The clandestine cemetery

The Cemetery and the Creation of Place

Throughout most recorded history, human societies have used various types of cemeteries for burial purposes; this theme points to humanity’s need to construct a meaning behind death and reflect life into the places where the dead are interred. Whether the bodies of the deceased are placed in the ground, within elaborate tombs, or simply in the presence of ancient or contemporary monuments, thei...

Clandestine Graves of Homicide Victims

Accurate determination of both the post mortem and post-burial interval (PMI/PBI) of a clandestine grave of a homicide victim is critical for forensic investigators to link or eliminate suspect(s). Currently, detection rates worldwide are low using a variety of search methods, ranging from simple ground probing and use of scent-trained search dogs, to more advanced remote imagery analysis and n...

De®ning the place of burial: what makes a cemetery a cemetery?

A great deal of material has been written about cemeteries based on the assumption that they constitute a speci®c type of burial place, but few writers have given close attention to the task of describing the features that may be particular to cemeteries. This paper regards cemeteries as speci®cally demarcated sites of burial, with an ordered internal layout that is conducive both to families c...

Removing the Noise from Cemetery Headstones

Many approaches exist for alphanumeric data acquisition from images, however very few make mention of engraved text and none to the knowledge of the author make mention of cemetery headstones. The ability to extract the textual information found on headstones is of great importance due to the valuable historical information that is, in most cases, authoritative and unique to that stone. Multipl...

Le Morne Cemetery: Archaeological Investigations