Another Life on Paper: “Here Lyeth: Grave Rubbings by Ann Parker and Avon Neal”

Leslie Thompson | Glasstire | 8th September 2026

The Puritan communities of colonial New England were often austere. Nowhere was that clearer than in their graveyards. Death was commonplace and not sentimentalised. Gravestone carvings were varied, some restricted just to symbols that could be managed by local craftsmen. These carvings are a record of culture – of caring, of racism intertwined with acts of remembrance, of inevitable death. Many headstone carvings now exist only as wax rubbings on paper, a fragmented memory of what once was.