Throughout this course, I’ve been intrigued by the methods of commemoration we’ve looked at in how they interact with their audiences. While some monuments bear inscriptions that assertively call out to an onlooker to stop and mourn the dead they commemorate, others speak inwardly to the dead themselves. While some, like the Ancient Romans, strategically located monuments by the sides of roads so that a great quantity of people might stop and honor their dead, others reserved monuments for private spaces to be honored in the home. While great mound monuments to honor the dead near Troy could be seen by strangers from miles away, funerary stelai in Greece beseeched a potential viewer to come closer and read the names of the commemorated. Throughout all of these methods of commemoration, there is a differing level of active engagement being encouraged by the viewer.

In this site, I examine three widely differing forms of commemoration, looking for the different and similar ways they court an audience. From the Bowdoin Art Museum, I examine a sparsely detailed inscription on an ancient Greek stele from the 2nd century BCE, looking back into Greece’s deep history of stele inscriptions for possible interpretations. From Bowdoin’s campus, I delve into the story of the Thorndike Oak, a living and mortal monument to one of the college’s first graduates who barely lived past his graduation, but whose oak lived over 150 years past his death. Finally, from my home county, I examine a scenic roadside vista’s understated Confederate monument, dedicated to a conservationist who helped successfully preserve the county’s natural beauty but unsuccessfully fought for a vast expansion of the international slave trade.

While all of these monuments come from strikingly different areas, eras, and cultures, they all give a similar lesson about memory and audience. By thinking deeply about how actively methods of commemoration encourage a viewer to engage– and thinking about who the intended viewer is for any given commemoration– we can gain deeper insights into how cultures used commemoration to translate certain values to themselves and to onlookers.