Alternative Memorials: Ghost Bikes

This entry will focus on alternative twenty-first century Canadian memorial practices and how they can relate to the archaeological record.

 Canada is a conglomeration of multiple cultures, as such there are various mortuary rituals that allow people to grieve for their deceased loved ones in an extremely personal way. After googling various memorial practices I came upon a PDF book by Robert Tobler called “Alternative Memorials: Death and Memory in Contemporary America.” In this book Tobler examines unique memorial practices such as the creation of Myspace memorial pages, tattoos, and ghost bikes as methods of grieving. I have often heard and seen the first two methods of commemoration and memorial practices but I had never heard of Ghost Bikes before. According to Tobler, ghost bikes are found “at the sites of fatal bicycle-automobile collisions,” (pp. 4 Tobler).

Putting Todler’s book aside, I began looking up images of ghost bikes on google images and discovered that ghost bikes are beautiful bicycles, painted white and decorated with flowers, cards, and photographs. These memorials can certainly be temporary but let’s just say in a future archaeological  excavation one of these bicycles is uncovered, with the residue of flowers, cards, and the metal of the bike still contains white paint, containing an engraved name of the deceased and the day of death.

Ghost bikes are just one of the amazing examples of contemporary temporary memorial artifacts, that reveal our society as commemorating the dead in a public way, preserving the life of the living by constructing an artifact that resembles how the person died, and or what the person loved to do while alive.

Moreover, temporary memorial sites such as ghost bikes, provide ways for the living to grieve by placing flowers on the bicycle, notes, photographs. For example, I’m sure the craftsmanship of the bicycles can reveal a lot about the economic status of the deceased individuals.

 Websites:

I wrote this blog rather quickly, because I won't have time to write all weekend, I'll come back and edit my citations later.

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/10821/Dobler_Robert_ma2010su.pdf?sequence=1

“ALTERNATIVE MEMORIALS: DEATH AND MEMORY IN CONTEMPORARY

AMERICA” by Robert Dobler.

http://www.ghostbikes.org/