Professor Harold Mytum will be giving a lecture with slides entitled ‘Beyond Names and Dates’ this will be held in the Darley Memorial Hall in Lastingham.

Many people enjoy reading the inscriptions on gravestones, and most have been recorded by family and local history societies, but the material aspects of these monuments are largely ignored. This talk will encourage you to see the many ways in which the monuments can tell us more about the culture and beliefs of those who commissioned and made them. They comprise an irreplaceable resource of local heritage value that should be recorded, managed, protected, and interpreted.
After the lecture, you will never look at a churchyard in the same way again!

Harold Mytum is professor of archaeology at the University of Liverpool with research interests that include above- and below-ground historic mortuary evidence (seventeenth to twentieth centuries) in Britain and Ireland, and diasporic communities in North America and Australia. His books include Recording and Analysing Graveyards and Mortuary Monuments and Burial Grounds of the Historic Period, and his Kirkdale Lecture monograph is soon to appear, with the title The rise of popular churchyard commemoration: Kirkdale and Ryedale in their national and international contexts.