Study Serious academic study of early puritan funerary art is a relatively new field. The historian and photographer Harriette Forbes, working with the historian Ernest Caulfield in Massachusetts during the 1920s, was the first to study the subject and amassed the first significant library of photographs and an expansive catalog of 16th century graves. Her book Gravestones of Early New England and the Men Who Made Them, 1653-1800 classified and interpret the artifacts in the context of the dominant religious and cultural influences of their times. The influential puritan minister, author, and pamphleteer Cotton Mather observed in 1693 how "the stones in this wilderness are already grown so witty as to speak". Modern scholars take a more circumspect view, in that most of the early carvers were often amateurs, and although they had basic understandings of iconography, their style and language evolved in a setting cut off from European trends, or a coherent, internal, written discourse. The historian Richard Meyer largely agrees with Mather's claim, and notes how the path of study of these early graveyards understood that such artifacts, "through a variety of complex and often interrelated manifestations, establish patterns of communication (and even dynamic interaction) with those who use or view them". The next major publication was Allen Ludwig's 1966 book Graven Images: New England Stone Carving and its Symbols, 1650-1815, although it tended to focus on describing specific examples, rather than present broad overviews or analysis. Reflecting the density of surviving examples, in 2006, the art historian James Blachowicz produced a catalog of 8000 stones and 713 individual burial grounds. He lists some 1300 stones that are signed or have been documented, and made a significant contribution to the methodology used to attribute headstones to individual carvers. In particular he identified 60 sets of typefaces, provided a detailed overview of how styles of representing letters, numbers and symbols could be used to group headstones by their carvers. Footnotes References Citations Sources Benes, Peter; Montague Benes; Jane. Puritan Gravestone Art II. Boston, MA: Boston University, 1978 Dethlefsen, Edwin; Deetz, James. "Death's Heads, Cherubs, and Willow Trees: Experimental Archaeology in Colonial Cemeteries", American Antiquity, 1966. pp. 502–510 Eriquez, Christina. Our History In Stone: The New England Cemetery Dictionary. lulu, 2010. Garvan, Anthony. "The New England Plain Style". Comparative Studies in Society and History, volume 3, no. 1, 1960. Gilson, William. "Stone Faces". New England Review, Vol. 30, No. 4,