the specific archaeologist that found the bodies. I find that the pictures and visuals that they have are great, but offer no warning to how graphic they are going to be or the significance of each photo. The overall appearance of the website is well done and very put together. As most National Geographic sties are well put together. This specific site is a connecting site to the main National Geographic webpage, it is called the National Geographic News. This page allows you to connect to many other pages that have to do with the same topic.     

What would make it better???

I think a bit more specific information about the site and what they found would make the webpage more informative and a better read. This would also allow the reader to get a larger amount of information in a shorter article that is easier to read. National Geographic is a great webpage that is very interactive and informative for people that don’t want too much of a scientific explanation for it. I think a more interactive section on the site would make it more relatable to the general public. A good mix of information and interactive qualities to a website make it engaging for the general public, resulting in more hits to the website in general.   

How would you teach your child about death???

How children learn about death I think depends on the society and culture that they are brought up in. For instance those that grow up in a country with high poverty rates and a society stricken with disease and death are more used to the idea and have probably have more exposure to the subject. Versus a society that is not often stricken by poverty and disease, the exposure to death in these societies is very small compared to other countries.

This is how I see my exposure to death. I can’t say I really learned about it. I was never really sat down and told this is what death is, or this is what happens when someone dies. Growing up in a pretty religious house I learned a little bit based on the bible, but had no real experience of someone dying close to me until my junior high years. I also had questions about where we went or what would happen to us but a solid answer was never given. Not that I am saying people skirted around the issue with me because they didn’t think I could handle it, I just think people didn’t want to tell me at such a young age. It seems like it would be hard to explain to a child. I think that is why a lot of people don’t dive right into it with children. Most I think like me aren’t exposed until someone close to them has passed. I defiantly was when my grandma passed in 2007. 4 months later my other grandma had passed. They were the only two grandparents I had left, in a matter of 4 months they were both gone. It was a whirlwind activity flying between Calgary and Toronto. Having gone from attending no funerals to going to two in a small amount of time. They were both extremely different funerals and events leading up too. I had a lot of questions for quite a while and was scared to approach anyone about them because it was so fresh. Knowing now the relationships that both my parents had with their moms helps me understand that I probably could have asked them questions, that may have helped them heal a bit more as well.

I am getting away from myself, back to the reason I am blogging. I defiantly think that the exposure to death has an affect on the children and how they learn and deal with death. Many different societies are exposed to it all over the world and are okay with it. They all have traditions and rituals that take them through the burial of the dead as well as the healing process. I think that Western Society has put a negative spin on death through many different events in our history. Death has been seen as a topic that many people don’t talk about openly, an issue that is skirted around often by families and our society. Our exposure to death is very individual but collectively we are not open about the topic. Our society is not as exposed as others are due to our level of development.

I am not sure if our opinion of death as a society has changed overall or not. I think if it has it will have only changed a little bit. Events in our history every time something happens changes the way in which we look at death. This has an affect on our opinions and exposure to death as a whole. The more I think about it we have been changed by events in our history, but have our children, do they know what is going on???

So I ask this, how would you expose your child to death?? 

Would you wait for something to naturally happen and 

then go from there or would you just jump right into it???