Content area
Full text
Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality. By Sarah Tarlow. Oxford: Blackwell, 1999. 207 pp. Illus. 55.00 (hbk), 16.99 (pbk). ISBN 6-631-20613-2 (hbk), 6-631-20614-0 (pbk)
In the early 1990s, the archaeologist Sarah Tarlow worked on a project to record every surviving memorial stone in the graveyards of Orkney, 3,021 monuments in all. These range in date from the pre-Reformation tombs in St Magnus Cathedral to memorials erected after the Second World War. Her analysis of that material formed her Ph.D. thesis and she has now written this volume based on it. While much of the data collected by the Orkney Graveyards Project was inevitably statistical (see Chapter 3), in the book she has concentrated on a qualitative and discursive approach, illustrated with line drawings and black and white photographs.
For those who are not archaeologists-no doubt the majority of readers of this journal-what does this book have to offer? Tarlow's approach may find considerable sympathy among those interested in folklore. She argues that "we should be moving towards writing archaeologies of emotion and experience" (p. 19) and that "a failure to consider emotions in the past, especially in a work ostensibly related to death and dying, would be an injustice to the people who erected these monuments" (p. 21). As she points out, the study of...