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I'm a PhD student researching the role of the archaeological dead in contemporary British society. Think of this as a scrapbook of all the interesting links, snippets of information and random bits and bobs I come across pertaining to death, dying and the dead. Enjoy?!

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    Coffins no longer a must in Ireland

    It will no longer be illegal to bury bodies without coffins in the Republic of Ireland from next month.

    Under existing regulations, a body can not be buried unless it is enclosed in a sufficiently strong material such as wood.

    The change was made to facilitate Muslims, who are normally buried without a coffin.

    However, after 1 June, anyone may elect to have a loved one buried without a coffin.

    The Department of the Environment said individual cemeteries could opt out of the arrangement.

    The new rule can be suspended if there is a health or environmental issue, such as a cemetery near a water source.

    (Source: BBC News)

    Fantasy coffins: Meet the man who puts the ‘fun’ into funereal Fancy laying your head down one last time in a Coca-Cola bottle? Or an aeroplane? You name it you can be buried in it, says Paul Bignell His creations are of highly intricate and take months of intensive work to produce, yet when they are finished they are buried six feet in the ground, never to be seen again. >Meet Paa Joe: the 68-year-old Ghanaian master craftsman and grandfather of the ‘fantasy coffin’ trade. For almost 50 years, Paa Joe – whose real name is Joseph Ashong – has been burying people in anything from lions, aeroplanes, tanks and even Coca-Cola bottles – whatever the link to the deceased, the Ghanaian coffin maker will hand-craft it. But times have not been kind to the man who has produced thousands of coffins over the decades and who has had two US presidents stop by his workshop. (Source: The Independent)

    Fantasy coffins: Meet the man who puts the ‘fun’ into funereal

    Fancy laying your head down one last time in a Coca-Cola bottle? Or an aeroplane? You name it you can be buried in it, says Paul Bignell

    His creations are of highly intricate and take months of intensive work to produce, yet when they are finished they are buried six feet in the ground, never to be seen again.

    >Meet Paa Joe: the 68-year-old Ghanaian master craftsman and grandfather of the ‘fantasy coffin’ trade. For almost 50 years, Paa Joe – whose real name is Joseph Ashong – has been burying people in anything from lions, aeroplanes, tanks and even Coca-Cola bottles – whatever the link to the deceased, the Ghanaian coffin maker will hand-craft it.

    But times have not been kind to the man who has produced thousands of coffins over the decades and who has had two US presidents stop by his workshop.

    (Source: The Independent)

    evocativesynthesis: Arthur’s Seat Coffins In June 1836 five young boys, hunting for rabbits on the north-eastern slopes Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, found 17 miniature coffins hidden inside a cave. No one knows what they are, but theories range from mock burials, to witchcraft, to protection for sailors. The coffins currently reside at the National Museum of Scotland.

    evocativesynthesis:

    Arthur’s Seat Coffins

    In June 1836 five young boys, hunting for rabbits on the north-eastern slopes Arthur’s Seat, Edinburgh, found 17 miniature coffins hidden inside a cave. No one knows what they are, but theories range from mock burials, to witchcraft, to protection for sailors. The coffins currently reside at the National Museum of Scotland.

    (via theolduvaigorge)

    Polish coffin firm provokes fury with its topless calendar  A Polish coffin company has angered the Catholic church after producing a calendar featuring topless women posing with their caskets. The marketing ploy features semi-naked women in provocative poses on and next to coffins made by company Lindner. The Catholic church has condemned the calendar saying human death should be respected and not mixed with sex. One image from the 2013 edition of the calendar sees a young woman with a snake covering her breasts as she reclines on a coffin. In another, a woman wearing a crimson corset is depicted pulling out the heart of a man lying on a casket. ‘My son had the idea of creating the company’s calendar so that we could show something half-serious, colorful, beautiful; the beauty of Polish girls and the beauty of our coffins,’ said Zbigniew Lindner, the firm’s owner. ‘We wanted to show that a coffin isn’t a religious symbol. Its a product. ‘Why are people afraid of coffins and not of business suits, cosmetics or jewelry?’ The calendar is for sale on the company’s website and each customer receives a complementary key ring in the shape of a coffin. The Catholic church in Poland has labelled the campaign inappropriate. A church spokesman has said that human death should be treated with solemnity and not mixed up with sex. Although 93 per cent of Poles consider themselves Catholic, the proportion who attend church regularly is falling as changes in society are challenging the faith.

    Polish coffin firm provokes fury with its topless calendar 

    A Polish coffin company has angered the Catholic church after producing a calendar featuring topless women posing with their caskets.

    The marketing ploy features semi-naked women in provocative poses on and next to coffins made by company Lindner.

    The Catholic church has condemned the calendar saying human death should be respected and not mixed with sex.

    One image from the 2013 edition of the calendar sees a young woman with a snake covering her breasts as she reclines on a coffin.

    In another, a woman wearing a crimson corset is depicted pulling out the heart of a man lying on a casket.

    ‘My son had the idea of creating the company’s calendar so that we could show something half-serious, colorful, beautiful; the beauty of Polish girls and the beauty of our coffins,’ said Zbigniew Lindner, the firm’s owner.

    ‘We wanted to show that a coffin isn’t a religious symbol. Its a product.

    ‘Why are people afraid of coffins and not of business suits, cosmetics or jewelry?’

    The calendar is for sale on the company’s website and each customer receives a complementary key ring in the shape of a coffin.

    The Catholic church in Poland has labelled the campaign inappropriate.

    A church spokesman has said that human death should be treated with solemnity and not mixed up with sex.

    Although 93 per cent of Poles consider themselves Catholic, the proportion who attend church regularly is falling as changes in society are challenging the faith.

    Hurricane Sandy forces coffins of the dead to rise up from the ground After having leveled huge swathes of New York City and the East Coast as it rampaged through the region on Monday night, superstorm Sandy inflicted a final indignity as it caused coffins to rise from their graves. At one cemetery in Crisfield, Maryland, two caskets, one silver and the other bronze, rose up from the ground as the sheer force of the water unleashed by Sandy swelled the ground. Powerful enough to dislodge the cement slabs that covered the graves, the sad sight indicated the indiscriminate bombardment that mother nature brought to reign over the U.S. Atlantic coastline. Full story here.

    Hurricane Sandy forces coffins of the dead to rise up from the ground

    After having leveled huge swathes of New York City and the East Coast as it rampaged through the region on Monday night, superstorm Sandy inflicted a final indignity as it caused coffins to rise from their graves.

    At one cemetery in Crisfield, Maryland, two caskets, one silver and the other bronze, rose up from the ground as the sheer force of the water unleashed by Sandy swelled the ground.

    Powerful enough to dislodge the cement slabs that covered the graves, the sad sight indicated the indiscriminate bombardment that mother nature brought to reign over the U.S. Atlantic coastline.

    Full story here.

    Buried Alive Vivi·sepulture; the action of burying, or the fact of being buried alive. Don’t worry, it probably won’t happen to you. That kind of thing could never happen nowadays…right? Being buried alive is a fear that has been with humanity for a long, long time. As early as the Greeks one can find stories of people being prematurely pronounced dead and accidentally burned alive on their funeral pyres. At various moments throughout history, this fear, this Taphephobia, has actively gripped the Western mind. The terror wasn’t without its basis in reality.  One circumstance in which live burials are thought to have often taken place were during outbreaks of disease such as the black plague. Due to the rapid spread of the disease victims were buried almost immediately after death, and sometimes beforehand. These circumstances would repeat themselves again with the cholera outbreaks throughout Europe.  Throughout the enlightenment, doctors were learning more about the human body and death. As they learned to revive people who were previously considered dead (such as drowning victims via the recently invented mouth to mouth resuscitation) doctors began to question if all the people they were burying had truly been dead. With increasing reports of premature burial, by the late 1700s the fear of being buried alive had fully taken hold of the Western mind.    It was a common enough fear that in 1799 as President George Washington lay dying he told his servants ”Do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead. Do you understand?” to avoid such a fate. The fear and much of the mythology surrounding being buried alive, reached its first cultural high watermark with Edgar Allen Poe’s stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the aptly named “The Premature Burial” which encapsulated the fear into prose. Over the next century the fear would only intensify. The Victorian Era might be called the golden age of premature burial fear. When the Duke of Wellington died in 1858, the three days Washington demanded wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the Victorians fear of premature burial. The Duke was left above ground for a full two months, just to be sure.  So terrified were people of premature burial that numerous ways of avoiding it were devised. Methods included ways of checking for the “true death” such as a tobacco smoke enema (also believed to have powers of revival), inserting a spike beneath the nail of someones large toe, and what were known as “waiting mortuaries” where bodies were left to decompose for a few weeks before burial. Another route was to just make sure the victim was really, really, super dead. From the “if they weren’t dead before, they defintly are now” school of thought, some doctors would avoid live burial by stabbing the corpse through the heart, removing the heart entirely or by decapitating the corpse. A special coffins was even made so that when closed with coffin nails, it punctured tubes of poison gas, and gassed the corpse to death. (All of which was presumably done to save someone the fate of being buried alive, but feels a bit counter-productive to this humble writer.)  In 1896, reformer William Tebb (and early anti-vaccination nut) was concerened enough about live burial that he founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. In 1905 Tebb conducted a survey in which he claimed to find evidence of ”219 cases of near live burial, 149 actual live burials, 10 cases of live dissection and 2 cases of awakening while being embalmed.” While to modern eyes this may seem like a strange fear from a past era, there have been a number of more modern cases. One amazing case was that of Angelo Hays, a frenchman who was buried alive in the 1930s during a coma, but rescued when he was dug up two days later becuase of an insurance investigation. He later poured his money into an elaborate escape coffin, complete with supplies and a two way radio. Recently vivisepulture has been making headlines again. Earlier this year a South African man believed to have died of an asthma attack awoke twentyone hours later in total darkness inside a cold chamber in the morgue. Only by yelling from within was he rescued. In September of 2011, a Brazilian woman, Rosa Celestrino De Assis, was declared dead. When her daughter went to give her dead body a final hug in the morgue, she noticed the corpse was breathing. In her words “Not only did I have to go collect my mom from a cold storage drawer at the morgue, but when I got there, I find her still breathing.” The woman was rushed back to the hospital, but sadly, died two days later. Both of these may have been cases of a medical phenomenon called the “Lazarus syndrome.” Also known as the Lazarus phenomenon, it takes place when after numerous failed attempts at resuscitation, a victims heart spontaneously begins to beat again, returning the victim to life. Though rare, there are multiple documented cases and it may be more common than reported. From a report in medical journal anesthesia-analgesia: “Although only a handful of such cases have appeared in the literature, there has been speculation that the Lazarus phenomenon occurs more often than those few reports would suggest. Possible explanations for the reluctance to report these cases include: 1) a concern regarding medicolegal ramifications, 2) a fear of being criticized for negligence or hyperbole, 3) the lack of a satisfying physiologic explanation for the events, 4) the lack of complete documentation or monitoring of the event, and 5) the physician’s disbelief of his or her own observations.” In the words of the doctor and author of the report: “It is a humbling reminder to find that our efforts and judgements are not necessarily the final arbiters of outcome. Perhaps it is a supreme hubris on our part to presume that we can reliably distinguish the reversible from the irreversible, or the salvageable from the nonsalvageable.” There are a number of excellent sites that can be visited which pertain to being buried alive. One is a beautiful grave in Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, belonging to a young girl named Rufina Cambaceres, who is said to have been buried alive. (The veracity of this particular claim is up for debate.) Another excellent site is the grave of Thomas Pursell in Wildwood Cemetery in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, (shown above in the black and white picture) who was buried with “an ax, a hammer and a piece of bread” in a ventilated, felt lined coffin that could be opened from the inside, and for a look at some safety coffin designs, try the Undertakers Museum in Vienna, Austria, the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Illinios, or the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, Texas. For much more on this topic read the fantastic “Buried Alive” by Jan Bondeson, the definitive guide to this fascinating subject. Via Atlas Obscura and posted in its full entirety because it is just fascinating!

    Buried Alive

    Vivi·sepulture; the action of burying, or the fact of being buried alive. Don’t worry, it probably won’t happen to you. That kind of thing could never happen nowadays…right?

    Being buried alive is a fear that has been with humanity for a long, long time. As early as the Greeks one can find stories of people being prematurely pronounced dead and accidentally burned alive on their funeral pyres. At various moments throughout history, this fear, this Taphephobia, has actively gripped the Western mind. The terror wasn’t without its basis in reality. 

    One circumstance in which live burials are thought to have often taken place were during outbreaks of disease such as the black plague. Due to the rapid spread of the disease victims were buried almost immediately after death, and sometimes beforehand. These circumstances would repeat themselves again with the cholera outbreaks throughout Europe. 

    Throughout the enlightenment, doctors were learning more about the human body and death. As they learned to revive people who were previously considered dead (such as drowning victims via the recently invented mouth to mouth resuscitation) doctors began to question if all the people they were burying had truly been dead. With increasing reports of premature burial, by the late 1700s the fear of being buried alive had fully taken hold of the Western mind.   

    It was a common enough fear that in 1799 as President George Washington lay dying he told his servants ”Do not let my body be put into the vault in less than three days after I am dead. Do you understand?” to avoid such a fate.

    The fear and much of the mythology surrounding being buried alive, reached its first cultural high watermark with Edgar Allen Poe’s stories “The Fall of the House of Usher” and the aptly named “The Premature Burial” which encapsulated the fear into prose. Over the next century the fear would only intensify. The Victorian Era might be called the golden age of premature burial fear. When the Duke of Wellington died in 1858, the three days Washington demanded wasn’t nearly enough to satisfy the Victorians fear of premature burial. The Duke was left above ground for a full two months, just to be sure. 

    So terrified were people of premature burial that numerous ways of avoiding it were devised. Methods included ways of checking for the “true death” such as a tobacco smoke enema (also believed to have powers of revival), inserting a spike beneath the nail of someones large toe, and what were known as “waiting mortuaries” where bodies were left to decompose for a few weeks before burial.

    Another route was to just make sure the victim was really, really, super dead. From the “if they weren’t dead before, they defintly are now” school of thought, some doctors would avoid live burial by stabbing the corpse through the heart, removing the heart entirely or by decapitating the corpse. A special coffins was even made so that when closed with coffin nails, it punctured tubes of poison gas, and gassed the corpse to death. (All of which was presumably done to save someone the fate of being buried alive, but feels a bit counter-productive to this humble writer.) 

    In 1896, reformer William Tebb (and early anti-vaccination nut) was concerened enough about live burial that he founded the London Association for the Prevention of Premature Burial. In 1905 Tebb conducted a survey in which he claimed to find evidence of ”219 cases of near live burial, 149 actual live burials, 10 cases of live dissection and 2 cases of awakening while being embalmed.”

    While to modern eyes this may seem like a strange fear from a past era, there have been a number of more modern cases. One amazing case was that of Angelo Hays, a frenchman who was buried alive in the 1930s during a coma, but rescued when he was dug up two days later becuase of an insurance investigation. He later poured his money into an elaborate escape coffin, complete with supplies and a two way radio.

    Recently vivisepulture has been making headlines again. Earlier this year a South African man believed to have died of an asthma attack awoke twentyone hours later in total darkness inside a cold chamber in the morgue. Only by yelling from within was he rescued. In September of 2011, a Brazilian woman, Rosa Celestrino De Assis, was declared dead. When her daughter went to give her dead body a final hug in the morgue, she noticed the corpse was breathing. In her words “Not only did I have to go collect my mom from a cold storage drawer at the morgue, but when I got there, I find her still breathing.” The woman was rushed back to the hospital, but sadly, died two days later.

    Both of these may have been cases of a medical phenomenon called the “Lazarus syndrome.” Also known as the Lazarus phenomenon, it takes place when after numerous failed attempts at resuscitation, a victims heart spontaneously begins to beat again, returning the victim to life. Though rare, there are multiple documented cases and it may be more common than reported. From a report in medical journal anesthesia-analgesia:

    “Although only a handful of such cases have appeared in the literature, there has been speculation that the Lazarus phenomenon occurs more often than those few reports would suggest. Possible explanations for the reluctance to report these cases include: 1) a concern regarding medicolegal ramifications, 2) a fear of being criticized for negligence or hyperbole, 3) the lack of a satisfying physiologic explanation for the events, 4) the lack of complete documentation or monitoring of the event, and 5) the physician’s disbelief of his or her own observations.”

    In the words of the doctor and author of the report:

    “It is a humbling reminder to find that our efforts and judgements are not necessarily the final arbiters of outcome. Perhaps it is a supreme hubris on our part to presume that we can reliably distinguish the reversible from the irreversible, or the salvageable from the nonsalvageable.”

    There are a number of excellent sites that can be visited which pertain to being buried alive.

    One is a beautiful grave in Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires, belonging to a young girl named Rufina Cambaceres, who is said to have been buried alive. (The veracity of this particular claim is up for debate.) Another excellent site is the grave of Thomas Pursell in Wildwood Cemetery in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, (shown above in the black and white picture) who was buried with “an ax, a hammer and a piece of bread” in a ventilated, felt lined coffin that could be opened from the inside, and for a look at some safety coffin designs, try the Undertakers Museum in Vienna, Austria, the Museum of Funeral Customs in Springfield, Illinios, or the National Museum of Funeral History in Houston, Texas.

    For much more on this topic read the fantastic “Buried Alive” by Jan Bondeson, the definitive guide to this fascinating subject.

    Via Atlas Obscura and posted in its full entirety because it is just fascinating!

    Death becomes you: Picking the perfect coffin Dying is the one thing we all have in common. The novelist Maria Edgeworth remarked, “I’ve a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die”. While you may not be able to take a seat in the pews, you can still have a say in your final send-off. Many bereavement counsellors believe that pre-planning your funeral can be one of the greatest gifts you can give to those that survive you As anyone who has had to arrange a funeral will know, it can be a heart-wrenching process. And, perhaps as people act on such advice, in recent years there has been a steady rise in the numbers of personalised funerals. Click the photo to read the article in full!

    Death becomes you: Picking the perfect coffin

    Dying is the one thing we all have in common.

    The novelist Maria Edgeworth remarked, “I’ve a great fancy to see my own funeral afore I die”.

    While you may not be able to take a seat in the pews, you can still have a say in your final send-off.

    Many bereavement counsellors believe that pre-planning your funeral can be one of the greatest gifts you can give to those that survive you

    As anyone who has had to arrange a funeral will know, it can be a heart-wrenching process.

    And, perhaps as people act on such advice, in recent years there has been a steady rise in the numbers of personalised funerals.

    Click the photo to read the article in full!