Bear Burials







     In 2017 I was visiting family in New York city. Hoping to catch my son during lunch up in Manhattan. I took the red line to Wall Street and then walked  to find myself looking at the Trinity chapel built in 1839. The original building was built in 1698. Next to the church are burial grounds. I was already very aware of all the information found on the stones in Maine. I was eager to see if this was a unique situation in my area. I had not heard of anyone else seeing this material and sure enough it was everywhere there were rocks in NYC. In fact even the tombstones in the Trinity Chapel burial grounds were indigenous artifacts.  
 



     I was already accustom to seeing these carvings around me, although I was not expecting to see them here In NYC on tombstones. The lighting was not great so my pictures are not the best quality, but you can still make out some of the imagery. On the tombstone above on the left, there is a frontal face with two eyes peering outward surrounded by the bear family. On the tombstone right there is a profile of a face quietly peering upwards towards the upper left corner with a family of birds nestled below.
   As I headed home back to Brooklyn, I stopped at Battery Park to take in the beauty of NYC. As I sat on the bench watching the ferry load up to take folks to the Statue of Liberty I glanced to the left of me to see the Smithsonian Indigenous Museum. I  was amazed by what I had found on the tombstones and thought surely someone in this museum could shed light on what I was seeing.  I thought maybe there had been and indigenous stone mason that had created the tombstones. We can not carbon date stone, so I am always looking for any clue that may provide some temporal sequence of events.
   I explored the museum for some clue to the images etched in so many stones around me. I went to the information desk and asked if there was anyone I could speak too. I was introduced to a very nice person who was willing to look and listen. His immediate response was surprise and excitement. He saw some of what I pointed out. He admitted of knowing the burial site but was very surprised to see the embellishments on the tombstones. He said was eager to get out of work and go see the tombstones for himself. I was able to maintain correspondence with the museum after this encounter. 
     Over the following couple of years I continued to share my findings. The idea I was presenting to the Smithsonian Indigenous museum was the idea of a Bear burials. The sky burial is a well documented funeral practice of exposing the body of the deceased on a platform to be excarnated by birds.  The folks who depended on birds for food and their feathers for decoration and protection saw the sky burial as a way to return what was taken from the bird. The cycle between the human and the bird explains the reference of the of the vulture on the totem stones. If you look back to my first publication I review the iconography of the stone totem pole from Gobekli Tepe . I refer to the life cycle of the bird from egg to fledging to adult and ending with a vulture. Below is the image highlighting the bird cycle on the stone totem pole of Gobekli Tepe. 



   The idea I was presenting to the Smithsonian Indigenous museum was the idea of a Bear burials.  Humans observed bears hibernate in a death like stupor and then resurrect in the spring. During the ice age harvest of bear cloaks for these folks was essential for survival, especially at childbirth. Below I present a photo from the internet of a bear shaman taken at bear lodge at the beginning of the 19th century. This image of bear shaman in his bear cloak provides you with some visualization of the human wearing a bear  cloak.
    To make peace with the bear whose skin was taken, the human body was then bundled in the bear cloak and returned to the bears den. In the spring the bears would wake up hungry and thankfully devour the human remains wrapped in the cloak. Below is a the imagery found on the Gobleki Tepe.
   



    It was a sustainable practice. The more bear burials, the more food for the arousing bear. This would encourage bear to return to the same site knowing that there would be food. Populations ebbed and flowed for hundreds of thousands of years with this arrangement. I observed chapel like stone enclosures where the body would be laid at sites here in Maine. It came together nicely. I have found sites here in Maine. It was serendipitous there was a site of this nature recently discovered at the  end of the red subway line area at the time of my visit to NYC. 






 
 


                                                                                                                                 
  
   
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