Dirt Factory

At many Jewish funerals, mourners each place a handful of dirt onto the casket before it is buried. This act is not merely symbolic; it is considered an actual mitzvah, a good deed, fulfilling the obligation to help bury the dead. The weight of the soil, the thud as it lands, makes the finality of death tangible in a way that words cannot.

It shifts the mourner from observer to participant, from speaking about death to physically sealing it. It is the earth itself that receives the body, and the mourner who delivers it.

In Christian burial rites, the priest often sprinkles dirt onto the coffin while reciting the words, “ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” as recorded in the Book of Common Prayer (1549), drawing on Genesis 3:19 and Ecclesiastes 3:20. This moment collapses biblical creation and bodily death into a single ritual action. The soil is not incidental; it is an active witness, a participant in the soul’s journey out of life. Through it, human transience is made vivid, tactile, and communal.

In Sumerian and Greek mythologies, humans are created from soil or clay, shaped by divine hands. Prometheus forming men from clay, and the Hebrew God shaping Adam from dust, echo each other with startling clarity. The difference is cultural flourish, not fundamental belief. Creation from soil binds divinity to dirt, body to landscape, spirit to substance.

Many Indigenous cultures treat soil not as inert matter but as alive, ancestral, and communicative. In certain Native American ceremonies, handfuls of dust are used in blessings to weave together land, people, and spirit. To take soil in the hand is not to grasp an object but to touch the body of the world. Blessing with earth is relational, an act of direct conversation with land itself.

Even in secular domains, soil carries sacred weight. In ancient Rome, transferring ownership of land required handing over an actual clod of earth, not merely a document. The buyer's and seller’s hands, both marked by the same dirt, enacted a binding trust older than contracts. Soil carried the weight of legitimacy, proof that land was not merely divided by lines but shared through substance.

This old intuition survives into modern life, resurfacing in acts of mourning, honor, and remembrance. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, material and remains from Ground Zero were preserved and interred at memorial sites across the United States. Some of it was buried at the National September 11 Memorial in New York; other samples traveled to military bases, museums, and public monuments. The dirt was treated as relic, carrying memory, sacrifice, and loss in a way no monument alone could express.

When American astronauts first landed on the Moon in 1969, they collected lunar soil, but they also left something behind: a small silicon disk inscribed with goodwill messages from world leaders, embedded into the lunar surface (NASA, Apollo 11 Summary Report). In a sense, humanity offered its own handful of Earth in return for the handfuls of lunar dust they gathered. Later, lunar soil samples were gifted to all fifty U.S. states and over 130 countries. Even beyond our planet, the logic held: soil signifies presence, memory, and belonging.

At the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in 2022, soil from the royal estates was sprinkled onto her coffin, symbolizing her lifelong bond to the land and people of the United Kingdom. It was not enough for her body to be placed in the earth; she was symbolically rejoined to the ground she had ruled and walked.

Military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery sometimes include soil from battlefields where the fallen served (Arlington National Cemetery Funeral Services Guide). Families sometimes arrange for soil from battlefields where the fallen served — from Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, or even Normandy — to be placed with the casket. The gesture speaks across wars and generations, returning warriors not only to American soil but to the very soil of their histories.

In modern wedding ceremonies, some couples incorporate a “unity soil” ritual. This practice, originating from the wedding industry’s adaptations of older unity rituals like the sand ceremony, invites partners to blend soils from meaningful places into a shared vessel, often planting a tree together. It is a ritual of creation rather than closure, rooting new life rather than marking its end. But even here, soil becomes a product, another item packaged into the economy of weddings. Where once soil bound communities and spirits, now it can also be found itemized on a florist's invoice.

Across these ceremonies, ancient and modern, religious and secular, certain themes recur with striking persistence. Soil is not treated as inert background but as active participant—a witness, a carrier of memory, a vessel of transformation. It binds people to land, land to story, story to spirit. In moments of transition—birth, death, migration, covenant—humans turn instinctively to the earth, not out of nostalgia but necessity. Touching soil is a gesture of reckoning: with mortality, with continuity, with the fact that we do not merely walk upon the earth, but belong to it in body and in story.

The soil is not merely where we end up.

It is where we have always been.

Color has always been a slippery thing, prone to argument and misunderstanding.

One person might call a patch of soil “reddish brown,” another might insist it looks more like “rust,” and a third might smile and call it “chocolatey,” each description telling a slightly different story, none of them rigorous enough to carry across a hundred miles of changing landscape.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a painter and educator from Massachusetts named Albert H. Munsell set out to fix that.

He believed that color could be described precisely, not through metaphor or comparison, but by measuring it along three fundamental axes: hue, value, and chroma.

In 1905, he published A Color Notation, proposing a system that treated color as something almost topographical, something you could plot and navigate through a three-dimensional space rather than trap inside loose adjectives and intuition.

For a time, Munsell’s ideas found a home mostly among artists and industrial designers, people concerned with pigment and product.

But in the 1930s, scientists — especially those working with soil — began to notice that the system solved a deeper problem.

The growing enterprise of soil surveying demanded a way to classify and compare samples across vast regions, and the vagaries of language were no longer enough.

Soil color, it turns out, is more than cosmetic.

It is an artifact of the ground’s history, a coded summary of its chemistry, biology, and exposure to the elements.

A deep, vivid red might signal iron oxidation under dry conditions; a pale gray could indicate prolonged saturation and the absence of oxygen; a rich, dark brown or black suggests abundant organic matter, the remnants of countless generations of living things returning to the earth.

If scientists could not agree on how to describe color, they could not reliably map, classify, or understand the soils themselves.

The United States Department of Agriculture, always searching for ways to bring order to natural complexity, recognized the opportunity.

At the center of this adoption was Dorothy Nickerson, a color scientist working within the USDA, who saw in Munsell’s work the precision that field science so badly needed.

Nickerson adapted the Munsell system to the specific demands of soil classification, resulting in the publication of the first official Munsell Soil Color Charts in 1941 — a rugged, practical tool that fit as easily into the hand of a field scientist as into the bureaucracy of federal standards.

With Nickerson’s charts in hand, the color of soil became more than an impression; it became a datapoint, a fixed coordinate in a national map of agriculture, geology, and environmental change.

A field agent in Georgia could describe a sample using the same language as a colleague in Iowa, and the variations between them — subtle shifts from red to yellow, from dark to light — could be tied to real, physical differences: in mineral composition, in drainage, in the long, slow processes of soil formation and decay.

Today, battered copies of the Munsell Soil Color Book still ride along in the trucks of soil scientists, archaeologists, geologists, and foresters, their pages stained and softened by rain, dust, and years of service. Each color chip, labeled with codes like “10YR 5/4,” offers a stable reference point in a world where light and perception change by the minute.

The dirt itself may crumble, the sky may darken, and the words may fail, but thanks to Munsell’s vision and Nickerson’s insistence, the colors endure — quiet, constant witnesses to what the ground has been and what it might still become.