Monuments and places, like rituals, are ways in which societies remember, whereby the point of memory and commemoration is the joining of past with present.

Bradley 1993

Monuments, Memory & Landscape

If we are to identify and understand the nature and implications of certain physical relationships with locales established through past human thought and experience, we must do it through the study of place. Places are contexts for human experience, constructed in movement, memory, encounter and association. This notion of the landscape as memory and experience has enjoyed increased attention as demonstrated through the rise in popularity of historic preservation and urban and public history. The identification of traditional or folk landscapes as settings or preserves of cultural memory can be traced as early as the late nineteenth century in the study and preservation of folk cultures in Northern Europe.

Preservation of individual monuments as icons of cultural and historical identity began earlier in the late eighteenth century with the formation of modern European nations based on the aggregation and segregation of different ethnic groups. As early as 1902 these preservation efforts reached such extremes that Alois Riegl described the trend as a 'modern cult' whereby historical monuments served as the primary vehicles for both the transmission and reception of changing cultural ideas and values over time.

Since the time of Ptolemy's Geography, Western tradition has viewed landscape as an inscribed surface, measured, depicted, and described with the names of people, things, and events as distinct personal. Opposite to this view of a landscape of memory, is the perspective that holds landscape as memory; that is, as a template directly participating in the process of memory-work or image-making. Regardless of whether the landscape assumes the passive (of) or active (as) voice of memory, all landscapes depend on natural, semi-natural and artificial features or natural phenomena to enhance or establish the significance of and attachments to a particular place. While the act of remembering is acutely human, the associations specific memorials and places have at any given time will change.

In their most direct engagement, all cemeteries and burying grounds are certainly landscapes of memory; the markers and epitaphs providing critical information about the deceased and their life in an effort for individuals, families, and communities to record and remember. However some necrogeographies, like the nineteenth century picturesque rural cemeteries of America, were designed from the beginning as landscapes as memory, openly displaying a complex assemblage of monuments, plantings, geometries, and passage to create a symbolic environment where nature expressed the divine and architecture referenced past times and other places in remembering the personal dead as well as the universal human condition.

Text adapted from Frank G. Matero, Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans' Creole Cemetery, Exhibit at Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, April 2002.