Connecting with Community

Connecting with Community

Working in the Jewish Cemetery has been a wonderful experience. Every person that’s stopped by to say ‘hi’ has been so kind and welcoming. Rabbi Brechner invited us to the synagogue for a casual lecture about Judaism and the Victoria community that...

Learning RTI and Monument Cleaning

Fieldwork is something that is new to me, and it has been necessary to learn many new skills to be able to accurately produce a record of this cemetery. Some skills we have learned include: how to take photographs of grave markers in ways that bring out the...

Importance of Heritage to Archaeological Field Work

The opportunity to work in the Jewish Cemetery started out as an accessible field course for Undergraduate students in Anthropology at UVic. I have never had the opportunity to visit a cemetery in which my own family rests, and without that personal connection, my...

Article: Jewish Mourning Rites

Fishbane, S. (1989) Jewish Mourning Rites – A Process of Resocialization, Anthropologica, 31:1 Illustrated with fieldwork involving members of an Orthodox Jewish Congregation in North America, Fishbane investigates both the historical development of funerary...

Quick review: Archaeologists on contemporary death

Williams, Howard. “Archaeologists on contemporary death.” Mortality: Promoting the interdisciplinary study of death and dying 16 no. 2 (2011): 91-97.  In this short article, Howard Williams looks at the different ways in which archaeologists not only study...

Making links

Sometimes, it can be hard to see how academic writing connects to real life situations. I’ve asked each of the field workers to pick an academic article that might be relevant to the work we are doing, and to write a short, plain English, synopsis. Then they...