Williamsport- The Thomas T. Taber Museum of the Lycoming County Historical Society invites the public to attend a lecture by Dr. Jonathan Scholnick, His lecture is entitled “What can we learn from changing artifact style? Investigating religious attitudes about death using eighteenth-century New England gravestones.” The lecture will occur on Thursday, October 12, 2023, at 10am. It will be held in the Community Room of the Taber Museum and is free and open to the public. Light refreshments are served.
As Dr. Scholnick explains, “The ways that people treat their dead indicates their ideas about the supernatural and allays their emotions about death. The eighteenth century was a dynamic period of religious change, particularly in New England, as the Calvinistic influence of the Puritan settlers waned and new denominations emerged. This was also a time of rapidly changing funerary ritual, when the inscriptions on grave markers shifted from emphasis on marking the remains of the person buried, to commemorating them, and gravestone motifs became more diverse. This study examines the ways that religious attitudes towards death change, using a database of texts and decorative attributes inscribed on eighteenth-century New England gravestones. Some argue that changes in grave marker decorations, epitaphs, and inscriptions reflect ideological changes, while others argue these changes reflect social changes. Specifically, this study examines the spread of novel decorative and linguistic elements found on gravestones during this period. Not only do the textual shifts in gravestone inscription enable us to characterize the diffusion of religious ideas, the linkage between decorative imagery and religious ideas informs theories about the archaeology of religion.”
Jonathan Scholnick is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Bucknell University. He discovered archaeology while growing up in Williamsburg, Virginia through frequent visits to Jamestown Island and daily bike rides to school, which was located adjacent to the Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg. He pursued a degree in Anthropology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he studied both Southwestern archaeology and historical archaeology. After graduating, he spent two years working in the Archaeology Department at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, studying the archaeology of enslaved people who lived and labored on the plantation. After Monticello, he moved to Tucson to pursue a Ph.D. in archaeology at the University of Arizona, focusing on Southwestern Archaeology for his M.A. degree and historic gravestones for his Doctorate. Following his graduate studies, he was a postdoctoral fellow at both Simon Fraser University in Canada and the University of California, Davis.
The museum is located at 858 West Fourth Street, Williamsport. There is ample parking behind the museum as well as on the street. For further information call 570.326.3326.