It's weird. I probably have more contace with tombs and tombstones than the average person, but I never think much about it. That is my job - I'm specializing in epigraphy, and much of my daily work consists of looking at tombstones. It's quite fun actually. But what can they tell us? So much, and so little at the same time.

One thing is sure, death was much more present in the Roman world. When a distinguished patrician died, his body was placed on the forum, and his relatives wore the masks of their deceased ancestors on a procession through Rome, mimicking the dead and keeping their memory alive, the dead literally walked the streets of Rome again. Along with the death-mask of the newly deceased, these masks would afterwards be prominently displayed in the family's house, carefully watching over the fortunes of their children and children's children. The dead were generally burned, in public, as Caesar so famously was, and buried outside the city limits - but a proper burial, among animal sacrifices, also included another pretty macabre act, the silicernium of funeral banquet, held directly at the grave of the newly interred (who thus probably was thought to participate), an act that was repeated after nine days. And in case the deceased should get hungry again, libations were poured over the grave of the dead. Some tombs contained openings or tubes connected to the burial spot to facilitate the drinks getting to the dead, like this peculiar marble slab for the covering of a grave, with a circular hole right in the middle. This must have been quite important, since some people paid considerable sums in advance to have this carried out in the future for them, and documented the payment on their tombstone. A bit macabre for many modern societies maybe, but remnants of the feast for the dead are still alive in many western countries, even if we may not leave food for the dead anymore. I'm told rappers still do that, though, and I'll make sure to have my children bring me some beer or gin occasionally, just in case.

In other ways, death was very present too. Today we hide our dead in special plots of land tucked away from our daily business and the lively streets. Burial inside the city limits was altogether forbidden in ancient Rome, but instead the tombs, mausoleums, grave altars and temples lined all the major roads outside every town big or small. Anyone who has been to Rome probably has visited the grand and imposing tombs along the via Appia. The dead were very present, right in the sight of every passerby, and vying for their attention, either by ostentatious display, if one could afford it, or by directly addressing the wanderer to stop and rest a while, to read about the unfortunate fate that had befallen the occupant of the tomb, keeping their memory alive. Of course people died more in general, but the dead were also always right by your side if you walked the famous Roman roads.

And those tombs do have a lot to tell. We learn about names and illustrious careers of so many people, we know a few hundred thousand of the Roman dead by name, which is a fraction of the total but orders of magnitude more than we would know from the literary account alone. We know of their careers and ambitions, we can learn about their jobs, thier wives and children, by whom they were mourned, and often how much they were loved, and how much the loss hurt those left behind who lost their 'dearest, sweetest, most beloved daughter' (or how they wanted things to seem that way in public). Some historians doubt the sincerity of these statements, whether the parents truly did love their children as much as they claimed, and of course we will never know the inner world of those people, but I think there is lots of genuine grief to be found. In general, Roman epitaphs are a lot more loquacious than most modern ones. We can reconstruct some family trees and reconstruct some of the relationships they had. We learn about the places they lived, units, campaigns and wars they served (and died) in, about people killed by robbers, murderers, friends, slaves, by the sea and by fire and flood. There's lots to be learned from their names as well, remnants of older languages, cultures and traditions that fused with Roman customs and so on. Of course those are the ones who were rich enough or cared enough to erect a tombstone. Hundreds of millions more are truly dead without a name that will ever be remembered again, despite the best efforts of their descendants. It gets overwhelming quite fast if you think about it, doesn't it? I hardly ever think about them as persons, they're mostly just datapoints to me, abstract information that I try to coax some bigger narrative out of. That's also kind of macabre.

They also tell us very little. The material isn't dense enough to provide meaningful statistics, despite the neverceasing efforts to derive some meaningful statistical claims out of a miniscule, non-representative sample. You can hardly ever get any meaningful biographical details out.

There are also some tombstones that are hard to forget. Like the legionary veteran who had to bury his wife and three children at the same time. Victims of a plague? Or barbarian incursions? They lived right at the northern border of the empire, plagued by raids at the time, and the skeletons of several young and old people from the appropriate time where found in close proximity, all having been brutally killed and thrown down a well. Or the father who had a tombstone made for his little daughter, with a relief portrayal of her playing with a little dog (maybe just a scene from a sample book, but still).

Sorry for that wall of incoherent rambling. But you asked me about tombstones, which others have regretted before. I'm curious about what archaeologists think of the human bones that go through their hands. They have corpses without names, we have names without corpses.*

To conclude this, since it's Halloween soon, a Roman horror story, related by the venerable Plinius (iunior):

There was at Athens a large and spacious, but ill reputed and pestilential house. In the dead of the night a noise, resembling the clashing of iron, was frequently heard, which, if you listened more attentively, sounded like the rattling of fetters; at first it seemed at a distance, but approached nearer by degrees; immediately afterward a phantom appeared in the form of an old man, extremely meagre and squalid, with a long beard and bristling hair; rattling the gyves on his feet and hands. The poor inhabitants consequently passed sleepless nights under the most dismal terrors imaginable. This, as it broke their rest, threw them into distempers, which, as their horrors of mind increased, proved in the end fatal to their lives. For even in the day time, though the spectre did not appear, yet the remembrance of it made such a strong impression on their imaginations that it still seemed before their eyes, and their terror remained when the cause of it was gone. By this means the house was at last deserted, as being judged by everybody to be absolutely uninhabitable; so that it was now entirely abandoned to the ghost. However, in hopes that some tenant might be found who was ignorant of this great calamity which attended it, a bill was put up, giving notice that it was either to be let or sold. It happened that Athenodorus the philosopher came to Athens at this time, and reading the bill ascertained the price. The extraordinary cheapness raised his suspicion; nevertheless, when he heard the whole story, he was so far from being discouraged, that he was more strongly inclined to hire it, and, in short, actually did so. When it grew towards evening, he ordered a couch to be prepared for him in the forepart of the house, and after calling for a light, together with his pen and tablets, he directed all his people to retire within. But that his mind might not, for want of employment, be open to the vain terrors of imaginary noises and apparitions, he applied himself to writing with all his faculties. The first part of the night passed with usual silence, then began the clanking of iron fetters; however, he neither lifted up his eyes, nor laid down his pen, but closed his ears by concentrating his attention. The noise increased and advanced nearer, till it seemed at the door, and at last in the chamber. He looked round and saw the apparition exactly as it had been described to him: it stood before him, beckoning with the finger. Athenodorus made a sign with his hand that it should wait a little, and bent again to his writing, but the ghost rattling its chains over his head as he wrote, he looked round and saw it beckoning as before. Upon this he immediately took up his lamp and followed it. The ghost slowly stalked along, as if encumbered with its chains; and having turned into the courtyard of the house, suddenly vanished. Athenodorus being thus deserted, marked the spot with a handful of grass and leaves. The next day he went to the magistrates, and advised them to order that spot to be dug up. There they found bones commingled and intertwined with chains; for the body had mouldered away by long Iying in the ground, leaving them bare, and corroded by the fetters. The bones were collected, and buried at the public expense; and after the ghost was thus duly laid the house was haunted no more.

It has all the makings of a modern horror story: the grand old villa available at an irresistible price, which of course turns out to be haunted and has already claimed sanity and life of many, the sceptic, rational gentleman who wants to get behind the secret and finally finds the way to appease the ghost. In this case, improper burial (within city limits too), which also tells us something about the importance of doing it right.

* Mostly, in rare, lucky circumstances both are close enough together.

H. P. Lovecraft had a great fondness for graveyards, and even though he wasn't a very morbid character, he liked to explore ancestral gravesites and admire the antiquarian carvings on the stones. One summer in 1933, Lovecraft received a visitor in Providence, Helen V. Sully, a friend of the California poet and weird fictioneer Clark Ashton Smith. Sully recounts in her brief memoir of Lovecraft an incident in the cemetery of St. John's Episcopal Church:

That night, after dinner, he took me to a graveyard associated with Poe. ... It was dark, and he began to tell me strange, weird stories in a sepulchral tone and, despite the fact that I am a very matter-of-fact person, something about his manner, the darkness, and a sort of eerie light that seemed to hover over the gravestones got me so wrought up that I began to run out of the cemetery with him close at my heels, with the one thought I must get up to the street before he, or whatever it was, grabbed me. I reached a street lamp, trembling, panting, and almost in tears, and he had the strangest look on his face, almost of triumph. Nothing was said.

• Helen V. Sully, "Memories of Lovecraft: II" in Lovecraft Remembered 278

Ah, "macabre". Here's a trivia factoid: the etymology of the word "macabre" is not well established. One theory is that it is derived from the Arabic word مقابر - maqabr - meaning "tombs." Neat. Of course it could just be coincidence, like the approximate similarity in meaning between the English word "Sheriff" and the Arabic "Sharif."

Medieval Italians had a peculiar relationships with graveyards. Since Roman times, it had been practice to bury the dead outside of city/town walls, but once Christianity became fashionable wealthy people started paying top dollar to get their large marble tombs places in front of, inside, beside, or generally near churches, the more important the church the better (of course, the more important the church the more expensive).

As urban societies became more complex, so did the practices that governed where a person got plopped once they kicked the bucket. The city of Milan has been significantly impacted by the need to construct graves and graveyards.

In the 15th century, the Duke Francesco Sforza decided to merge all the (mostly religious) hospices around the city into one massive hospital, the Ca Granda or "Big House." To do the job the foremost public healthcare architect in Italy, Antonio Averlino better known as Filarete, was hired from Florence, where he had just finished a major refurbishment of the New Hostptal of Santa Maria (which, incidentally, it still operational). As healthcare secularized, so did, erm... deathcare. In Florence, Filarete had set aside a cloister and chapel for burials, but in Milan he would have to come up with a different solution. The higher water table and closeness of the Ca Granda to a waterway made a crypt-style burial ground impossible to implement. The Ca Granda was instead planned with large open courtyards to be used as the site of burials.

When the University of Milan was first founded in 1906, it was established as a Medical School in the Ca Granda. Today, all healthcare facilities have been moved elsewhere while the University of Milan had expanded to six departments and occupies the entire building. So today, students hang out in courtyards that used to be burial grounds. Make of that what you will.

In any case, by the 17th century the existing deathcare facilities had long proven inadequate and a burial crypt was constructed below the hospital chapel, but predictably water seeped in almost immediately. The crypt would continue to be the burial place for the city's poor, but for the emerging middle class who could splurge a bit on tombs a new structure was constructed just outside the walls near the hospital. A small gate (still visible today) was opened in the city's inner walls and a footpath was paved to a walled cemetery and chapel past the city's waterway right by the outer walls. It's estimated that some one hundred and fifty thousand people were buried here, until Napoleon came along, conquered Italy, and decreed for sanitary reasons that no people were to be buried within city limits.

Today, the so called "Rotonda di Via Besana" still stands as a small urban green space with a café, trees, and manicured lawns. It's filled with joggers and playing children, who don't seem to be bothered by the thousands of bones buried beneath their feet. Macabre, isn't it?

As a sort of summer project, I researched a historical African American graveyard. The oldest grave dated from around 1890 with that individual being born in 1851. My personal favorite person is man named Abraham Lincoln born in 1859. This cemetery isn't in any kind of good shape. Only a select number of people are aware it's there. To get to the graveyard, you have to go through deep southern woods. Many of the gravestones are broken and the graves themselves sunken in. It is strange that such an important graveyard filled with ex-slaves has gone to such disrepair. Knowing this, you walk with a sense of awe and sadness. I wouldn't recommend walking through it at night. Only because the area is known for sinkholes and this place has a few of its own. Through my research, I brought attention to its existence and the community has gotten interested. Side note, this summer I will be digging in Peru on the mounds. I will be experiencing another type of graveyard.

Shaft tombs are the crown jewel in Jalisco archaeology. If you can find an unlooted shaft tomb your work will be cited for decades. Unfortunately between rampant looting and comparatively little archaeological interest in the region, these tombs are quite rare. Looting took the heaviest toll if the number of ceramic figures in museum collections is any indication. Unfortunately, even if one had the interest (and funding), the tombs are hard to find since they lack any surface features and do not follow a pattern. The tombs themselves are located below the ground from 2m to 18m. The chamber is sometimes carved into the tepetate, but not always. Sometimes they are found underneath architecture, sometimes they are near architecture, sometimes they are in a field with no surface indication that there are tombs, sometimes they cluster and form a cemetery, and sometimes they stand alone. On a survey we thought we came across a looted cemetery since it was located east of two guachimontones. Unfortunately the tombs were too deep to hop into and have a look and we did not have any sort of climbing gear to get into and out of the holes. We checked the back dirt hoping to find any diagnostic pieces to tell if these holes were looted tombs or failed wells, but we turned up nothing.

You may be wondering how so many tombs were looted if they are so hard to find. The answer is that there were two types of looting, opportunistic and purposeful. The opportunistic stemmed from farmers plowing their fields and noticing a sunken area in the ground where a chamber collapsed. Or sometimes they would uncover a capping stone that was sometimes placed at the entrance of the shaft. The purposeful looters went around digging into structures as well as carrying a long iron bar to hammer into the ground. With the bar they would go along and try to punch through into a chamber. If they were successful they would dig down and loot the chamber often ignoring where the shaft was located.

The best way to find unlooted tombs now, I think, is with ground penetrating radar. But you need good conditions, permission from land owners, and lots of funding to cover every square meter of the highlands area. It would be a long, arduous, and expensive process with few expected results and little public interest.

There's a cemetery in Natchitoches, LA, called the American Cemetery. It started on the site of the second Fort St. Jean Baptiste, as I recall, and it's...old, at least by American standards, established in the 1730s. One of my favorite places to visit within the cemetery is a group of three iron crosses that are just about weathered away, one of which is the oldest of the marked graves-- that of Marie Anne D'Artigaux, marked by an iron cross with an inscription in French that reads

ICI Repose le co---

D'Honorable Dame Marie Anne Dartigaux

espouse Pierre Joseph Maes

decedee le 26 Fevreier de 1797

Agé 34 ans

Requescat in Pace

There are also a bunch of broken and illegible markers that make for interesting side conversation at a thesis presentation on iron crosses.