Burying the Peculiar Institution: An Analysis of West Tennessee Slave Culture and Religion through Cemeteries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The cemetery, both for the folklorist and the historian, serves as a window into the artistic, social, and religious pattern of a locality.Cemeteries demonstrate population change and balance; illustrate economic affluence; and reflect traditional values, legal regulation, and religious theory.The formal disposal of the deceased is a universal practice, and thus should be an essential consideration in cultural study.Yet despite the fact that "There can be few other subjects as untouched or as promising as the geographical study of burial practices," cemeteries, particularly those of the Antebellum South, remains a widely untapped historical resource. 1Perhaps even more unusual is that throughout the study of slave history, there has been surprisingly little scholarly research directed towards the mortuary practices of slaves, something that would be extremely valuable considering that archaeological data can buttress scholarly speculation. 2 This lack of research is most likely due to three major reasons.First, sans exhumation, it is difficult to concretely claim that cemeteries do in fact contain the bodies of slaves.This is primarily a result of the unmarked graves slaves most often occupy, which provide no source of identification.Second, urban sprawl has left a limited number of historic cemeteries that can be studied since many have been destroyed.Those that do exist are often in rather remote locations that are seldom visited by researchers.Finally, slave cemeteries often developed into modern day African-American cemeteries, making the 1 Fred Kniffen, "Geographical Record," The Geographical Review, Vol.57, No. 3, July, 1957.pp.426-427. 2 Consider, for example, Albert J. Rabateau's classic text on slave religion and how his claims could be strengthened through a comparison to archaeological findings or mortuary practices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".