Abstract
This paper explores the emotional dimensions of my research on children and their memorial markers in nineteenth-century cemeteries in the United States. Returning to this work in a heart-centered way offers an opportunity to address how my emotions are connected to my experiences and understandings in the present, as well as my engagement with the emotional lives of the people I am studying in the past. Working with the memorial monuments of young children has been emotionally challenging for me as a researcher, and I have become deeply interested in the emotional worlds that nineteenth-century American parents were a part of when they created these monuments designed to convey grief and loss. This exploration is also a journey of how I have moved away from my training in scientific, processual archaeology that prized objectivity to a heart-centered practice that combines rigor and respect for the material record with concerns of the heart and humanity.
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Baxter, J.E. (2020). Emotional Practice and Emotional Archaeology. In: Supernant, K., Baxter, J.E., Lyons, N., Atalay, S. (eds) Archaeologies of the Heart. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-36350-5_9
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