About

This project began in early Summer 2023, and aims to catalogue the corpus of Scotland's 17th and 18th century gravestones. Creating 3D scans and collating older scholarship which is often out of print or hard to find, SMMP's aims are two fold - preserve these stones for the future in a way which is low cost and low intervention, and also create a resource for scholars of Early Modern Scotland, ethnology, death studies, and other associated fields. 

Previous gravestone surveys have set parameters based on age, for example some studies only include stones from before 1707, while others have selected stones based on aesthetic merit. This project includes any stone, from before 1800, where symbols of mortality, immortality or trade are present. These are referred to as the memento mori type. 

The rural parishes of East Lothian have formed the initial territory for research; easy to reach from Edinburgh and rich in their surviving collections of funerary monuments, there already exists a considerable degree of literature covering the county's graveyards, collated here.

This project would not have been possible without the help of many people, in particular Michał Niewdana, whose technical support has been of enormous help.