Camin O’Brien in his Guidelines for the Care, Conservation and Recording of Historic Graveyards emphasises the need for an annual maintenance regime and he recommends that the motto to adopt when it comes to grave
I first encountered a GPS receiver on Professor William O’Brien’s excavations at Ross Island in Killarney, Co. Kerry sometime in the early 1990s.
The number one conservation technique which a community group can employ in their local historic graveyard is to record the memorial inscriptions. The relentless action of the elements is slowly eroding all the stone memorials.
From the outset the Historic Graves project has been about more then simply recording raw data such as location information, photographs and inscriptions from historic graveyards and the memorials contained within.
'On the other hand, they are relics of real people. We should treat them with respect – because we are human, and they are physical links with humans. '
Some interesting thoughts by Mike Pitts on the current debate in the UK about the reburial of human skeletal remains assemblages.
