ABSTRACT
When the rural graveyard slowly gave way to the modern cemetery on the periphery of towns and cities, the development also led to the eventual creation of some of the first public parks. The resultant communal landscapes quickly attained wider social significance, not only as sites of personal commemoration and display of personal status but increasingly as space for staging social and cultural memory. This chapter therefore shows how to begin to read gravesites (i.e., inscriptions, iconography, rituals of individual commemoration, etc.) and how to understand the spatial context of where the individual plot is located (i.e., design, public usage of the cemetery, staging of social memory, etc.). The phrase ‘archive of the feet? frequently sneaks into discussions about cemeteries, and this chapter provides practical help with deciphering these archival holdings, helping to understand the complex landscapes of private and public memory that are cemeteries. This is done by looking at prominent cemeteries such as Père-Lachaise and Mount Auburn as well as looking in particular at the Sennefriedhof in Bielefeld.
