Financial conditions directly affected decisions regarding those materials selected to mark the deceased as well. While the form of gravestones slowly evolved from large monuments to smaller flush markers during the late 1800s and early 1900s, they collectively experienced a pronounced shift during the 1920s, reflecting American responses to the devastating human losses of World War I and the 1918–19 influenza pandemic. Gradual changes in the American way of death since Victorian times underwent punctuated shifts in mortuary attitudes, commemoration practices, and funerary materials following moments of extreme social and economic duress. Social and economic factors significantly influenced grave-marker choice in southern California cemeteries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The presence of decorated coffins at the Uxbridge Almshouse Burial Ground, as at other cemeteries associated with socioeconomically marginal groups, also suggests that archaeological interpretations that unquestioningly equate socioeconomic status directly to coffin embellishment need to be reviewed in light of sociohistorical developments relating to mass consumption and popular culture in industrializing America. Archaeological recovery of mass-produced coffin hardware and glass view plates, from cemeteries spanning a range of socioeconomic contexts, demonstrates that certain aspects of popular culture were so pervasive as to find expression, albeit dilute, at even the lowest level of society. The appearance of mass-produced coffin hardware in archaeological contexts throughout North America may be linked with this popular movement. Called “the beautification of death,” this Romantic movement idealized death and heaven through ideological, behavioral, and material transformations. A popular cultural trend developed in late 18th- and 19th-century American mortuary practices.
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