The Richness of the Quest

I took a break midway through writing this post, and when I glanced at my Facebook news feed, it contained this quote from Joseph Campbell: "[I]f you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way." (courtesy of the Joseph Campbell Foundation).

Thanks for the words of wisdom from beyond the grave, Dr. Campbell. You, sir, are my hero. I'm stealing a bit of your quote for a post title.

A few days ago, Dr. Jon F. Wilkins announced his intention to start up the Ronin Institute, a non-profit research institute for independent scholars. I was immediately very excited by this idea, so I sent him an email asking if there might be a way for me to get involved. He replied positively and inquired about my current status, goals, and plans. What follows is a modified and greatly expanded version of my response, which contains more of my personal backstory than I thought Dr. Wilkins would want to have dumped in his inbox.

I have a B.A. in anthropology from a major university with a respectable department, but at present, I am working as the office girl at a local funeral home (following a miserable stint in college admissions at said university and an enjoyable and rewarding but exhausting stint as an EMS dispatcher, also at said university), and I have been out of graduate school since 2009.

I was already contemplating my escape, in the form of either a semester off or a change of degree program, for a variety of reasons; the singleminded, all-or-nothing focus of the academic department was already wearing thin for me, as I had begun graduate school with two jobs and volunteer commitments as a trainee recovery diver, a SAR technician, and an EMS dispatcher, all of which were either necessary (the jobs) or valued and important (the volunteer gigs) parts of my life, and none of which I was willing to give up to fit in with the all-nautical-archaeology, all-the-time, and-nothing-else-matters culture of my department.

I was, and am, deeply interested in the history of seafaring and captivated by the idea of the physical connection to it offered by archaeology (which, incidentally, I just read a great article about today), but I increasingly balked at the idea of defining my life and my worldview by that and restricting my interests to nothing else.

It also, to be brutally honest, became quite hard to take seriously as a life's work; my classmates' and professors' single-minded focus began to seem sheltered and elitist, especially on the days when I stumbled into class after being up all night sending ambulances to deathly ill or injured people or out all night/weekend/both searching for a missing child who more often than not turned up dead if at all; I could still hear the panicked voices on the other end of the phone, see the bodies floating the in lake and the worried, distraught families huddled at Incident Command- that was the real world, and my classmates knew only their ivory tower, and I began to think of them as naive. I began to see that branch of archaeology as fascinating and fun, something I would like to pursue avocationally, but not something I could dedicate my life to in a serious way after those experiences.

I considered taking a semester off in the fall of 2008 to complete a paramedic's license, having taken the EMT-Basic course concurrent with the end of the spring 2007 semester and the subsequent summer, but I debated and wavered until I ended up sticking with graduate school for another semester. I missed a lot of class (and a lot of my paying job) in the fall of 2008, first putting in long exhausting shifts at EMS helping dispatch ambulances to unload medical evacuees from Houston in advance of first Hurricane Gustav and then Hurricane Ike and ferry them from the DMAT shelter to the local hospitals as needed, and then after Hurricane Ike, out in the field with my SAR team at Bridge City, Crystal Beach, and Anahuac, scrambling over debris and demolished houses searching for the remains of the missing.

That was a pivotal experience in my life, and to this day it's the thing I'm most proud of- not my Cum Laude degree from Texas A&M, not my admission to graduate school, not my involvement in projects while there, but those few weeks in the fall of 2008 when I worked my ass off, walked through hell with a few good friends and colleagues, and made a difference.

I felt a need to make a real difference, not an indirect theoretical greater-good-of-humanity difference but a real, conrete, direct difference in the lives of actual individuals, as I said a few months ago in my response to my SAR team leader's blog post about our reasons for doing SAR work. After Hurricane Ike and a few more missions, my mind was made up; I wanted to do forensics, specifically human remains detection, but I still had hopes of combining it with Nautical Archaeology to work on submerged remains, with the most likely application being POW/MIA recovery (which is also a cause I have long had a soft spot for).

Unfortunately, early in the spring semester of 2009, a very close friend, who I usually describe(d) as my brother, died in a car wreck; the loss and my failure to cope well with it left me too distracted, depressed, and generally useless to finish out the semester, though I muddled through an unsuccessful attempt because I wasn't sure what else to do and wasn't thinking clearly enough to consider it.

I never even formally left. "Oops" might be an understatement.

At present, my intention is to return to school for an eventual doctorate in physical anthropology, but both finances and geography are a challenge; my husband is in the Army, so we don't get much choice about our location, and committing to a traditional academic program at this point would be highly impractical even if we could afford it. My hope is that within the next few years we can some financial issues sorted out and perhaps even get stationed somewhere near a university with a suitable program, and then I can work quickly enough to complete a degree before we get sent elsewhere again. In the meantime, I find that I miss the academic community and involvement in research and the exchange of ideas, even more than I expected that I would. Once I get this graduate school thing sorted out, I hope and intend and plan and want to work in my actual field; I would enjoy working for JPAC, maybe, or an ME's office wherever we end up, but I do not forsee an academic career in my future- I'm not willing enough to sacrifice the rest of my interests and goals for it- but I do forsee and hope for continued involvement in research.

Where and how I see myself in terms of goals, ambitious, and interests has come into focus in a much more useful way in the past few months, so that I have a good idea of what I want to be doing, and who I want to be, in the short term, on the way to my return to school, and how I would like that to fit into the transition back into a degree program and the shape I would like my career to take afterward. I am beginning to finally take to heart the advice my father once gave me when he said that I shouldn't try to make a career out of every passing interest- but I'm mingling that with my own recent discovery that inability to make a career out of an interest doesn't make it any less a valid and important part of my life, my work, and my identity. I'm a happier person, and a more productive one (in whatever sense you want to define "productive", which I'm learning is also a highly variable word) for that combined realization.

It really is about what Joseph Campbell called "the richness of the quest," and productive endeavors are endeavors that contribute to that for me, whether or they're professional, paid, and/or institutionally supported.

SAR will always be one of those productive endeavors for me. I enjoy the occasional adventure, the fieldwork, the camaraderie, and the dogs; I thrive on the sense of purpose. It's what I live for and an essential part of who I am.

Another of those endeavors, which suffered somewhat during my time in graduate school and which I am only recently returning to in any serious way, is writing. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade; I remember almost the exact moment when I discovered writing was fun, and I have been obsessed with telling stories and shaping words ever since. I need the creative outlet, and I find that I am happier and feel better about myself on days when I get a substantial amount of writing done; only recently have I figured out that I have to let myself see this as a valid productive activity so I can give myself the time for it and feel good about getting it done and proud of the results.

Blogging is sort of an extension of that; it's a different kind of outlet, which lets me tell slightly different stories- true ones- in more appropriate ways; it also gives me a place to vent, a place to put ideas that aren't fully developed enough for other venues and may never be, and a way to stay at least somewhat connected with an intellectual and academic community.

I do miss that sort of connection, and I miss involvement in interesting research. My research interests are somewhat scattered, but my primary interest, the one I hope to focus on in my eventual career, is human remains / clandestine grave detection. This is primarily an outgrowth of my volunteer work, as several years of observations and experiences in the field have both given me theoretical curiosity about these things, and emphasized the need for answers to certain questions and improvements in certain methods and procedures. I can easily see a life's work in finding the missing, bringing closure if not comfort to the bereaved, and maybe even bringing the bad guys to justice.

I have a secondary set of research interests, which I mostly intend to be avocational, in mortuary iconography, gravestone and historic cemetery documentation and preservation, and historic grave detection and documentation. At the moment I'm finding an outlet for that through Find-A-Grave and my related blog Last Words; this is also a much easier area to pursue independent research in than forensics,
so I am currently working on a couple of independent projects on changes in iconography patterns across time and region.

None of that alters or replaces the basic fact that I have to earn a living, and that my husband and I both would like to be living a bit more comfortably than we presently are, so as much as I might like to, I can't abandon all monetary concerns and become a self-unemployed bliss-following writer/researcher/emergency responder/philosopher. That does sound like a lovely retirement plan, but in the meantime, I've come to some realizations about work, as well. First, I can be essentially content with my life, if not my work hours, doing even the relatively unfulfilling, degree-irrelevant sorts of work that Liberal Arts and Humanities BA's often get stuck with, so long as I have those other productive, fulfilling aspects of my life to give me a sense of identity, progress, involvement, purpose, and self-worth.

Second, it's easier than I originally thought to find interesting and/or fulfilling work now that pays decently, even if it doesn't directly bear on either my current or future degree; that's where having a diverse set of interests helps. My job at the funeral home, for instance, has its challenges, but it's not the sort of thing anyone needs a degree of any sort for, and it's solidly below the level of responsibility that I'm technically qualified for- but it's interesting work, and it's deeply fulfilling to go home at the end of the day knowing that I have helped someone, even if only in a small way, at a moment when they badly needed it, so I am content; this is a good place to be for now, on my way to another eventual destination.

In A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Jimmy Buffett commented that when he was a child, a frustrated adult demanded to know what he wanted to do with his life; the young Buffett replied that he wanted to live a damned interesting one.

Me too.

Jonesville Cemetery (Photography by Dunerat)

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

This is the blog post I've been looking forward to writing all week!

Since we were on vacation in the Atlanta area last week, I couldn't resist the lure of some of the area's great historical cemeteries. We had a ton of sightseeing planned already, and the primary focus of the trip was visiting family, so I knew I couldn't actually spend the entire week dragging my poor husband around a bunch of cemeteries, no matter how excited I was about them, which meant I needed to pick one I that was really excited about.

Unfortunately for Greg, he can't resist my jumping-up-and-down excitement any more than I can resist his, which is not at all.

I borrowed my father-in-law's computer to hop on Find-A-Grave (which launched some interesting conversations because he is a genealogy enthusiast himself) and searched for photo requests in the area. There were several open, and I picked out a few likely prospects from among the cemeteries listed; my particular interest is older graves. The iconography fascinates me, as it has since I first read about it as an example for applying a battleship curve to typological seriation back in my undergraduate archaeology classes (. I'm perfectly happy to fulfill photo requests for more recent interments, of course, but I get especially excited about historical ones.

The notes on the Find-A-Grave page for Jonesville Cemetery grabbed my attention. "This cemetery was recently uncovered. It contains the graves of freed slaves. The Mt Sinai Baptist Church is clearing the land for the cemetery." The page listed only four interments in the cemetery, none of which had photos. I was instantly thrilled by the prospect of tackling this project- a very historically interesting, mostly undocumented cemetery belonging to an often-overlooked segment of the population. As an added bonus, it sounded small enough to make a manageable morning outing, which was a selling point in presenting the idea to my husband.

A quick Google search turned up a couple of local news articles which provided some further information and heightened my interest. The cemetery is located on Dobbins Air Reserve Base, not far inside the gate.

The helpful duty staffer at Dobbins gave us good, clear directions, and despite his insistence that the cemetery was "pretty hard to find," we walked right to it and wondered what on earth he was talking about when he said that. It was a bit secluded, but the fenceline was readily visible from the path we had been directed to, and the gate was standing open when we arrived, giving us our first glimpse of a sparse handful of gravestones half-hidden among brush and overgrowth.


We were both surprised at the sheer amount of overgrowth in the cemetery, given the enthusiastic news articles about clearing, cleanup, and more planned work days. Only the northern portion of the cemetery was clear enough to walk through. The southern end of the fenced property was still too densely overgrown to penetrate at all, or to glimpse any gravestones in, if any were there. I haven't yet spoken to anyone at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church to find out what stage their cleanup effort is in and what activity has taken place since the first round of news articles in early 2011, but my best guess is that their efforts this past winter focused on the northern end of the cemetery for one reason or another, and that those efforts could not prevent spring and summer's growth of dense foliage.

The cemetery was alive with swarms of mosquitoes and yellowjackets, and within minutes I was regretting having packed only my favorite pair fo flip-flops for our entire trip; I had itchy feet the whole way home. Even my usually bug-immune husband was swatting at mosquitoes and went home with a few itchy bites, though thankfully we avoided any repeats of the yellowjacket incident at our wedding- not for lack of recklessly stomping where I pleased without regard to where the silly things were buzzing around. The whole experience definitely felt more like a crazy wilderness adventure than the sedate stroll through a historical cemetery that I had been expecting earlier in the week. Fortunately, I like that kind of thing.

In the accessible northern section of the cemetery, the plant growth was still daunting, and we found ourselves wading through tall weeds and occasional thorns and burrs to make our way from grave to grave, and getting a photograph of most of the markers meant clearing away varying amounts of foliage first; we made sure to get before- and after-clearing images, partially because, thanks to having been an archaeology student in a former life, I believe in documenting any changes made to the site, and partially just to illustrate the overgrown state of the cemetery.

The photo request that drew us to Jonesville Cemetery in the first place was for Rebecca Bedford (1865-1908) whose children touchingly memorialized her as simply "OUR MOTHER." Sadly, we found her marker lying under a tree, broken and lying on its own base.


Mrs. Bedford's marker was in otherwise in good condition, only slightly weatherworn; the clasped-hands engraving was still clearly visible, and the epitaph was legible (except for the last line being partially obscured by the stone's breakage).


Mrs. Bedford's gravestone was one of the last we found, though; we found ten interments during our morning's exploration, including the double-interment of L.B. and Rosa Moore. Their double headstone was lying flat on the ground, though it did not appear damaged; it was almost totally obscured by weeds and underbush when we noticed it after the pair of footstones bearing the initials L.B.M. and R.M. caught our attention.


Upon clearing, only the surname "MOORE" was visible in capital letters. Lifting the marker to see if anything was engraved on the other side wasn't really an option with just the two of us there, so we were left with only a pair of initials and no birthdates, deathdates, epitaphs, or other information about the couple interred there.


Only later, when we found a small gravestone mostly hidden by a bush, did we have any clue to the Moores' identity. Hidden among the leaves of the bush growing wild next to the mostly cleared grave of Annie Roberson (1823-1892), Greg spotted a tiny bright glimpse of stone.


With the foliage carefully cleared away, we discovered a small gravestone with a lamb engraved above the epitaph- traditionally, but not always (as I learned at McBryde Cemetery earlier this week) an indicator of a child's grave. We had found the grave of little Janie Moore (1891-1893), whose epitaph identifies her as the "DAU. OF L.B. AND ROSA MOORE." We suddenly had names and a family connection for the Moores.


The verse reads:

"Asleep in Jesus
Oh, how sweet.
To be with such a
blessing meet."

This seems to be a modified version of an excerpt from the hymn "Asleep in Jesus":

"Asleep in Jesus!
O how sweet
To be with such a slumber meet."

Some interesting background and theological commentary on this hymn can be found here.

It is unclear why Janie Moore was buried separately from her parents, alongside Annie Roberson. Perhaps she was some relation.

In trying to find further information on the burials at Jonesville, the best source my internet research turned up was a publication by the Cobb County Genealogical Society which purported to include a listing of burials in several cemeteries including Jonesville. According to the Cobb County Library, which is very kindly sending me scans of the relevant pages, the list contains 27 marked burials.

According to an official of the Cobb Cemetery Commission, cited in this article in the Marietta Daily Journal, "at least 36 graves" were located during cleanup efforts in February 2011; the article notes that "Most are unmarked, but a few have headstones or fieldstones [...]." We did notice numerous orange marker flags placed in the ground throughout the cemetery during our visit, which we supposed to be indicators of important features such as burials or section markers (only in retrospect did I realize they must all be marker burials), but we did not think to count them at the time.


In the absence of markers, I'm curious about how the volunteers identified burial locations. Most of the orange flags we noticed were either obviously associated with a marker, or placed in or near a depression in the ground, which is a characteristic visual indicator of a possible burial but not definite proof. Ground-penetrating radar is a common tool for locating unmarked burials, but it doesn't seem likely that the Jonesville volunteers would have used that; I say this partially because the effort didn't seem well-funded enough to have access to that kind of resource, but mostly because none of the media reports mentioned it, and shiny technology usually makes such good copy that it draws most of the focus, so the odds of its omission are pretty small.

That's a question I'm planning to ask Mt. Sinai and the Cemetery Commission.

We did notice several unengraved fieldstones, like this one, several of which had orange flags nearby. I made a mistake in assuming at the time that they were section or lot markers, since other cemeteries do use similar stones for the purpose.


For the gravestones that we were able to locate, the iconography of Jonesville Cemetery is an interesting but not especially unusual assemblage. 3 of the 10 gravestones featured a clasping-hands motif. Henry Middlebrooks (d. 1917)'s gravestone features this motif in the form of a pair of clasping hands in the foreground over a heart in the background.

My current favorite gravestone iconography resource, Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister, notes that clasped hands are traditionally a matrimonial symbol, especially if the sleeve attached to one hand appears to belong to a woman's clothing and the other to a man's; otherwise, the symbolism "can represent a heavenly welcome or an earthly farewell" (p. 108). The sleeves on both hands in Mr. Middlebrooks' engraving appear very similar and therefore probably belong to the same gender's clothing, or else the engraving is insufficiently preserved to reveal any details to the contrary. However, Keister also notes that the heart is a common matrimonial symbol in "modern tombstones," so it is difficult to draw a firm conclusion.

He was a Christian and a worthy mem
ber of the Marietta Law
and Order League.
W.M. Pack
Archon

I haven't yet succeeded in finding any information about the Marietta Law and Order League.

Like Henry Middlebrooks, Rebecca Bedford's 1908 clasped hands, the earliest of the three, bear no clear indicators of their gender, potentially due to weathering of the stone.


Ophelia Jackson (1845-1930) also has a pair of clasping hands on her gravestone, shown below a blank scroll (I have to wonder whether it was ever meant to have anything inscribed in that blank space); these are clearly a man's hand and a woman's hand; the sleeve of the hand on the viewer's left appears distinctly feminine.


The male-female pairing in this engraving may indicate matrimony or it may be a personal touch on the imagery of her farewell to a mortal loved one or her greeting by God. There is no way to be sure of either possibility, but the inscription below the dates of her birth and death reads "Faithful unto death."

OPHELIA
JACKSON
BORN JAN. 1845
DIED AT COTTAGE HILL
MARIETTA, GA.
APR. !7, 1930
"Faithful unto death"

Two of the ten Jonesville stones- Alice Bunyon (1874-1910) and Mollie Owens (1860-1902) feature images of a hand pointing upward, a symbol of the soul's ascension heavenward (Keister p. 108).


Interestingly, both images feature the same scalloped border in the circle around the hands, and the stones themselves are also remarkably similar, indicating that they may have come from the same manufacturer, eight years apart (which may have interesting implications regarding the overall business of gravestone production in the area, and on a smaller scale, may reveal something about at least one business in the community of Jonesville).


Mollie Owens's stone is very weathered, and both the image and the epitaph are very faint:

IN MEMORY TO MY
DEAR MOTHER
MOLLIE OWENS
DIED
FEB. 17, 1902
AGE 42 YRS.

Alice Bunyon's stone is much clearer:

IN MEMORY TO MY
DEAR WIFE
ALICE BUNYON

DIED
JUNE 29, 1910
AGE 36 YRS.

Given the formal similarities of the epitaphs, I'm inclined to wonder whether that's the result of the gravestones coming from the same manufacturer, or whether Mrs. Owens and Mrs. Bunyon were part of the same family.

Janie Moore's marker features the lamb iconography already discussed. Beside her, Annie Roberson's gravestone is decorated with a floral motif which is now somewhat faint.

"Write, blessed are the dead
which die in the Lord, from
henceforth, they do rest
from their labors and their
works do follow them."
Good and faithful Servant,
of Zion's travelers.

Annie Roberson's epitaph is from the instruction to John in Revelation 14:13, King James Version.

Of the remaining gravestone, L.B. and Rosa Moore's shared headstone cannot be seen on one side, and A. Beach (1834-1909) bears no iconography and a very simple epitaph.

A. BEACH
DIED
JAN. 22, 1909
AGE 75 YRS.

My husband very good-naturedly came along on this trip as my photographer; he is much more serious about photography as a hobby than I am, and as a result he's also much more experienced and knowledgeable, and thus simply better at it. Still, this was both of our first real attempt at photographing gravestones in particular, and the combination of worn and faded gravestones with dappled sunlight and shadow from overhanging trees presented an interesting challenge. Several of our pictures were taken with me looming at some awkward angle over the gravestone to shadow it evenly while Greg took the picture, sometimes standing at an awkward angle himself or shooting between my legs or under my arm to get the correct perspective for the shot.

Overall, it was a much more challenging, but much more interesting, exciting, and rewarding experience than I had planned for, and Greg was wonderfully patient about the project turning out to be larger and more involved than I had briefed him for. He's awesome like that.

So far, I've already contributed some significant documentation and a nice pile of photos to the Find-A-Grave record, which will hopefully help some genealogical researcher with his own project. I am hoping for a chance to revisit the site in December to take some measurements for a proper scale map of the cemetery; hopefully access the southern half of the property once the summer foliage has died off for the winter; pay more attention to those unmarked fieldstones; and make rubbings of the markers, once I have a few months of practice to work with. In the meantime, I have that burial listing on the way from the Cobb County Library, which will hopefully give me some more data to add to the records on Find-A-rave and my own notes; I'm also planning to contact the church and the Cemetery Commission next week for information on what work is still being done at the cemetery, what methods were used for identifying unmarked burials, and any available background information about the community.

Stories in Stone (book review!)

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I just finished reading Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography. It occupied me during the slow stretch at work last week, because even on my rather morbid bookshelves I couldn't find anything more perfect to read at a funeral home. Several other items came close, though, and I think I'm going to make a point of choosing my at-work reading accordingly, just to see how long it takes someone to notice.

Besides, I have a certain morbid "I Like Sunlight Too Much And Don't Mope Enough To Be A Goth, But I Still Wear Too Much Black And Don't Mind The Smell of Decomp" reputation to maintain.

It was written (and photographed, kudos for versatility) by Douglas Keister, a man with a rather unfortunate surname (the poor fellow must have been the butt of lots of jokes).

Yes, that was immature of me. I'm done giggling now.

Um, actually, not yet.

Okay, now.

Moving on.

This one was an acquisition from Barnes and Noble's bargain shelves (as was Kwaidan and a decent handful of my other books; apparently either that's where they keep all the really obscure weird stuff, or I'm just broke a lot but still addicted to books... probably both. I bought it on an outing with Greg before I actually moved up here with him, so there were some pleasant memories found in just picking it up again. It amuses me sometimes how many of my books I can actually remember the provenance of, and I will be both happy and sad the day my library is large enough that this changes.

Overall, the book was a nice enough read, although I'm fairly sure it was intended more for use as a guidebook than for sit-down reading, as the title suggests. It's divided into chapters, and each chapter has an introduction and then several encyclopedia-style topical entries, each ranging in length from a few lines to a couple of pages. That makes it handy for looking things up but a little choppy to just read straight through.

I was reading at work and in a somewhat scattered mood over the last few days, so having something in short quickly digestible blocks was actually a plus, under the circumstances.

There were a few slightly erroneous statements that caught my attention, though:

Page 72: "Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead, is depicted with the head of a dog."

Calling Anubis the god of the dead is oversimplifying the Egyptian pantheon a bit; Osiris is technically the ruler of the underworld and the deceased counterpart to the living king Horus. A dead pharaoh was an embodiment of and one with Osiris the way a living pharaoh was an embodiment of and one with Horus. Pretty much all the gods have some role in the preparation, final journey, judgment, or afterlife of the deceased- most of the Egyptian gods are in some way "gods of the dead." Anubis himself was more a god of the funerary process, particularly embalming. Still, that's forgivable except...

Anubis' head was that of a jackal, not a dog. A dog is less like a jackal than you are like a gorilla.

It's a minor enough mistake, except that I would except any book on funerary imagery to at least get the basic features of Anubis' identity right. Maybe I'm just an Egyptology snob.

Page 138: "Word entomologists tell us that the phrase 'gone to pot' may have had its origin as a reference to a cinerary urn."

I'm not sure what a word entomologist is- perhaps someone who studies whether silverfish in libraries prefer to eat pages with more nouns or verbs? I'm equally unsure whether that is a typographical error or, more likely, someone getting the words themselves swapped around, which I've seen happen numerous times. All obscure disciplines beginning with the letter E must be, on some level, interchangeable.

Either way, it's something a copy editor at least should have caught.

On the other hand, "cinerary" is a damn cool word.

These are relatively minor errors, but I found them a little jarring, and they gave me cause to take the rest of the information in the book with a grain of salt, because those were just the errors I recognized. What else could the author have gotten wrong in areas outside my scope of knowledge that I might not catch? Mistakes like that cost some credibility with the reader.

The author regained a portion of that credibility by including a decent bibliography at the end. I'm a sucker for a good bibliography, especially if the book managed to leave me more interested in the topic on the last page than I was on the first- which this one did.

I also appreciated the discussion of Chinese and Japanese iconography, symbolism, and practices. Too many Western studies tend to overlook non-European perspectives, and it was refreshing to find a more comprehensive approach, in addition to the fact that the information itself was an interesting overview.

The photography was beautiful and well-integrated with the text, and the captions were informative and concise.

Having finished Stories in Stone, I'm contemplating following up with a Saturday outing to one of the historic cemeteries in the Bell County area with the digital camera and this handy guidebook. Maybe I'll find something interesting.