skirts of cities, where they were often overtaken by further
expansion. Consequently, graveyards became an issue of
urban planning, although authorities were slow to respond.
In the Victorian era, this changed under the influence of a
new sentimentalization of death and the afterlife. Graveyards
became “cemeteries,” a term derived from the Greek koimete-
rion (a sleeping place), which were filled with fanciful archi-
tecture imitating Roman and Egyptian motifs.
A similar development occurred in the United States.
In New England the Puritan tradition meant that graveyards
were treated as mere necessities, and all affectation in burials
was frowned on. Further south, things were not much differ-
ent, and visitors to the colonies remarked on the chaotic state
of graveyards in New York and Philadelphia. In the nine-
teenth century the rural cemetery movement set out to
change this start of affairs. Their best-known achievement is
Mount Auburn cemetery outside Boston, which is beautiful-
ly landscaped with tombs discretely set into hillocks. A Swed-
ish visitor remarked, “A glance at this cemetery almost excites
a wish to die.” A parallel innovation was the embalming of
corpses, which originated during the Civil War so that dis-
tant families could take their sons home for burial. By the
mid-twentieth century the entombing of embalmed corpses
had become standard among Americans, whether newly im-
migrant or long established. Cemeteries were made efficient
by insetting tombstones flat on the ground to allow regular
mowing, but underneath these neat lawns lay massive con-
crete vaults and luxuriously furnished steel coffins. Crema-
tion came into vogue at the end of the twentieth century, but
an archaeologist of the future would certainly conclude that
American notions of death paralleled those of the ancient
Egyptians.
SEE ALSO Caves; Death; Funeral Rites; Pyramids, overview
article; Towers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cotterell, Arthur. The First Emperor of China: The Greatest Archeo-
logical Find of Our Time. New York, 1981.
Metcalf, Peter, and Richard Huntington. Celebrations of Death:
The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual. 2d ed. Cambridge,
U.K., 1991.
Morley, John. Death, Heaven, and the Victorians. Pittsburgh,
1971.
Morris, Ian. Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiqui-
ty. Cambridge, U.K., 1992.
Stannard, David, ed. Death in America. Philadelphia, 1974.
PETER METCALF (2005)TOMOL. The indigenous people of the central California
coast now collectively known as the Chumash are known in
ethnographic circles for their unique use of the plank canoe,
or tomol, a vessel that was not only instrumental in the Chu-
mash exploitation of their marine resources, but served to so-
lidify the complex regional trade system whose influence was
felt far beyond the Chumash interaction sphere. However,
for some contemporary Chumash, this important item of
material culture reaches beyond its practical value and into
the realm of prime symbol, tapping into the essence of Chu-
mash culture and religious orientation and encompassing a
nexus of meaning surrounding issues of dependence upon
nature, belief in the reciprocity of social life, and the world
view of the people.
THE CHUMASH. In classical times, the Chumash were never
a discreet linguistic or cultural entity. They lived in a geo-
graphic area along the California coast from roughly Topan-
ga Canyon in the south to Estero Bay in the north, extending
east to the western edge of the San Joaquin Valley, and in
the northern Channel Islands. The people who have come
to be known as the Chumash inhabited numerous relatively
autonomous villages, each with its own internal political
structure, the largest of which acted as capital cities for smal-
ler village collectives. These individual city-states supported
several dialects of the Hokan linguistic family, first identified
by anthropologist Alfred Kroeber in 1925 and named, for
the most part, for the missions in the areas encompassed by
the dialects, namely the Ventureño, Barbareño, Ineseño,
Purisimeño, Obispeño, and the additional Emigdiano,
Cuyama, and Island dialects. While these dialects have been
identified as branches of the Hokan linguistic family tree,
they in fact operated much like distinct languages. This, in
turn, has given rise to the notion that the various regional
entities actually operated as distinct tribes in their own right,
but with the necessary economic and sociopolitical system
that would unite a region into a relatively cohesive network.The regional federations consisted of smaller villages,
which varied in population from sixty to over a thousand
people, each presided over by a chief, or wot. The smaller vil-
lages owed their allegiance to a major chief for the region
who resided in a capital village, enabling him to control the
production and redistribution of the goods within his vil-
lages, thereby strengthening the federation’s position among
the other regions. Perhaps the key feature of this complex of
inter-regional trade is the presence of specialized craft guilds,
or brotherhoods, both within the villages and extending into
a regional alliance of like craft specialists. These guilds were
fraternal in nature, with the knowledge needed to produce
the various products of these guilds passed on to subsequent
generations via familial ties.These specializations standardized the production of a
number of important elements of Chumash material life, in-
cluding baskets, obsidian projectile points, plant fiber cord-
age, shell bead money, and especially the plank canoe known
as the tomol. In fact, the most powerful of these guilds was
the brotherhood of the tomol, with its members in possession
of high social status, important links to the religious leader-
ship (’antap), and unprecedented access to the political lead-
ership, as well. The tomol, with its powerful brotherhood,
was the glue that held the entire system together. In order9228 TOMOL