AIC's 47th Annual Meeting

Grove Street Cemetery (GSC) was established with initiative of James Hillhouse and 31 other citizens of New Haven New Haven in 1796. Being one of the earliest burial grounds with a planned layout the cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in October 1997 and since 2000 it is a National Historic Landmark. GSC was designed by New Haven architect Henry Austin with a geometric design and is divided into rectangular plots. In addition to the notable burials like Noah Webster, also known as “Father of American Scholarship and Education", Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin, and Charles Goodyear, the inventor of vulcanized rubber, the cemetery officially open to all and provided a special section for slaves. GSC has experienced difficulties in terms of conservation despite the renovation and maintenance attempts on the memorials have been made. In order to make these efforts more efficient, it is first necessary to learn and understand what has deteriorated, deteriorating at which speed and up to what extent. This study focuses on the assessment of the state of preservation of stone memorials on GSC in order to register and define a baseline for future condition monitoring studies as well as implementation of preservation measures by using 3D modelling and mapping of visual weathering forms according to the ICOMOS International Scientific Committee for Stone (ISCS) Illustrated glossary and ultrasonic velocity (UPV) measurements for the evaluation of the level of deterioration wherever possible. Furthermore, digitization of the memorials and evaluation of the stone deterioration in the cemetery were used as a teaching/learning tool for the Sustainable Preservation of Cultural Heritage course since 2016 offered by Yale University IARU Global Summer School and Anthropology Department. Each term, students select a group project at the beginning of the class. ‘Digitization of the memorials in Grove Street Cemetery and their condition assessment’ is one of the term projects, at the end of the term they were expected to propose a conservation strategy with the help of the conservation approaches they have learnt during the class and their findings on the memorials of the GSC. The students of diverse backgrounds and different levels of education experience the ‘learning by doing’ by taking part in this monitoring deterioration project. In this way they practice the conservation theories in Built Heritage Preservation in addition to different theoretical understanding of Sustainable Preservation of Cultural Heritage. The results and their integrated analysis of 3D models, 2D and RTI images, UPV measurements together with the archival and historic information collected were brought together and analyzed with the help of CHER-Ob - software that is developed by Yale Computer Sciences in collaboration with Yale Institute for the preservation of Cultural Heritage (IPCH) to define a baseline for any future conservation attempts.