‘That this too,too solid flesh would melt…’

I Introduction

After tentative beginnings, the field of study called ‘necrogeography’ - a term broadly defined as the ‘geographical study of burial practices’ (Kniffen, 1967: 427) - has developed to become a substantial topic of research in its own right; and is one that includes not only geographers, but scholars with similar interests from a wide range of disciplines, ranging from art history and sociology to psychology and environmental science. Indeed, as part of a burgeoning field now better known as ‘death studies’, geographical approaches to the examination of death and its commemoration have multiplied to the extent that they now constitute a distinctive research focus (Romanillos, 2015; Tyner, 2015, 2016). The part played by researchers based within physical geography is the purpose of this paper, but, of course, this does not deny the part played by human and cultural geographers – who have had their own important role in the evolution of this research topic.

Indeed, for geographers, this achievement is one that can be shared by both physical and human geographers, since both subdisciplines have made important contributions to the analysis of the causes and implications of the many ways that the dead have been memorialised over space and time. Noteworthy, specific examples considered in more detail below are: (i) from physical geography, Nijssen and Nyssen’s analysis of gravestone lithologies, a study that has allowed the authors to suggest diffusion routes for both commemorative practices and stones themselves across a large part of the northern European plain (Nijssen and Nyssen, 2011: 276–279); and (ii) from human geography, Cloke and Jones’s illustration of how the flora of Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol has interacted with human interest in heritage preservation to construct fresh interpretations of landscape (Cloke and Jones, 2004; Jones, 2007). Both are studies, while rooted in the careful collection and analysis of data from gravestones and cemeteries, add to a greater understanding of the wider significance of such forms of memorial or patterns of commemoration.

The route to this point has been a somewhat slow and cautious one, with disparate origins that lie in work as varied as the 19th-century geologist Geikie’s study of weathering in an Edinburgh cemetery, geomorphologist SW Wooldridge’s interest in the location of Saxon burials on open chalk downlands, and the investigation of the role played by yew trees in the cemetery landscape (Cornish, 1946; Judson, 1968: 356; Wooldridge, 1956: 214). From the 1960s, however, the pace quickened as geographers in larger numbers began to identify research on cemeteries and gravestones as a topic worthy of study: among the first to do so being scholars of the geography of religion (Deffontaines and Bernard-Maître, 1966: 1720; Park, 1994: 213–226; Sopher, 1967: 32).

Outside the formal disciplinary boundary of geography, with the exception of Forbes’s pioneer work on New England stonecarvers, there was little advance until major contributions, also made in the 1960s, by archaeologists such as Edwin Dethlefsen and James Deetz (who used spatiotemporal changes in mortuary iconography to track cultural diffusion across early New England) and the folklorist Henry Glassie (who illustrated regional patterns in material culture via gravestone analysis) – both scholars whose research presaged important work by Richard Meyer and his collaborators on the cultural and ethnic differences found in North American commemorative practice (Dethlefsen and Deetz, 1967; Forbes, 1927; Glassie, 1968: 142–144; Meyer, 1989).

Sensing the potential of this field, in 1967 the eminent cultural geographer Fred B Kniffen attempted to focus more concerted attention upon the topic through a short, but loud clarion call in The Geographical Review entitled ‘Necrogeography in the United States’ (Kniffen, 1967). One of the first geographers to employ this new term (a word that incorporates the Greek word for ‘corpse’ [nekros] with ‘geography’), Kniffen defined the field of ‘necrogeography’ as one having an interest in ‘graveyards as areal phenomena, genealogical records, and reflections of established practices and cultural values’ (Kniffen, 1967: 426). Although its value for geography lay in the fact that as with other cultural phenomena it ‘nicely exemplified’ the traits of ‘evolution, invention and diffusion’, its field of interest was not, Kniffen believed, one limited to human or cultural geography. The ‘formal disposal of the deceased is a universal practice’, he argued, that ‘reflects traditional values, religious tenets, legal regulation, economic and social status, and even natural environment’ (Kniffen, 1967: 427; emphasis added).

Although he was able to identify only two geographers who had published works that fell under this rubric (Pattison, 1955; Price, 1966), Kniffen felt confident enough to conclude that ‘there can be few other subjects as untouched or as promising as the geographical study of burial practices’ (Kniffen, 1967: 426). Indeed – over 50 years later – the growing crop of papers now being published on geographical topics related to cemetery and gravestone studies is testimony to his optimistic prediction.

In one important respect, however, Kniffen’s paper has proved to be problematic. As we have seen, he did not (in what is admittedly a short prospectus) seek to address the issue of definition in more than the broadest terms. Neither he nor his immediate followers, for example, put clear boundaries on what topics of research could be considered ‘necrogeography’, or what uses of gravestone or cemetery data did not directly contribute to this endeavour (Francaviglia, 1971: 501; Jeane, 1972: 148; Jordan, 1982: 1; Nakagawa, 1987: 1). We can only now hypothesise what such limits would be. Thus, for example, while it is clear that studies, such as those already mentioned by Nijssen and Nyssen (2011) and Jones (2007), use cemetery or gravestone data as a basis to interpret or contribute to further analyses of direct interest to cemetery or gravestone scholarship – and, therefore, qualify as ‘necrogeography’ – it is less clear how research that only utilises such data for applied purposes could be dealt with. Thus, for example, while using data obtained from gravestones, studies that are designed to examine the effects of acid rain are clearly addressing issues of environmental pollution, rather than those central to gravestone studies, and could be discounted as contributions to ‘necrogeography’. (Of course, in practical terms, it is challenging to make hard-and-fast distinctions, since a great deal of such applied work requires a facility with the use of methodologies – such as the measurement of gravestone weathering – acquired through careful application of techniques developed for their intrinsic interest or for the purposes of heritage conservation.)

Lacking such precision, it is perhaps not surprising that the term ‘necrogeography’ itself has been rarely used by geographers and, after a few mentions by Kniffen’s close colleagues (Francaviglia, 1971: 501; Jeane, 1972: 148; Jordan, 1982: 1; Nakagawa, 1987: 1), has passed out of general use. Certainly, it is not a term found in the recent work of leading geographical scholars in the field (Zelinsky, 2001, 2007). Beyond the confines of this discipline, the word is infrequently used, although reference should be made to the work of the cultural historian Thomas Laqueur, who has used ‘necrogeography’ to detail some of the more physical aspects of churchyards or cemeteries: in particular, the orientation of graves within their confines and their location inside or outside city boundaries (Branting, 2007; Laqueur, 2015: 123–133, 279–288).

The general failure of Kniffen’s term to gain traction in the literature should not blind us, however, to the plain fact that research focused on cemetery and gravestone study in both physical and human geography has produced a significantly increased crop of work since his call to arms; and that such research might still find the greater coherence Kniffen sought if a more appropriate framework could be found than the one conjured by the neologism ‘necrogeography’.

To this end, in the paragraphs that follow, this paper seeks to examine that harvest by, (i) to provide a general context, discussing the possible connections between physical geography and the study of gravestones and cemeteries; (ii) surveying the recent work of physical geographers in that field and then (iii) considering two possible frameworks (based on the work of Ariès and the lens of the ‘deathscape’) that might give greater coherence to such research. As this paper concludes, these approaches may offer a way to combine both the physical and the cultural in ways that are more truly reflective of the interdisciplinarity of death studies than the approaches of a more loosely defined necrogeography.

II Physical geography and the study of gravestones and cemeteries

Having now considered the general growth of gravestone and cemetery research within geography, before turning to the specifics of a survey of the recent work of physical geographers, who have contributed to such research, it is useful to consider how physical geography can provide a context for the physical analysis of cemeteries, monuments, and the spaces that they occupy in order that we might gauge the significance of such studies.

Both the scope and purpose of physical geography have long been discussed by the subject’s practitioners: tasks made harder by the fracturing of the subject into subdisciplines, that share little in terms of a common core, or with developments within human geography (Huggett, 2010: ix; Sims, 2003; Slaymaker and Spencer, 1998: 3–20). In the face of such challenges, a number of scholars have sought to offer a clearer direction forward (Trudgill and Roy, 2003: vii–ix). Thus, Trudgill has suggested that the relevance of physical geography lies in ‘the way our knowledge is seen as significant and can be used…in a number of different contexts. In the broadest possible way, from scientific interpretation to poetic metaphor, physical geography is socially and culturally significant’ (Trudgill, 2003: 275). ‘It may be useful’, Huggett and his coauthors, therefore, suggested ‘to take the position that physical geography explores the interrelations between all the surficial terrestrial spheres as manifest in the form and function of the human sphere’ – a ‘holistic’ view, they noted, ‘taken by many nineteenth and early twentieth-century physical geographers, admittedly without a human focus’ (Huggett et al., 2004: xi–xiii).

As ambitious as this project appears, it does show the ways in which physical geography might frame what Kniffen saw as ‘the geographical study of burial practices’ and graveyards (Kniffen, 1967: 42) and how this might, in turn, contribute to a ‘holistic’ physical geography that thereby gains a relevance across a broader spectrum of concerns. Of course, this is not to say that some important questions remain unanswered; and we have already suggested above that Kniffen’s failure to adequately define the term ‘necrogeography’ poses difficulties for his own suggested overall approach to this issue. Does the fact that not all studies that use gravestones or cemeteries as physical data then explore aspects of commemoration or place-making diminish their holistic value? Will our answers change if the results of, for example, a detailed inventory of flora in graveyard refugia are then found to be useful for the conservation of certain rare species in urban areas? Clearly, ends, means, and relevance are all issues to be considered here; and since the study of death is itself a cultural engagement with mortality, our answers might change depending on their context. Ultimately, whether we frame such work in terms of pure or applied research, we must never forget that the gravestones and cemeteries upon which such work depends are spaces of respect and should be treated accordingly.

III The study of gravestones and cemeteries in physical geography

The following survey of literature focuses on recent publications in physical geography that are of relevance to cemetery or gravestone studies. Within that overall set of material, it is possible to identify a number of themes that have developed. The most important are: (i) the geology of gravestones; (ii) their use in the study of weathering rates and atmospheric pollution; (iii) their role in the calibration of monitoring techniques and natural hazards; (iv) the importance of cemeteries as places of refuge for indigenous species; (v) those studies that consider the effects of burial and cremation in terms of environmental pollution; and (vi) the more general value of the cemetery's physical landscape as a therapeutic landscape.

IV Necrogeography and the landscapes of death

As if echoing the notion of standing at the border of two worlds, the subdiscipline of necrogeography lies at the junctions of physical and human geography. The above paragraphs have documented the progress that physical geography has made in the analysis of cemeteries and gravestones. It is argued here that any further progress, however, requires the use of an overarching framework to connect the wide array of interests so far considered into a more meaningful whole. To illustrate this contention, the examples of two approaches more widely known to human geographers involved with death studies will be explored here – the first concerns what have been called the mentalités of Ariès; the second, the more recently-developed concept of the ‘deathscape’.

In 1974, the French historian Philippe Ariès provided not only a useful four-stage chronological framework with which to track the cultural history of death in Western society, but also a context that might be used to explain many physical changes in burial, commemoration, and cemetery layout. The first (from the Roman era to the 12th century, characterised by a simple acceptance of death) and the second (beginning in the 11th century, displaying in its art a greater sense of ‘the loss of self’) are perhaps less important here than the subsequent two stages that he identified. Thus, from the 18th century onwards, he argued, Western European attitudes to death are replaced by a sense of separation at the death of another. Importantly, he suggested that ‘this feeling lies at the origin of the modern cult of tombs and cemeteries’. A fourth stage from the 1930s saw what Ariès described as the ‘medicalization’ of dying. Death increasingly occurred alone in hospitals outside of family control and meant that death was literally no longer ‘familiar’. Indeed, the separation of individual emotion from mourning centred on physical remains has meant that burial and its commemoration increasingly lost its significance – a process that Ariès saw culminated in the almost clinical disposal of bodies through cremation (Ariès, 1974: 28, 46, 68, 70, 85–92). Interestingly, rather than see cremation as an entirely new development, geographer Jean-Robert Pitte has argued that it manifests the ‘fear of death’, albeit in a new guise. Writing of the death of a loved one, he noted that ‘it is easier not to think about this fatal moment if one has taken care to erase all trace of one’s predecessors, even one’s parents, keeping only several moving souvenirs of a period when they were living…’ (Pitte, 2004: 348).

Although criticised for attributing change to a collective unconscious and for attempting to do so with by a ‘grand narrative’, Ariès’s work drew attention to the significance of the private realm (Hutton 2004: 288–289). Despite questions over detail, his model remains an important part of the social historian’s interpretive armoury – for example, underpinning studies as specific as one of burial practice in 19th century Prussia (Alvis, 2004). Certainly, such changes in attitudes to death provide an important framework with which to interpret the physical aspects of the material culture that surround the commemoration of death and to analyse the changes that have occurred in such necrogeographies.

With the exception of the Romans themselves, whose legacy of tombstones and epitaphs have been extensively studied by historians and classicists (Patterson, 2000: 264–270; Sperduti et al., 2018: 130–132), the necrogeography of Ariès’s first stage has received little special attention from geographers, although many scholars, with regard to early Christian burials, have noted the importance of an orientation of what has been called ‘feet to the east’ (Abrams, 2010; Gjerland and Keller, 2010; Laqueur, 2015: 123). It is only later, Ariès suggested, with the rise of a greater sense of individualism or personal loss, that the need to commemorate memory develops – and in these developments lie the origins (and orientations) of the physical memorials in marble or granite.

Changes in the physical location of cemeteries and their proximity to urban centres can also be examined in this way. As we have seen above, this is especially important if we are concerned, for example, with matters of groundwater pollution from burials or toxic emissions from cremation. Unknown as a feature in what Ariès termed ‘pagan Antiquity’, urban cemeteries only developed from the Middle Ages as people sought to be physically close to the town church, a location made sacred through the burial there of those considered to be saints (Alvis, 2004: 240; Laqueur, 2015). Such ‘churchyards’, as they should be more formally known, are typified by irregular ground plans and their relatively small physical size (Rugg, 2000). Hemmed in by later urban growth, these areas eventually become so overcrowded that, from the late 18th century onwards, a fear of the supposed effects of the noxious gases of decomposition produced in the highly confined spaces of older inner city cemeteries led to the demand for cemetery relocation to the urban peripheries (Ariès, 1974: 14–15; Brown, 2013; MacKenzie, 2008: 203; Scholz, 2017: 452–454; Thorsheim, 2011).

Once cemeteries were moved out of urban centres from the late 18th century onwards, so too arose the opportunity to redesign them. This could be done using formal grid plans in large, planned ‘suburban’ city cemeteries that allowed for discrete cemetery plots upon which individual gravestones could be erected (Rugg, 2000). Alternatively, they could be built according to the principles of the ‘landscape garden’ (where ‘nature’ itself provided solace for the grief of losing a loved one), as detailed studies of London’s Highgate and Père Lachaise in Paris have shown (Etlin, 1984: 335–355; Hamscher, 2003: 40). Importantly, the growing contrast between the older inner city churchyard and newer types of cemetery also brought with it the possibility of differences in terms of various attributes of their physical geography. For example, grave orientation (which can determine lichen growth and affect patterns of weathering (Thornbush and Thornbush, 2018) and is usually west-east in churchyards) can vary by specific location in a ‘landscape cemetery’, whereas the density of overhanging vegetation at such sites (which might affect local patterns of canopy runoff or the resident species of birds) would far exceed that found in those ‘suburban’ locations.

An alternative to the use of a general framework based on Ariès’s model lies in human geographers’ investigation of what has become known as the ‘deathscape’ – an approach that draws on anthropologist Arjun Appadurai’s attempts to question causality and to move beyond the fixed vision of any particular group. As Appadurai has described this approach, ‘terms with the common suffix –scape… indicate that these are not objectively given relations that look the same from every angle of vision but deeply personal constructs, inflected by the historical, linguistic, and political situatedness of different sorts of actors’ (Appadurai, 1996: 33). Recent applications of this approach by scholars include the ‘foodscape’ (Détolle et al., 2016: 153), examples that provide illustrations of the wide applicability of the idea.

With respect to the ‘deathscape’ itself, Kong has described this as an approach that has focused on ‘cemeteries as cultural features which reflect…cultural and historical values’ (Kong, 1999: 7). In other words, what she identifies as the ‘traditional’ necrogeographic concerns of Kniffen can be replaced with an interest in how cemeteries are enmeshed in a much wider world of connections – connections which shape and become a culturally-constructed landscape that must be interpreted through the various lenses of the deathscape. In this sense, the deathscape serves as an approach, not any one specific formation, and is itself informed by concerns such as class, gender, and nation. The historian David Arnold provided one illuminating example of this when he described the ‘spatial sense of a mortality inscribed on the landscape itself’ that the British experienced in India as the ‘highly visible deathscapes’ of that country’s medical topography as it manifested itself to the colonial traveller’s gaze (Arnold, 2006: 42–49). Of course, all of these relationships can also alter over time, as for example in a demonstration of how the commemoration of individuals change as their role in a society is reevaluated, Young and Light (2013) tracked the two reburials of the first communist prime minister of Romania.

Attempting to provide a formal definition of its totality, Maddrell and Sidaway have observed that ‘the broad heading of deathscapes’ invokes ‘both the places associated with death and for the dead, and how these are imbued with meanings and associations; the site of a funeral, and the places of final disposition and of remembrance, and the representations of all these’ (Maddrell and Sidaway, 2010: 4). Importantly, as their collection of studies shows, the deathscape framework is one that more adequately allows the varied experience of different ethnic and religious communities to be considered, which is an increasingly important aspect of this type of research, as the contours of commemoration in many places adapt to changing patterns of immigration.

Two examples serve to show how the use of a deathscape framework allows aspects of the physical attributes of the cemetery to be placed in a wider cultural context. First, as we have seen above, one of the most consistent reasons for the spatial separation of the cemetery and the city appears to be a fear of pollution. But this was not always from atmospheric pollution. Equally powerful once was the fear of ritual pollution from the dead – a factor in Roman law prohibiting burial within the pomerium, the sacred boundary of the city (Patterson, 2000: 264–265). These fears were echoed centuries later first by those early 19th century proponents of the ‘rural cemetery movement’ – who sought to move cemeteries from the inner city to exurban locations in order to free citizens from unhealthy gases of decomposition – and, second, by those late 19th century pioneers who advanced cremation as a way similarly to protect the public. Interestingly, Teather’s (1998) study of increasing cremation in Hong Kong showed how an ideology of hygiene has been used by government as a way of saving land for more lucrative development than that of utilisation by cemeteries, a situation repeated under the banner of sustainability more recently in Colombia (Klaufus, 2016).

Our second example considers the cemetery through the lens of its changing biogeography and draws on research on the interaction of people, trees, and place in Arnos Vale cemetery in Bristol, UK (Cloke and Jones, 2004; Jones, 2007). Established as a ‘landscape cemetery’ in 1837 with trees considered more appropriate than the traditional cypress, such as the weeping willow and weeping ash (Loudon, 1840: 54–55; Rackham and Moody, 1996: 60), the site became a popular burial location and by 1900 was practically full with almost 90,000 burials. The cemetery thereafter slowly becomes abandoned and forgotten to all but its private owner and a team of loyal preservationists until 2003, when the city was able to transfer control to the Friends of Arnos Vale Cemetery (FAVC), the group that now administers the site. In their analysis, Jones and Cloke used insights developed from actor-network theory to explore the pivotal role that the cemetery’s trees played in these developments. They suggested that many of the original plantings, through their almost unfettered growth over a century, have created the conditions for their own survival since the ‘wild’, ‘natural’ sense they have created (Arnos Vale is noted as a refugia and as a therapeutic landscape) has appealed to those who opposed the site’s redevelopment. Indeed, it could be argued that the trees have contributed in no small way to the large £4.8 million Heritage Lottery Fund money the FAVC received to reopen the cemetery in 2011. By the same token, the trees’ growth, through the slow destruction of gravestones, has contributed to a dilemma – since how much of the trees’ growth can the FAVC remove to restore the cemetery without ruining the landscape they seek to preserve? A dilemma, it must be said, that is commonly encountered by all heritage groups in such situations (Cloke and Jones, 2004: 313–323; Jones, 2007: 169–170).

What both examples suggest is that, while the changes – in the former, that of pollution, in the latter, that of the flora – that are witnessed in the physical realm can be monitored for their own sake, their greater significance lies in seeing them as part of a general reconfiguration of the prevailing ‘deathscape’, a view that sees cultural changes and perceptions, cemetery location, design, biota, geology, and so on as one integrated and evolving whole.

V Conclusions

As we have noted above, in 1967, Kniffen endeavoured to give what he saw as a much-needed boost to a topic that he considered had potential by describing it as ‘necrogeography’, a field having an interest in ‘graveyards as areal phenomena, genealogical records, and reflections of established practices and cultural values’ (Kniffen, 1967: 426). This paper has endeavoured to review the recent literature in that field, specifically that associated with six broad themes within the realm of physical geography. Thus, it has considered work in the areas of geology, weathering, atmospheric and environmental pollution, calibration, biogeographic refugia, and therapeutic landscapes. Important as all of these contributions are in their own right, it has been argued that the use of a wider approach would allow a much broader understanding of not only each component of the picture, but also of the changing overall frame itself.

It has been argued that the wider frameworks provided by Ariès and the lens of the deathscape provide an important way to combine the insights of both cultural and physical geography – as the examples of changing flora and attitudes towards environmental pollution have illustrated. Indeed, if an approach based on the deathscape is as valuable as scholars such as Cloke and Jones (2004) and Maddrell and Sidaway (2010) have suggested, then it is clearly legitimate to consider next how such an approach can be implemented by physical geographers. How, for example, can the skills and preoccupations of physical geography enhance the questions central to a deathscapes approach? What additional questions might a physical geographer ask? Would such answers allow us to suggest – for argument’s sake – what percentage of vegetation cover or species diversity in a churchyard is necessary to console a visiting mourner? How much weathering of a gravestone needs to occur before that stone loses its role as a memorial?

The key to answering these questions is to appreciate that the deathscape approach is not prescriptive, but suggests the researcher considers a situation from a number of perspectives, rather than merely one. Placing an emphasis on uncovering the networks of interactions between phenomena and their own changing relationships, this approach is also one that challenges us to consider all aspects of our world as equal actors in the outcomes that we see – outcomes that since they are socially constructed will be time, place, and culture specific. Certainly, as we have suggested above, physical geography, with its emphasis on a holistic understanding of the complex web of interactions that comprise our environment, its grasp of regional variation, a sensitivity to the insights of human geography, and its appreciation of the dynamic range of processes that shape that realm is a discipline well-equipped to consider the deathscape. In such ways, as Huggett et al. (2004: xi) suggested, ‘physical geography is being reinvented’ through a renewed focus on the environment and links with human geography.

Thus, it is by utilising not one perspective but a number of angles and by paying attention to the networks of interactions between phenomena in various regional settings that physical geography might find ways that it might incorporate a deathscape approach. In the case raised above, the addition of a comparative regional perspective might indicate that cemetery vegetation levels are culturally-specific: the coverage considered ideal in English garden cemeteries being considered entirely inappropriate in the ‘laboriously scraped Texas graveyard’, where grass on a grave was ‘disrespectful to the dead’ (Jordan, 1982: 14), or too inadequate by the standards of Mexican-American cemeteries reported in Meyer’s collection of studies, where festivals such as All Souls’ Day are celebrated by an exuberance of natural and artificial flowers (Meyer, 1989: 162; Gosnell and Gott, 1989: 223).

Regarding the longevity of stones as memorials, one suggestion is to recognise that memory is not only vested in the epitaphs on the stones themselves (as shown, for example, with Roman gravestones), but may also be preserved in the relevant views of cemetery visitors themselves, a perspective used for example by scholars of therapeutic landscapes (Bell et al., 2017: 94–95, 98). Rates of weathering might be able to remove individual names within several generations, but a community’s sense of its collective past can still imbue those stones with meaning. In attempting to assess this reaction, geographers can draw on their unique blend of both human and physical geography skills to highlight the value of looking at all actors from a number of vantage points. It is perhaps ambitious, but as Wooldridge remarked in his book The Geographer as Scientist – endorsing the words of Carl Sauer – ‘geography must take the risks of interpreting the meeting of natural and cultural history’ (Wooldridge, 1956: 297).

Looking at Western attitudes to death in its totality through such lenses is, as Maddrell and Sidaway (2010: 4) have remarked, to see that ‘deathscapes thereby intersect and interact with other moments and topographies…’. In such a way, this paper argues that it should be possible to a forge a new necrogeography that recognises the value of interdisciplinarity and combines the strengths of both physical and cultural geography in a more holistic approach to ‘the work of the dead’.