 Hi everyone. Happy Wednesday and welcome to the Virtual Archaeological Research Facility. My name is Lucy Gill and I am a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley and an archaeologist here at the ARF, also one of your hosts for this year's Brown bags. The Archaeological Research Facility recognizes that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huchin, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chichen Yoloni, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Yoloni people. We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has and continues to benefit from the use and occupation of this land. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold University of California Berkeley more accountable to the needs of American Indian and indigenous peoples. Before I introduce our speaker today, just a reminder that next week at this time, we'll be hearing from our newly minted Dr. Mike Grown who will speak about indigenous shoreline management along California's central coast. It is my absolute pleasure to introduce today's Brown bag speaker, our very own Trent Trombly, PhD candidate in anthropology at Berkeley and one of my first friends here in the department. Trent mostly works in Portugal where he spent last year on a full bright fellowship and he will be speaking about his work there on the bioarchaeology of religion on Monday, October 19th at an event sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America if you're interested. However, today we have the good fortune of hearing about some of his work closer to home at a pioneer cemetery in Orville, California where he is considering both archival records and material culture to think through the genesis of folk tales and contemporary engagement with the dead. Please put any questions for Trent in the chat on YouTube and I will relay them following the talk. Thanks Trent, take it away. All right, I'm going to share a screen here. Is this look okay? Okay, thank you so much for that warm introduction Lucy, I really appreciate it. As Lucy said, my own dissertation work actually is on skeletal biology in Portugal but this is a fun side project that I've been working on for a couple of years now and while I'm bummed that I can't do any sort of brown bag engagement in person as a result of COVID-19 I'm very much excited to be here and that you guys took the time out of your day to come listen to this particularly as it's something that's quite close to home in every sense of the expression. So my talk is entitled Archaeological Desecration as Creation, Postmortem Engagement and the Making of a Witch in a Pioneer Cemetery in Northern California. I'd like to start with a story, a personal story actually and this is of me when I was growing up or actually finishing my community college at Butte Community College in Northern California in around 2011-2012. A friend of mine who grew up in Oroville, I grew up in Chico, wanted to show me around some of the local nooks and crannies or sites that I might not have known about in the Oroville kind of folklore and historical society so she brought me to this particular cemetery called the Pioneer Cemetery and she brought me to this particular grave that we see in this photo here and the grave we're predominantly going to be focusing on is the one on the left with all the cracked cement because the headstone itself reads belonging to Annie M. Silver's and the birth date say that she was born on April 16th 1676 and she died on October 5th 1906 making her 230 years old at her time of death. This paired with the fact that the dates were carved in stone and this kind of otherwise unique or distinguishing iconography particularly in the center here that I'm trying to use my mouse to show states that it was erected by the women of Woodcraft and then it states courage, hope, remembrance. Now as it was relayed to me by my friend she had been she had grown up being told that this was probably a witch's grave because the woman not only lived so long but that Woodcraft might be some sort of code for witchcraft and she belonged to maybe this kind of witch's coven or witch's society and local folklore. So I'm going to be doing two things today the first question I want to look at is what's so special about Annie Silver's grave and headstone and second of all why is she a witch and what does her being a witch tell us about cemetery's death and life after death more broadly. I want to start by situating kind of the local historical and geographic context we're going to be talking about Oroville in northern California if you're driving north on highway 70 and you're passing through Oroville this is what you'll see look again looking north towards Table Mountain at the foot of Table Mountain you'll see a big O similar to Hollywood but never quite finished the rest of the the letters about 55 miles or so north east of Sacramento at the foothills of Plumis and Lashland National Forest. I want to make a quick disclaimer because if you guys look closely later on in the archival records that we'll be looking at you'll see not the name Oroville but Ofer or the township of Ofer, Ofer Township. This actually caused me quite a bit of confusion when I was working archivally because there's another Ofer in Placer County just outside of Auburn that actually remained the town of Ofer. Oroville tried to name itself Ofer as well but because the other Ofer in Placer County had already established their post office or Ofer was this Ofer that we're talking about in Oroville had to rename and so they chose to do Oroville. Why Ofer? Well there's a lot of biblical allusions to the town or city of Ofer as this place that has a lot of gold and a lot of these towns were created both Ophers were created during the colonization of the west in the California Gold Rush and so a lot of these towns were established or named as a kind of means of hoping that you would find maybe a lot of gold in these prospects and so Ofer in the case of Oroville was named similarly to the other Ofer referencing King Solomon and gold but having to rename they chose to do Oroville or City of Gold. So now we're going to be focusing on actually on Lake Oroville this is an image of Lake Oroville for those of you who haven't been there it's quite beautiful for those of you have you you're probably very familiar with this site but if you haven't been there you might be familiar with it from the Oroville Dam crisis that occurred in February 2017 and this is where one of the major spillways actually ruptured and caused a lot of damage and excess spillway into the Thermalito Reservoir and it made both local and some minor national news outlets. This lake is actually really important and integral to this talk today because the plaque right outside the Pioneer Cemetery says that the cemetery itself is dedicated to the burial's hearkening from Bidwell Bar Cemetery, Enterprise Cemetery and six family plots that were moved as a result of creating water for the Oroville Reservoir and State Water Project. So the relation between the Oroville Reservoir, California Department of Water Resources and familial burials in the Pioneer Cemetery cannot be overstated. The Pioneer Cemetery was commemorated in 1965 as an aggregation of burials from these locations. The Central Valley Project began in 1935 as a means of developing the Sacramento and San Joaquin irrigation systems throughout the Central Valley but urban and commercial growth following World War II really forced California legislators to find additional means of water supplies which ultimately led to the development of the California State Water Project or SWP in 1960 and we see actually on the plaque it references the SWP here. The Feather River was pitched as one of the major river systems for impoundment by A.D. Edmundston, the major hydrologist at the time in 1951 and subsequent construction of the dam occurred from 1961 to 1968. Construction of the dam and lake spanning some 3.5 million acres places it as the second largest manmade lake in the state, second only the Shasta Reservoir. Therefore it's not really all that surprising that small boom towns such as Bidwell Bar and Enterprise are formally called Mountain Springs which I've highlighted in yellow here based on geolocation as well as numerous familial burial plots were forcibly relocated and subsequently inundated as a result of the construction. I also want to highlight that familial plots are probably quite common throughout the foothills of the North State. In fact just this last March my parents and neighbors in nearby Paradise stumbled upon three headstones on a neighbor's property that were revealed through the destruction and subsequent clear cutting that followed the campfire in 2018. My uncle as well rides his mountain bike throughout much of these foothills and has noticed additionally a lot of familial plots probably from this time period as well and we can see to the very left in this little yellow dot this is where the Pioneer Cemetery is today actually right off of the Thermalito Reservoir. I was able to find a photo of the Cemetery, Bidwell Bar Cemetery from 1960 just before they inundated and flooded the area for the lake. This is from the Frank Christie collection but as of yet I haven't found any photos of the cemetery from Enterprise and Mountain Springs which is particularly disheartening at least in the moment just because that's where Annie and it seems like her family actually came from or were originally buried. The second thing I want to do in terms of context is try to illustrate the difference between these two cemeteries. So these are off of the same road and actually share the same parking lot and a lot of times they're lumped together as the Thompson Flat Pioneer Cemetery but they're actually quite different and have different histories. If you were to follow this chain link here this chain link fence it actually would end here and the cemeteries share the same chain link fence. Outlined in yellow here we have the Pioneer Cemetery which as we mentioned was established as a result of flooding the lake and is managed currently by the Department of Water Resources. This differs from the Thompson Flat Cemetery which was actually established on June 5th in 1931 so much earlier by the Local Agency Formation Commission or LAFCO. We can even see from the 2010 Municipal Sphere of Influence plans or report for the county that the Thompson Flat Cemetery district covers kind of the northeastern portion of Oroville. Okay so the big question what's so special about Annie Silver's grave? Again this is us standing at the foot of the graves. You'll notice that she's buried next to an individual Ezra as the as my friend told me Ezra she thought might have been her daughter buried next to her daughter. You'll notice that both of them are capped in cement. Annie's is broken Ezra's is not. Cement cappings have been used mainly to prevent any sort of erosion or sinkage of graves and that is certainly probably what's going on with some of the cracking here. We can see quite a change in slope in the case of Annie's grave but as we'll also see later I wouldn't be surprised if vandalism has also played a role in part of this. Again when we look at the actual carvings we see Annie M. Silver's carved April 16th 1676 October 5th 1906 and you can tell there's been a little bit of pocking or relief or maybe even erosion of the 6 and 0 here and then Ezra J. Silver's 1867 to 1950. One of the things you'll notice off the bat is that Ezra's just has the birth years whereas Annie's actually has months in date so you can tell that even from a financial standpoint it looks like more has gone into Annie's headstone. Now in terms of monument form this is basically what we as archaeologists or a cemetery folk who people who study cemeteries will use to describe different headstones. Ezra Silver's is what we would call maybe a dion base. It's a very modest often low in height typically quite square or blocky headstone. He's got a very smooth surface here and then it's got rusticated top and edges. This differs quite substantially from Annie's which is not only a tab and socket more of a traditional kind of circular headstone but has this additional tree stump or log on top of it. Additionally we see all this kind of arboreal imagery of branches. We see this dove on a tree and we see a gate and finally Annie's headstone is much larger than Ezra's just in terms of sheer size. Now in terms of that embossing of that kind of incising or carving that says erected by the women of woodcraft you know this was part of I think her local legend was that this was maybe code for some sort of witchcraft society. I certainly didn't know about what who the women of woodcraft were until I did some digging myself and the women of woodcraft were a larger or a subsidiary of the larger woodmen in the world organization a fraternal organization aimed at providing insurance. The Women of the World was founded in 1890 by Joseph Cullen Root in Omaha, Nebraska to help provide insurance through fraternal organization. Their first death claim was paid out to drowning victim William Warner who died in June 14th 1891 in Niles, Michigan. The women of woodcraft was co-founded by Miss Carrie Van Orsdahl and Mr. J. L. Wright and Miss Van Orsdahl based the auxiliary actually out of the west coast in Pendleton, Oregon. The women of woodcraft eventually rebranded to the neighbors of woodcraft in 1917 and actually went on to eventually rejoin the large organization in 2001. Woodmen of the World rebranded to woodman life in 2010 and continues to provide insurance and annuities. But what's interesting is that historically the women of woodcraft and women of the of the world were instrumental in shaping the American material culture of cemeteries throughout the turn of the 20th century. The women of the world provided headstones for deceased members free of charge between 1890 and 1900 and continued to provide headstones through the 1920s with a cover charge. By the mid-1920s however the organization ceased to provide gravestone monuments as a result of increasing costs. So that means that the women of woodcraft and women of the world are likely to only have headstones within a roughly 30 year period between 1890 when the organization was formed and the mid-1920s when they stopped giving out the headstones. In the case of women of woodcraft it's even tighter. It's got to be between 1897 and 1917 1897 when they formed and 1917 when they rebranded to the neighbors of woodcraft. So this all goes to suggest that maybe Annie's birth year at least as indicated by the seal of women of woodcraft was probably between 1897 and 1917. So how does all this match up with the archival documents from Annie? So let's start with the 1900 U.S. federal census. If you look closely this is actually from the Ofer township of Butte County again or modern-day Orville. And when we look at her entry we see that she comes up actually as the wife of Ezra Silver. So the person she's buried next to is actually her husband Ezra and that she was born at States on January the month of January 1877. So this contrasts quite a bit from her headstone which says April 16th 1676 about a 200 year difference. I will caution that a lot of 19th century census records tend to omit a lot of information or even change information particularly for women. They have a lot more detailed information of men or people who are the heads of the house. But it is interesting to note that she would be born in 1877 and not 1676. This would also fit with what we see iconographically from the women of woodcraft. So it's likely that this was probably a mischip. Headstones typically carved the name and date to the deceased last. So it might have been that the carver accidentally mischipped the wrong date but so much work had already gone into this large headstone that it was left as it is. Now how about the death index? Let's see how that matches up with her headstone. So when we look at the 1905 to 1929 California death index we see her entry comes up as Annie M. Silver's age 30 years by the time of death and the date of death was around October 8th 1906. This is much closer to what we see in the actual headstone. In fact if we go back farther to the 1880 U.S. Federal Census we can actually see that she comes up as the four-year-old daughter of Carl and Ella Woodman. And this is of the Mountain Springs Township. This is basically that town, that boom town, that was eventually renamed to Enterprise and then subsequently flooded for the lake. We see that Carl, her dad's occupation, was listed as a printer so he probably was working in the newspaper industry at the time there and her mother was keeping house. But Annie at four years of age in 1880 fits much closer with her birth year at 1876 or 1877 than 1697. So once I was able to find part of her family members as well as Ezra's the archival information really exploded from there. So instead of going through each of those in turn I'm going to try to distill as much as I can into a rough genealogy that I've created. So let's start with Ezra Silver's side of the family. We see that Ezra Silver was born to Joseph A. Silver. Joseph A. Silver was born about 1813 on the island of Fayol in the Azores to Mark Anthony of Portugal and Mary of Ireland. Joseph A. Silver I will say is not a typical name you encounter in 19th century Portugal. I would not be surprised if it's been anglicized. I wouldn't be surprised if I were to go to Fayol and look at the immigration records which I'm hoping to do someday. If his name was actually José de Silva that's a very, de Silva is a very common last name in Portugal and I just wouldn't be surprised if it was anglicized here. He married Mariah Leroy of France. They emigrated to the east coast or to the east coast originally then to the west coast. His occupation was listed as a minor so he probably came over as part of the gold rush and they had four children of their own Leroy, Mary, Ernest and Ezra. Now going over to Annie's side of the family her parents were Ella Hand and Carl D. Woodman. They had four children of their own Annie or Anna Woodman, Harlan, Laila and Ernest. Anna and Ezra would go on to have three children of their own Genevieve, Leslie and Harlan. I wouldn't again be surprised if young Harlan was maybe even named as a homage in respect to her brother Harlan who died at the same year but Annie would go on to die two years later in 1906 and in fact Ezra actually remarries after Annie Lillian R. Golden who takes his last name to become Lillian R. Silver's. What's interesting is that Ezra died in San Joaquin in 1950 which is just outside of Fresno. Their kids Genevieve would go on to be burdened Los Angeles, Leslie and Stockton and Harlan in Sacramento which kind of begs the question what is Ezra doing way the heck up here back in Mountain Springs which eventually became inundated and now the Pioneer Cemetery. Was it in his own will to be buried back next to his first wife and where is his second wife buried? Now let's take a look at the actual cemetery itself. This is a very basic plan I've drawn up of the cemetery. We'll focus in on this little region here where their burials are and what I'm going to try to do here is color coat the genealogy with the actual grave location. So we see that Ezra and Annie are buried side by side over here but not too far to the east we see that two of Annie's siblings Harlan and Ernest are buried side by side actually below their mother Ella. Now what's particularly interesting is their father Carl is buried way over here next to some other people who have Woodman as a last name. So one of the questions I have was what is the spatial organization we see presently in the Pioneer Cemetery was any of that maintained from the original Mountain Springs Cemetery that was subsequently inundated by the lake? What was the original spatial organization of the cemetery up in Mountain Springs and was any of that maintained and moving the bodies here to the Pioneer Cemetery as it is today? It also kind of goes to show just how elaborate Annie's headstone is compared to the rest of her family. Most of them have very modest kind of plaque burials or even not even really tabbing sockets or they're modest plaques that just say the name birth year and death year and even in the case for father Carl it's just Carl Woodman 1884. So it is really interesting that Annie has such a nicely commissioned headstone. Okay now we're going into the portion about vandalism at the cemetery. When I first pulled up to the cemetery in 2015 to start taking photos this was one of the first signs you encounter in the parking lot a sign that warns about the serious crimes of vandalism suggesting a history of vandalism in the cemetery that's been vandalized itself. You know in fact in an oral history interview in 1983 with Evelyn Joslyn who was a board of trustee member for the Thompson Flat Cemetery she stated quote there was a great deal of vandalism in that cemetery. Several years ago we had 23 headstones knocked down and quote every visit I've gone since I have found some aspect of vandalism either towards the cemetery itself the broader cemetery gates or features are actually the headstones themselves. When we look at Annie's headstone more closely the first thing we notice is that it's toppled off of its base it's no longer standing on its base. Headstones don't usually fall down on their own they usually require some sort of nudge and while her headstone is very tall and possibly top heavy I think all these scuff marks that you're seeing along here as well as the relief wear here suggests it was probably crowbarred or pried off of its actual base to be toppled. The back of the headstone shows lots of scuffing scratching and incising and in fact when we look at the sides we see people have actually written letters or characters or sentences and in the left photo I'll try to trace as best I can it says in Annie. In the right photo it's much more faded and unfortunately today it's almost completely faded to not be able to make it out but some of the words I've been able to trace and make out are ling or ing or sing the word she told me to write ps she is killing to blank blank blank grave so people are clearly etching their own kinds of things into this headstone in addition to toppling it. Another thing I noticed that was fairly interesting was when I compared the photo one of the photos I took on the right in 2018 to one I found online from the find a grave repository or website and if you look really closely in the background on the left photo you'll notice there's actually spray paint or tagging on the actual cement caps itself. Now unfortunately there's no other photos I don't know what the tagging says and I've reached out to the person who took the photos but haven't heard anything since but you can also see in the 10 years of difference between these two photos just how much wear and tear Annie's headstone has experienced compared to 2008. So much so that people even on find a grave have actually tried to care for the cemetery. We see digital flowers left as kind of a sign of digital remembrance. We see one particular individual say I hope you're still resting in peace. Sorry for what the vandals have done to your stone. I'm going to try to drive up and fix it this weekend which is interesting because a lot of the vandalism you see is actually spurring on a lot of care. Conversely a lot of care for this particular headstone. Just this last September I went and took photos a couple weeks ago actually and took photos and I found a wine bottle, some vandal bones, what looked to be cigarette butts as well as a bunch of pennies and pebbles placed on the stone and finally both real and plastic flowers laid atop the cement cap. In terms of coins you know there's a long tradition of leaving coins at the graves of United States military at least since the Vietnam War. In the case of military service and cemetery visits different coins actually signify different relationships with the deceased. Leaving a penny signifies that you visited despite having no relationship to the deceased while leaving a nickel signifies usually you trained at boot camp together. Leaving a dime means you serve with them in some capacity and leaving a quarter signifies that there was a that you were there when the fellow soldier was killed. So leaving of coins is thus a materialization of remembrance and respect paid to the dead and the choice of pennies is possibly illustrative as it signifies respect without any personal relationship to the deceased. In terms of stones there's a long history in Jewish funerary customs of leaving stones or pebbles at headstones as a sign of respect that you had visited. I'm not insinuating that there's any sort of you know religious connection here I just think that some of that some of those customs have definitely found their way into more American funerary and mortuary customs and culture. But all of these kind of go to show that people do engage at least in the U.S. by mourning through material signs that signify that you had visited as a as a sign of respect. Now there's something else that's kind of interesting that I found and this is actually a Facebook post or report by the local Orville Paranormal Society and they labeled the post or as the witches cemetery a.k.a. the Thompson Flats and Pioneer Cemetery and I want to bring this up because I think it's really crucial that the Orville Paranormal Society did their archival research. They state here according to local legends one of the graves in the Pioneer Cemetery was the grave of a witch that people believe this is the fact on her tombstone it states that she was a member of the women of woodcraft. Some people believe that woodcraft was code for witchcraft also on her tombstone it states that she was born in 1672 and 1902 that would make her over 230 years old. So this is almost the exact same kind of legend or folklore I was told but they go on to actually explain in the next paragraph the women of woodcraft have nothing to do with witchcraft it was an insurance agency as for her age it looks like a misprint or mischisel archival records say she died at 30 not 230 but it is pretty interesting because they say in the next paragraph one reason may bring may bring us back to the women of woodcraft and misbelief that woodcraft was code for witchcraft for at least 40 years now people have been doing seance and cult ceremonies at that woman's grave so this is pretty interesting and I haven't been able to substantiate or even get any feedback on some of this stuff but it is interesting to see this kind of at least some acclaim like this that people have been engaging with this headstone at least for 40 years if not more almost the entirety of her headstone being situated here in the Pioneer Cemetery and finally I just want to note that they they illustrate actually all the paranormal activity that they found is in the adjacent Thompson flat cemetery and I bring this up because it all kind of begs the question of the vandals who defaced Annie's headstone the same as a paranormal society and I would say no it's highly unlikely given the paranormal society actually did their archival research and caution that not only is Annie not a witch but the activity comes from the neighboring Thompson flat cemetery I don't think they have anything to do with that it's difficult to get any confirmation on the actual acts of vandalism since it is legal people aren't really stepping forward to volunteer that they actively vandalized a headstone but I think that's something to keep in mind but it's certainly an active site in the archaeological sense in the ways in which people engage with material culture in fact one of the things I notice is and I'm going to try to show you it here is when I seriate the photos or chronologically organize the photos we see quite a bit of activity with the headstone so the oldest photo I have is remembering back to that 2008 photo from find a grave with the headstone had already been toppled over at this point rotated it and kind of rested against its own base and this is the one with the tagging or spray paint when I took my first photo in 2015 the headstone was back laid on its backside almost as if it had just been toppled it largely remained in the same place at least by 2016 but a few months later it had been repositioned and this time rotated and rested kind of a skew atop the cement cap by 2018 it had been propped again like it was in 2008 but definitely more wear and tear as we see a couple months later still largely in the same place there's a couple more you know material evidence of funerary offerings or something in the form of candles and flowers but what's interesting is annie m silvers and women of woodcraft had actually been rubbed or etched in it looked like I think with a crayon or maybe some sort of rubbing material or even a sharpier pen but they were highlighting annie m silvers and the women of woodcraft two years later it's largely in the same place it's a little more upright still propped against the base but the rubbings or pen like scribing had been removed at this point or cleaned off and then finally just a few weeks ago it's completely standing upright now no longer resting on its base with the pennies stones flowers faunal bones and wine bottle uh so all this goes to show that this headstone moves around quite a bit and fairly frequently and while I've only been able to gather photos fairly sporadically it's been interesting to see in my own journeys there each time I don't exactly know what to expect as different members from the community either vandalizing it further or caring for it further uh seeing headstones move around is not typically something you see in most cemeteries so I think it speaks to a lot of the post-mortem engagement with this particular headstone so I don't have a ton of space to talk about this but I do want to touch briefly on the ideas of witchcraft um and I don't think we can overlook the fact the US's history of witch persecutions of all forms nor the US's largely patriarchal society doesn't additionally factor into the vandalism we see here uh while we may be far removed from the renowned 17th century Salem witch trials which took place in massachusetts public perception and interpretation of what constitutional witchcraft has certainly changed dramatically in the case of the century 17th century Salem witch trials for example gender was certainly a component in the accusation and subsequent persecution of witches but was not the defining component while it's true that the majority of persecutions targeted women in the case of the Salem trials five of the 19 individuals who were hanged were in fact men two of the victims were dogs uh Giles and Martha Corey were a couple who similarly suffered tragic fates in Salem uh Martha despite being a good standing with the church was accused of witchcraft and hanged on september 22nd in 1692 her husband Giles attempted to defend the accusations against his wife but was subsequently accused of witchcraft himself refusing to go to trial because he thought he's it was rigged uh he was pressed to confess an excruciating torture process whereby the individuals placed between flat substrates and slowly crushed with increasing amounts of weight or stones which we see in the middle kind of artistic depiction here um and as far as I know this is the only historically documented case of this torture ever being done in the US and it was immediately stopped after um so I touch on this and and I've kind of highlighted some some rather famous historical works on the subject here to touch on the fact that despite all this public perception today tends to equate witches with women uh it's a mapping of gender as a prerequisite for being a witch so returning to Annie's vandalism you know I wonder to this day if Ezra or if any other male's headstone were mischipped in a similar manner would we see the same results uh would have purported 230 year old Charles carved in the same arboreal imagery still be labeled a witch and consequently yield such destruction and continued attention personally I'm not so sure I do think gender plays a significant role in Annie's legend as a witch and in the eyes of those who vandalize these spaces I don't think it's a coincidence that the only other headstone that shows showcases complete signs of complete toppling at least right now belongs to Anna Margaret Kloss and it's completely inscribed in German um the headstone itself at least in 2008 definitely had some structural integrity issues you can see that it was capped in cement to help kind of protect it but by the time I took photos in 2015 it had been toppled over and you can see the amount of rebar reinforcing it uh and as of 2020 it's almost in complete disarray as of right now um so you know the US is of course no stranger in systematically denying the peace and permanence that is often associated with cemeteries for people of color immigrants impoverished communities popper cemeteries for example throughout its history what we see at Annie's grave likely goes to show that violence inequality and contestation are struggles that continue to play out post-mortem even after death and so this brings us to our second big theme or question and that is what is any silvers as represented by a headstone purported witch reveal about broader anthropological ideas of cemeteries engagement with the dead and life after death more broadly so I'm going to touch on a number of works here I think the first ones I want to touch on relate to actually cemetery design and landscape design um the secret cemetery is a pretty interesting book that's an ethnography of cemetery goers and they the author state quote transformative ritual acts resurrect and symbolically reconstruct the body control nature and by implication control death and so keep the departed present and alive and quote I think we certainly have a lot of ways in which Annie is kept as this force or this member of the of the local folklore and legend by means of ways in which people engage with her in her headstone in terms of death scapes the authors of this make a good point to showcase that cemeteries provide a space for sometimes illicit activity as they're not often patrolled this is not a stab at any sort of management agency it's more of a change in the ways in which the American public engages with cemetery and funerary spaces it's not like parts of the Victorian period where people would go have picnics or dates or even barbecues out in cemeteries you didn't just go in the past necessarily to mourn but today it's become much more of a more of a somber kind of I think space in a lot of ways I also really want to highlight Catherine Verdery's work who works in post who worked in post-soviet eastern Europe on the portrayal of actual human political figures as they were kind of paraded throughout parts of post-soviet Europe and she states quote remains are concrete yet protean they do not have a single meaning but are open to many different readings because corpses suggest the lived lives of complex human beings they can be evaluated from many angles and assigns assign perhaps contradictory virtues vices and intention I think definitely some of this is at play in Annie's headstone different people interpret her differently and that kind of goes to show the the vast array of material engagements with her headstone I think also in archaeology as in and by archaeology as well we've definitely struggled to write about emotively about bodies through employing sanitizing language filters using scientific language is great for creating distance but sometimes that distance obscures the actual human component of the people we're working with and I think Joyce talks about this particularly well in the case of Crandall and Herod they make a case for how bioarchaeologists in particular could be attentive to the post-mortem agency that bones and bodies can acquire and how political and social arenas continue to exert influence on the dead and they focus on a particular pair of brothers in Las Vegas who were purportedly killed through a wild west gun duel but through subsequent forensic analysis were actually ambushed but the legend had so far cemented this that it actually affected land deeds and rights and who got access to the land so these bodies can still kind of come back even though having been long dead to exert political influence in some ways Jason De Leon's concept of necro violence which builds on a Chilean bembe as critique of Foucault may also help to understand vandalism in a cemetery setting and he defines this as quote violence performed produced through specific treatment of corpses that is perceived to be offensive sacrilegious or inhumane by the perpetrator or the victim and his or a cultural group or both end quote so admittedly while Annie's corpse is not the recipient of desecration for extended mortuary context certainly is and I think that degradation towards a tombstone as an index of a very body purported identity can be similarly considered within the realm of necro violence and then finally I just want to touch on Zoe Crossland's really interesting semiotic approach which I think could be illustrative as she focuses on the ways in which dead body despite their quote tangible index of cality and quote remains ambiguous and open to interpretations in fact the ways in which bodies or in our case a headstone relates to the people whom they belonged in our case purported 230 year old gives rise to an interpretant which creates chains and cycles that can continue to snowball out of control in a sense any silvers the witch likely hinges on the centennial six in her headstone's birthday 1676 this birthday implicates Annie as a which because of how long she assumedly lived 230 years old the evidence evidence of hers which is reinforced by the fact that her dates are literally carved in stone kind of concretizing her age as fact so I wonder were it to demarc an eight instead of a six bringing her age back age at death from 230 years back into the realm of 30 years who's to say much of any of her post-mortem engagement or legend would have ever come to fruition so this brings about a rather ironic kind of possibility and process and that is the very acts that sought to deface and desecrate and destroy any resting place are ironically some of the very acts that continue to reinforce her as a witch in this sense the age and iconography is read as a witch might lend itself to vandals particularly focusing their desecrative efforts towards her headstone in particular maybe because she was a witch this vandalism leaves material traces for future cemetery visitors including those who want to care for the headstone which only further reinforces Annie's legend of being a witch and so you get this almost cycle of desecration and creation Annie's headstone in grave showcase the desecration is not only reductive but also additive even if you're toppling a headstone over even if you're removing parts of it that's still leaving information even the removal is still additive so much so that each successive act of material engagement with Annie's resting place including vandalism might only further reinforce Annie's roles of which in this sense Annie became a witch she was made a true witch by successive successive acts of vandalism and restoration and each act only further cements her as a witch in local orville folklore so being a side project this is never quite done this is something there's still many many questions and things I still want to pursue but some of the ones that are most pressing for me right now are first of all what was Annie's relationship to the women of woodcraft was she a paying member if so where was the local maybe auxiliary agency on the west coast outside of Pendleton organ was there one maybe closer to the Ofer Township who carved her headstone where was it commissioned was it carved locally was it sent in maybe from out of town and how did that maybe factor into some of the discrepancies we see with the even the months and days of her birth and death dates again how was the spatial organization of the burials at least in the pioneer cemetery today determined was any of that maintained from the original cemeteries we saw or we would see in in enterprise or mountain springs and finally another curiosity again is who chose to have Ezra buried in orville next to Annie was it by his own doing did he leave it in his will somewhere and where is Ezra's second wife buried and it's just curious that someone who had a second wife and then died in Fresno would be transported way back up to a fairly small cemetery I think in Mountain Springs okay in terms of conclusions there's two I want to leave you with the first is something I particularly emphasize to our undergraduates as well as myself and that's the importance of proofreading I've managed to conduct a side project for a few years and lecture at you all for nearly an hour because it might be considered the equivalent of a 20th century typo in the form of a mischip our typos misclicks or smudgy handwriting as any historian who toils over paleography will tell you they have consequences without us even knowing the second is a little more serious and I think anthropologist Timothy Ingold summarized eloquently when he stated quote the fundamental thing about life is that it does not begin here or end there but it's always going on end quote Annie died over a century ago but was socially resurrected and continues to be resurrected and abstracted as a post mortem which today in this sense Annie never really quite died but was brought back to life again in a new light I can only hope something as humble as a gravestone like Annie's can show us the power of materiality and how to breathe life into spaces of mourning tragedy and remembrance when I first visited Annie's grave nearly a decade ago I don't think I ever would have envisioned even the academic influence any would have on my research and while my own dissertation is one that's focused on medieval Portuguese cemeteries and skeletal biology and thus seem like no further place from a folktale close to home the truth is both are linked by what anthropology and archaeology can contribute to spaces of mourning remembrance and contestation cemeteries whether from the 10th century the 20th are social spaces capable of revealing some of the vast array of human experiences and emotions surrounding the dead something I think can speak to all anthropological endeavors and finally I cannot help but think the ways in which any silver's life as a mother a wife a daughter a sister who took her husband's likely anglicized Portuguese last name died at the age of 30 in a rural mining town and received a headstone commissioned by an early feminist auxiliary insurance agency differed so much from her post mortem one I can also not help but think that any silvers the which became a which likely due to the equivalent of today's typos but more importantly paired with the continued interest and engagement of the living even centuries removed so who knows we might all become witches yet thank you trend for such an interesting talk again if anyone has additional questions for trend please feel free to put them in the live chat on youtube and I will have the opportunity to ask them now um we have a couple questions to start us off the first is have you been to the cemetery in black diamond mines east bay regional park district um in past decades some headstones there were also still legible I have not no I have not um that sounds incredibly interesting and I'll definitely try to take a look I've gone through a number of cemeteries throughout the east bay and quite frankly a lot of them throughout the central valley but um there's still plenty I haven't seen yet so I'd be I'd be very curious to check some of those out thank you for that question um we've got a couple comments saying how interesting the talk was um and then we've got another question can you say more about the connection between the violence done in the construction of the reservoir and the movement of graves to pioneer cemetery sure thing um yeah the interesting thing about the state water project is at least in the case of orville is just how much volume of space it ended up taking up around 3.5 million acres it's massive and in that case the it's interesting to me that they were able to displace these amount of graves from these two boom towns and some of the things I just don't know is how much archival or even photo evidence do we have of those of those boom towns even beforehand I found some historical photos through sacramentos kind of photo archives and have been able to find some stuff on that matter but not a ton and so it's something I'm I'm still trying to look into and I think there's violences on different scale there's violence maybe in the sense that displacing these bodies or moving them could be considered a form of desecration or maybe just dealing with what you have to try to get water into the rest of the state there's certainly a history of violence in these foothills against indigenous communities particularly my due peoples and a lot of the photos of the historical society don't necessarily acknowledge that and so there's there's violence at different levels here and I think that's something that to keep in mind and my hope is to try to at least get some more information from the state water project to kind of do some more digging on exactly how this plan went down and particularly how the movement of the graves was undertaken thanks our own art director Christine has a question did you figure out why the father has been removed from his family in the new cemetery Carl yeah I'm not sure I think again I wonder if how much of the spatial organization from the mountain springs enterprise cemetery was maintained in the movement of these graves that's one question I can speculate I think because of his last name maybe he was buried next to some other people or because he was he died about two to three years before most of the rest of his family maybe he had a plot in mountain springs that was there for the family but the subsequent inundation for the lake altered those plans quite a bit and they might have had to you know readjust as they moved into the pioneer cemetery that's a possibility as well and I'm not 100 positive but that's kind of my best guess at least right now until I can get some get some information from maybe the SWP on that cool another question was there wine left in the bottle and are animal bones like is there an association do you think in this context between animal bones whether generally or those particular bones and witchcraft in terms of wine unfortunately there was none left but it is from I know it's an actual wine brand that you can find at grocery outlet at least locally that's like about the only place I've actually seen that brand I know you can find it in other stores but that's one of the places I've seen it as for the bones yeah I wouldn't be surprised it looked like a it was definitely a sub-adult because the epiphasies hadn't been fused or anything and it was definitely some sort of mammalian thing I didn't I didn't end up picking up the bone or touching it I try not to touch or mess with any of the actual material stuff left there but I wouldn't be surprised if someone maybe left that there in illusion not only for remembrance but maybe in kind of sympathy for this idea of her being a witch and maybe this idea of witches interacting with both animate and inanimate mortal remains in that kind of sense you see that a lot in at least more medieval Europe in the translation into the US changes quite a bit but I wouldn't be surprised if this idea of witches engaging with bones would be part of that certainly um another question um wouldn't it be easy to change the six into an eight so like why would it have been left basically why would the type have been left yeah it's a good question and the way the six is oriented I'll see if I can get back into it I'm going to go back to the more of the zoomed in picture of it it looks like they had almost started doing a six from the outright if you look really closely it's completely flat on the left side whereas the eight would have more of like a little bevel in there to kind of separate for these blocky carved straight lined characters it is curious and I have definitely there is definitely a gap between this portion so it isn't an eight it's a six but you wonder could they have added something back in maybe to to to fix that I'm not 100 positive it's it's particularly interesting now because over the years it's become even more eroded and like I said this zero from the 1906 and the bottom of the six are almost completely gone now whether through erosion or people pocking at it or something like that but it is it is definitely a curious question as to what would it be like to fix a headstone after you maybe already removed a portion of it cool and then one last question can you talk a little bit more about Portuguese migration generally in that area were they often mining or engaged in other enterprises yeah that's a great question that's frankly something I really want to follow up on I will say generally the the appreciation for Portuguese migration into the west coast and particularly California is very underappreciated there the Portuguese are definitely part of the larger fabric of of the US acquiring California and colonizing California in many respects but both in terms of whaling shrimp industries and fishing and dairy farming particularly from the Azores most of the central valley has become a major kind of boom for dairy farming in terms of the foothills it's particularly interesting the only other project I know if that's done some of this stuff is actually our very own David Hyde whose dissertation found quite a few Portuguese laborers who worked lime kilns in Santa Cruz but that's more again towards the coast in terms of the foothills as part of the boom my best guess for this particular portion is that at least in Joseph's case he was coming over as part of the mining industry Ezra himself throughout almost every census record is listed as either a miner or kind of a day laborer but I think the it's something that we haven't maybe dug into as much of yet and it's something I'm looking to try to do is to try to understand more about Portuguese kind of history in California particularly maybe in the north state and in these foothills a little more certainly along those lines just one last question my question just have you talked to I mean this is obviously such an interesting project from a local history perspective and you know have you spoken with like anyone at the city or the whoever's in charge of the cemetery now are they interested in doing some kind of collaborative project sure I've definitely spoken with a lot of members of I've spoken with some members of the swp of people who've managed laugh of Lafko who managed the Thompson flat cemetery I've made I've talked with people who've done more of the historical society component and they've all been really tremendously helpful in giving me some information here and there about you know about people's engagement with the cemetery about the history of the cemetery itself or pointing me in the direction of things like the oral history report which I hadn't been aware of which was really tremendously helpful I am curious to learn a little more about you know even people who are around maybe in the 70s and 80s who made it might have known about this cemetery I think that would be particularly interesting and trying to see when maybe did this thing start to pick up in terms of the local folklore and legend or even knowing when the headstone was toppled when was it kind of toppled over or not these are some of my own questions that I think I hope to work with more local community members in the future it's been a little tricky now just with distancing but I've had a lot of really good phone conversations with people from either from Lafko or even people who patrol the cemeteries it's been quite interesting the last few times I've gone every time I pull up to the cemetery there's a truck that kind of immediately follows to I don't know if it's to keep watch but just to also make sure everything's okay and that's been I've had a couple conversations with people who work there and that's been kind of enlightening to understand maybe what's been going on here so to that end um someone thank you by the way that's that's very cool um someone just commented um they are a DWR archaeologist working primarily in the Lake Orville area a descendant of animargerata cloths reached out to them in April and they met on the site to evaluate the damage wow amazing yeah that's incredible that's such a small world I would yeah I would love to get in touch and maybe see if we can you know put notes together and see if we can find out some more about some of this stuff so cool yeah awesome well thank you so much Trent for such a fun interesting talk um that's you know many of us have have been out to that area um and always cool to to hear about also where people are from so thank you my pleasure my pleasure thank you so much