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Evergreen Cemetery Recording Project Quick links to: About the Project
Gregory Vogel I began this project in the fall of 2001, while teaching an upper-level class in archaeological method and theory at the University of Arkansas. In archaeology we are very interested in how artifact styles change through time, and there are several ways of documenting and interpreting these changes. I have always tried to incorporate 'hands-on' approaches in my classes, to have students actually practice what they are learning. Cemeteries, it occurred to me, are a perfect place to practice recording and interpreting the change of artifact styles through time. Gravestones are artifacts (anything made by people is an artifact), and the dates are already on them, so it is easy to line them up chronologically to see how they have changed. I chose Evergreen Cemetery for the exercise because it is a very large cemetery with a long history of use (from the 1840s up to today), and is located immediately south of the main campus of the University of Arkansas. During the recording session the first semester, I realized that many other aspects of archaeology could be incorporated into the exercise. I also discovered that Evergreen is on the National Register of Historic Places, but that there was no full accounting of all of the gravestones and other permanent features of the cemetery. I therefore expanded the class exercise to include a systetmatic mapping and recording of the gravestones and other features to document the cemetery in detail. This was the beginning of the recording project. Students were only involved in the project for one or two weeks out of the semester, though, so progress in recording was very slow. I realized that other people in the area may be interested in the project too, and put out a call for volunteers - and received a tremendous response from many local people interested in genealogy, history, and cemeteries in general. To date, over 200 students and over 50 volunteers have helped out on the project. Several of the volunteers have gone on to use the recording techniques they learned on this project to record other local cemeteries. The University of Arkansas is a Land-Grant institution, and I am happy that this project furthers all three of its primary goals of education, research, and service. The project has furthered the education of U. of A. students as an engaging, hands-on exercise that demonstrates several archaeological principles; it is real-world research that has applications in several fields, including genealogy, history, and anthropology; and in documenting an important historic resource it is service to the local community. You can read a newspaper article about the project from the Northwest Arkansas Times here, and a feature story from the Morning news here: (part 1) and here: (part 2) (PDF files).
The majority of the work now involves entering the information from the recording forms into a database, and converting the hand-drawn maps into Geographic Information Systems (GIS) format. Some of this work is done, but there still remains quite a bit to do. The ultimate goal of the project is to make all of the information available and easily accessible on-line. A recent grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council has greatly helped with this. The grant has paid for consultants at the Center for Advanced Spatial Technologies (CAST) at the University of Arkansas, to assist in creating a geographically-based, searchable database for the cemetery. The purpose of this database is to serve as a 'virtual cemetery' where website visitors can search all of the information collected by students and volunteers, find where individual gravestones are located within the cemetery, and bring up a picture of gravestones or other features of interest. Each student in the archaeology class aided in the mapping or recording of the cemetery, and each student also conducted research into some aspect of the cemetery or the data that had been collected. Below are a few examples of student research projects. Bear in mind that none were conducted on the full dataset of all features or interments, but I think they still offer interesting insights into the features of the cemetery and the demography of the interred population. Click on the thumbnails for a larger image and an explanation.
Geographic information systems (GIS) refers to a type of computer program designed for mapping and spatial analysis. For this project, we are primarily using Idrisi Kilimanjaro GIS software. Incorporating all of the information into the GIS involves three main stages, 1) the hand-drawn field maps are scanned and digitized on-screen, creating a GIS layer showing the size and location of each feature; 2) information from the field recording forms is entered into a database; and 3) features on the GIS layer are linked to the recording-form database. With the information entered into GIS this way, it is possible to search the database and find where particular features are located - for example, where a specific grave is located, or where all of the graves of people who were born between 1800 and 1850 are located. It is also possible to search spatially, by clicking on a feature and calling up all of the recorded information about that feature. When this project is completed, the GIS information will be put on-line, along with linked photographs of all of the features. Evergreen has recently received a grant from the Arkansas Humanities Council to help us do this - stay tuned for further developments! The spatial analyses presented below are from a 'pilot' GIS created by University of Arkansas student Mike Ratcliffe, as part of his senior thesis. Note that this only covers a small portion of the cemetery as a whole.
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