Blog Entry 3-My Dream Grave Goods

I do not find the topic of talking about my own future death neither morbid nor scary. It is going to happen anyway, hopefully not for many decades, but I guess I am speaking as someone who has come to terms with their mortality so I find myself quite open to talking about it.

I have never really thought of the concept of grave goods for myself, seeing as I do not believe in an after life and have never wanted my body to be buried. The thought of worms and other such things breaking me down while I rot just does not paint a good picture, so inhumation is definitely out of the question.

Coming from a religious family I have always been adamant about being cremated, maybe at the beginning just to watch my mother squirm about how I would deal without a body on judgement day... :P

But ever since I heard about http://urnabios.com/ , I have come to like the idea of being cremated even more, would it not be awesome to become a cherry tree (one of my favourite plants) after death?


The problem then becomes that even if I chose to have grave goods, most of them would not last incineration, but I could probably have a plaque put on my tree after it is tall enough?

At this point in time I would choose to be incinerated with:

My basic personal jewelry, nothing too ostentatious.
My 2 favourite books , my vintage edition of Wuthering Heights and my first copy of The Prisioner of Azkaban (in Spanish).
Lots of chocolate!!
My iPod
If there was any message left to interpret after incineration, it would probably that I was a bookish chocoholic with a love for music and beautiful accessories.


I asked my creeped out fiance what he would incinerate me with and why, he got very emotional but I finally got it out of him:

Chocolate (chocolate orange if i can find the regular kind, not the dark one) Pride and Prejudice so you can watch it as much as you like, as well as Beauty and the Beast in Spanish, and Anastasia A picture of us and a letter from me telling you I love you and forever will A bottle of water in case we are not in rainy victoria and when you become a tree you get thirsty Some of my cologne - that's for leaving before me And your wedding ring, because I'm coming to find you and you better still have it on when I do

Other than forgetting my books,music and thinking there will be someplace for us to reunite after death there is not too much of a disconnect between his choices and mine for how I want to be portrayed at death. My fiance's choice's are mainly centered around our relationship and our inside jokes, so other than the movies and chocolate it would be puzzling for someone to interpret in the same way.

Blog Entry 2-Working with Databases for Anth 397

The database assignment was an eye opening experience for me in more ways than one...


First of all, as someone who can barely build a spreadsheet on Excel, I found it challenging to figure out how to use Access and Excel to organize the information required for the assignment. It would definitely have been better to have had a longer adjustment period to Access but thanks to the tutorial and writing down all the directions given to us by the proff, I was able to finish the assignment without becoming completely lost in Access. I am definitely more confident now using Excel, it just took lots of time and practice. Using Access, still not so confident, unless I am building a simple query on an existing database I would probably have to resort to watching YouTube tutorials to save me.

Secondly, I underestimated the emotional impact working with a cemetery database can have. At the beginning, just looking at the plot numbers and how many people were buried in them was not as difficult, but once I got to the part of the assignment where I had to read the inscriptions,such as age at death and cause (of death) it really brought home the magnitude of those people's lives. They all had occupations, and people they cared about (and vice versa) and not all of them got to live long lives, specially the infants and children. Overall it made me appreciate the life expectancy nowadays and also want to pay a respectful visit to St. Stephen's Cemetery to thank the people whose personal information helped me learn how to navigate Access.

Blog Entry 1-Interesting topics related to the archaeology of death

There are plenty of topics related to the archaeology of death that interest me; the main ones that stand out are these:

Forms of mummification
I have been interested in the different ways mummification can take place since I was a child, not just Egyptian or Northern European bog mummies but also high altitude mummification such as that of Otzi or Inca mummies. The natural or culturally devised manner in which to mummify, the context in which the mummies are found, and the (speculated) reasons as to why the mummification took place are all quire interesting. Therefore I try to keep abreast of ongoing investigations about them. One particular subtopic that has captured my interest is the Inca ceremony of capacocha which involved sacrificing children for important events at high altitudes (which led to their incredible preservation). This article has stayed with me for quite some time:Inca Child Sacrifice Victims Were Drugged
Mummies (depending on their level of preservation) give a human face to the people who died thousands of years ago, which to me makes death ever the more inescapable constant no matter the period in time.

Neanderthal burials(?)
It is such a difficult topic to study since we do not have much to evidence to go on but speculation of Neanderthals’ cognitive abilities and how closely they are in the evolutionary tree to us Homo sapiens (depending who you ask).Burials such as the Shanidar flower burial are influenced in their interpretation both by experts’ biases in regard to Neanderthals and what they consider to be taphonomic processes. So what constituted a Neanderthal cultural burial? We can only imagine judging from our own experiences which might be completely off since many cultures vary greatly in their burial methods there is no standard rule. What can constitute to the trained human eye as a natural burial could potentially have been a form of cultural burial for them.

About Myself

Summer 2013. Nesebar, Bulgaria.

Hi!
I am Sabrina. I am third year student majoring in anthropology. I have done most of my growing up here in Victoria, earlier half in Colombia (Spanish is my 1st language) and once I graduate who knows where else I will go...
As you can guess by the title I am fascinated by mummies among other things; within anthropology I am mainly interested in the physical side: bioarchaeology, and palaeopathology , so I thought Anth 397 would be an interesting course to take.
Outside of uni, when I am not busy reading up for assignments I love to read for fun (mainly fantasy and historical fiction). Other things I also like to do to unwind include: bake/cook,write lists,Netflix, hang out with friends or play with my 2 year old Boxer Bandido. I used to have many more hobbies in my younger years before things got crazy with school, so things I would like to do more of are: yoga, paint,make my own clothing/crafts, improve my French(or learn a 4th language) and travel.