One of the many memorials at the site of the Station nightclub fire, in which 100 people died. An exhibit at the University of Rhode Island chronicles the history of the memorials.

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

SOUTH KINGSTOWN — When she began studying The Station site six summers ago, anthropologist Randi Scott expected that the memorials created after the nightclub fire that killed 100 people would be abandoned. She assumed winter would set in and the elements would discourage the grieving. Time would move on.

But greater forces than weather were at work. As her research continued through the months and into years, Scott chronicled an extraordinary transformation. Simple became ornate. Relative anonymity became highly personalized. And the continuing evolution of the memorials, Scott has concluded, signifies positive changes in the larger culture.

Scott hopes to prompt contemplation of those changes with her exhibit of Station photographs that opened last week at the University of Rhode Island. Scott, 55, an East Greenwich resident, graduated this year from URI with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology. Her exhibit is free and open to all.

“For very, very long periods of time in our society, when somebody died, it was always very private — for family, friends, a very small group of people,” Scott says as she walks a visitor through the exhibit.

But contemporary mass casualties, Scott maintains, whether of accidental, natural or malevolent cause, evoke a new and potentially beneficial response. The Station memorials in West Warwick, she says, speak not only of the need to memorialize the dead and the injured — but the desire to protest the senseless violence that typifies the age. Consider it a sort of grass-roots call for renewed appreciation of shared humanity.

“I think it’s a need to bring attention to some of the things that are happening,” says Scott, who has also studied the “spontaneous memorials” that emerged after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre and the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. These memorials are a relatively new phenomenon, Scott says; nothing of the sort, for example, appeared after the 1942 Cocoanut Grove fire, in Boston, that sent nearly 500 to their graves.

Scott does not assign blame for the West Warwick fire, in February 2003, that killed 100 and injured more than 200. Whatever the cause, it was horrifically senseless, she says.

“In this particular case, many of the families and just the community in general feel that this type of tragedy should not have happened.”

Media accounts and Web sites, of course, bring reminders of the tragedy. So do visits to individual graves. But the power of the memorials on Cowesett Avenue, Scott says, cannot be equaled. There, at the place where many believe the souls of their loved ones left the earth, a stranger can almost come to know the departed.

Scott began her continuing explorations of the site in the summer of 2003, a few months after the earliest memorials had been cleared away. It was then that someone built 100 crosses and erected them along the footprint of the doomed building.

“As you can see, they’re very simple,” she says, pointing to early photographs in her exhibit.

That first summer turned to fall and the cold came.

“We figured that after the winter of 2003, that this would all disappear,” Scott says.

Instead, as the months and years passed, grieving relatives and friends built new crosses, some taller than a person, and demarcated plots for their loved ones with stones and bricks. They wrote names and dates of birth and death — the same date of death, Feb. 20, 2003, for all but the handful who died later in hospitals. They left photographs, notes, cards, jewelry, hats, clothing, butterfly figurines, statues, guitars, rosary beads, candles, beer bottles, wind chimes and balloons.

“You can actually look at some of these things and you can tell what these people were into,” Scott says. “You become personally involved with the person who died even though you never knew them.”

As a scientist, Scott finds unique value in chronicling the evolution of the site, which is the subject of professional articles and a book chapter she has written.

“In archaeology and anthropology, you usually have to look at the past to make judgments or try to figure out how or why a culture changed,” she says. “I believe that we are watching a culture change as it’s happening and I’m getting the opportunity to document it.” It’s an opportunity, she says, made possible by her mentor, Brown University anthropologist Richard A. Gould, who has also studied the site.

A mother of three, Scott says she was inspired to investigate mass-casualty sites by her desire after 9/11 to help family and friends of those who died. She donated money, she says, but wanted to do more. And so, a career path appeared.

She considers her Station research a “gift to the families” of the dead and injured.

“These people will never be forgotten.”

Nor will their lives be wasted, Scott says.

“This is going to be a catalyst for people to start becoming more involved with other people. We’re tired of the violence, we’re tired of the killing, we’re tired of everybody being so upset because you’re afraid to do anything.

“These memorials are going to help change those attitudes. With more and more people being killed in these ways and people coming together, it’s going to start branching out and changing the way we look at ourselves as humans.”

Except for the boundaries between the memorials, there are no divisions at the scorched place in West Warwick, Scott says. Anyone can visit.

“At The Station, there’s no such thing as race, creed, color, religion or nationality. Nothing. There are no boundaries. And if we can extend that kind of thinking past a tragedy, it would make it much better for all of us.”

The exhibit at URI’s Fine Arts Center, 105 Upper College Rd., Kingston, is open through June 26; Tuesdays and Thursdays from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., Wednesdays and Fridays from 4 to 8 p.m. and Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.

More on Scott’s work and exhibit is at www.uri.edu/news/releases/index.php?id=4943

gwmiller@projo.com