Summary

Ron Romano of Spirits Alive (a non-profit dedicated to preserving Eastern Cemetery and its history) joins the show to talk about gravestone symbolism, mortuary practices, cemetery organization and social status, and the evolution of gravestone creation in Eastern Cemetery of Portland, ME.

Cemeteries reveal a lot about the people who made them — how they think about death, life, and religion; social and economic hierarchies; changing technologies; what’s important to them; what causes anxiety. Cemeteries are human-made spaces filled with our bodies and artifacts that we’ve created. They can’t help but be reflections of who we are and what we care about in any particular moment. Historians like Ron help us unpack these layered contexts by using the cemetery as a lens for interpretation of the past, which helps biological anthropologists and archaeologists contextualize their discoveries and better understand past populations.

His new book, Stories from Maine Cemeteries: Lives Cut Short, comes out on June 9!

Recommendations

• Spirits Alive
• Spirits Alive – Monographs about Portland’s Eastern Cemetery by Ron Romano
• Association for Gravestone Studies
• Romano, R. (2017). Portland’s Historic Eastern Cemetery: A Field of Ancient Graves. Historic Press.
• Romano, R. (2016). Early Gravestones in Southern Maine: The Genius of Bartlett Adams. Historic Press.
• Giguere, JM. (2024). Pleasure Grounds of Death: The Rural Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century America. University of Michigan Press.
• Burnett, A. (2015). Gone to the Grave: Burial Customs of the Arkansas Ozarks, 1850-1950. University Press of Mississippi.
• Blachowicz, J. (2015). From Slate to Marble: Gravestone Carving Traditions in Eastern Massachusetts, 1770-1870 (Vols. 1-2). Graver Press.
• Bondeson, J. (2002). Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. W.W. Norton & Company.
• Hartnell, J. (2019). Medieval Bodies: Life and Death in the Middle Ages. W.W. Norton & Company.
• Hartnell, J. (2019). Medieval Bodies: Life, Death and Art in the Middle Ages. Wellcome Collection.
• Faust, DG. (2009). This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Knopf Publishing Group.
• Houlbrooke, R. (1998). Death, Religion, and the Family in England, 1480-1750. Oxford University Press.
• Houlbrooke, R. (Ed). (2021). Death, Ritual, and Bereavement. Routledge.
• Doughty, C. (2015). Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory. W.W. Norton & Company.
• Deetz, J. (1996). In Small Things Forgotten: An Archaeology of Early American Life. Anchor Books.
• Shultz, SR. (2005). Body Snatching: The Robbing of Graves for the Education of Physicians in Early Nineteenth Century America. McFarland & Company.