ABSTRACT
The approach assumes that any cultural item, be it a style of pottery or a way of making an arrowhead, has a particular popularity period, and as it grows and wanes in popularity, its prevalence as time passes can be represented graphically by a single peaked curve. The style sequence of death’s head, cherub, and urn and willow design is to be found in almost every cemetery in eastern Massachusetts. Prepared from controlled data taken from the Stoneham cemetery, north of Boston, where the style sequence is typical of the area around this eighteenth-century urban center of eastern Massachusetts, the graph following shows such a curve. However, in the opening decade of the eighteenth century the carver(s) in Plympton made certain basic changes in the general death’s head motif. The carver of the fully developed Medusa was probably Ebenezer Soule of Plympton; a definitive sample of his style is found in the Plympton cemetery.
