Mary Goose’s life and whether or not she was real or made up is a mystery still yet to be solved,
but I am here to use archaeological methods to explain the chronology of her life and death.
Using relative dating techniques, I hope to survey the ground where she is buried and gain
some answers to her death. Stratigraphy will help reveal the succession of layers and hopefully
excavate some artifacts around the area. This will help me gain some insights into a possible
time of burial. Other methods I could try are typological sequence and seriation, which are
useful because we compare different styles of headstones at different times in history to come
up with a timeline. To determine Mary’s Goose’s death, I believe that using a combination of
seriation and stratigraphy will be the best option. I can use stratigraphy to search for artifacts
within the different layers to reveal their relative sequence and seriation. This will give me
historical evidence as to why that specific headstone was assigned to her gravesite.
1. Absolute dating techniques would not work with this site since they are used to date
much older artifacts. This method would be used for radiocarbon dating, potassium
dating, uranium-series, fission tracking, etc. Only with these would this method work.
Methods used for recent artifacts are particular and tend to have other implications like
thermoluminescence dating, which only works if pottery is present.
2. I believe that moving the headstone would significantly impact my dating techniques
because I would not be testing the ground where her body is. Consider it being a
mismarked grave; what if I did all this research and background based on Mary Goose
and come to find out that it is in an area that was recently planted, my research would
be misrepresented and wrong. The only information I would be able to use is the
headstone itself; the ground wouldn’t be related to anything involving her life or a
timeline in which she may have been buried. Studying the headstone isn’t as effective as
studying the actual ground because we will only be given the components of the
gravestone’s timeline, not the existing site itself.