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Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!

Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!


Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.

Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.

Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.

West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
Bag of skulls confirmed as human in China PDF Print E-mail
Written by DeadGirl   
Sunday, 09 April 2006
BEIJING, April 6 (UPI) -- Police in China's western Gansu province confirmed Wednesday that 121 skulls discovered in a plastic bag last month were human, state media reported.

The heads, discovered by a herdsman on March 26 in a remote mountainous area of Gansu's Tianzhu Tibetan Autonomous County, had been hacked from the bodies, according to an unnamed source within the Ministry of Public Security quoted by Xinhua.

Officials in the provincial capital Lanzhou dispatched a forensics team including DNA specialists and anthropologists to investigate last Sunday after local authorities reported the skulls, in varying stages of decomposition, belonged to monkeys.

The bag contained both male and female heads of all ages, old and young, according Professor Chen Shixian from Lanzhou University, one of the experts brought in by police.

Chen dismissed rumors that the skulls had been dumped by hospitals after doctors removed the brains for medical research. He said the decapitations showed no sign of medical expertise. Investigators have not revealed the ethnicity of the dead.

One possible explanation for the mystery is the Tibetan practice known as "sky burial." Corpses are dismembered and put on raised wooden platforms for vultures to devour the flesh. The dried bones are either crushed or used for handicrafts.

United Press International has seen Tibetan goods made with human skulls sold in marketplaces ranging from Beijing to Lhasa, capital of Tibet.

http://www.upi.com/InternationalIntelligence/view.php?StoryID=20060406-022048-3295r
 
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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries

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“Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.”

- R. Buckminster Fuller 1895-1

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