Overview
- Is highly topical and offers a multi-regional focus
- Advances the dialogue between (bio) archaeologists, literary scientists, and social anthropologists
- Takes a diachronic approach; examining cases from prehistory to the present
- This is an open access book
Part of the book series: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory (BST)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
- mortuary archaeology
- dead-body politics
- memory studies
- agency of the dead
- archaeological theory
- literary studies
- medieval relics
- mass graves
- burial monuments
- prehistoric graves
- History of Egyptian Sepulchral Monuments
- Iron Age in Northern Central Europe
- Historic Sources about the Uses of the Dead
- Literary Tombs in the Twelfth Century
- Archaeological Traces in Beowulf
- National Identity through Merovingian Burials
- Skeletal Remains of Saint Erik
- Dissolving Subjects in Medieval Reliquaries
- Shakespearean Exhumations
- Open access
About this book
In the present as in the past, the dead have been deployed to promote visions of identity, as well as ostensibly wider human values. Through a series of case studies from ancient Egypt through prehistoric, historic, and present-day Europe, this book discusses what is constant and what is locally and historically specific in our ways of interacting with the remains of the dead, their objects, and monuments. Postmortem interaction encompasses not only funerary rituals and intergenerational engagement with forebears, but also concerns encounters with the dead who died centuries and millennia ago.
Drawing from a variety of disciplines such as archaeology, bioarchaeology, literary studies, ancient Egyptian philology, and sociocultural anthropology, this volume provides an interdisciplinary account of the ways in which the dead are able to transcend temporal distances and engender social relationships. Until quite recently, literary sciences and archaeology were generally regarded asincommensurable in their aims, methodologies, and source material. Although archaeologists and literary critics have been increasingly willing to borrow concepts and terminology from the other discipline, this book is one examples of a genuinely collaborative endeavor.This is an open access book.Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Estella Weiss-Krejci is an archaeologist and social anthropologist. She received a PhD and a venia docendi from the University of Vienna. Her research interests include ancient Maya water management and mortuary behavior, and dead-body politics in prehistoric, medieval, and post-medieval Europe. She has been a recipient of grants awarded by the Austrian Science Fund, the Portuguese Science and Technology Fund, and the Fulbright Commission. Her research results have been published in peer reviewed international journals and edited books. From 2016 to 2019 she was the Austrian PI of the HERA / EU Horizon 2020 DEEPDEAD project (Deploying the Dead: Artefacts and Human Bodies in Socio-Cultural Transformations).
Sebastian Becker gained a first-class undergraduate degree in Archaeology & Anthropology from the University of Cambridge. As part of an EU-funded research project, he completed a successful PhD, also at the University of Cambridge, focusing on later prehistoric art inCentral Europe. His research took him to France and, more recently, Austria, where he has been researching the uses and re-use of (pre-)historic bodies as part of the HERA / EU Horizon 2020 DEEPDEAD project (2016–2019). He currently lives in Berlin.Philip Schwyzer is Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Exeter. He received his BA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. Interested in links between literature and archaeology, he has led interdisciplinary projects including ‘Speaking with the Dead’ (2011–2014), ‘The Past in its Place’ (2012–2016), and the HERA / EU Horizon 2020 DEEPDEAD project (2016–2019). His books include ‘Shakespeare and the Remains of Richard III’ (2013), and ‘Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature’ (2007).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction
Book Subtitle: Dead Bodies, Funerary Objects, and Burial Spaces Through Texts and Time
Editors: Estella Weiss-Krejci, Sebastian Becker, Philip Schwyzer
Series Title: Bioarchaeology and Social Theory
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03956-0
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2022
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-031-03955-3Published: 24 June 2022
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-031-03958-4Published: 24 June 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-031-03956-0Published: 23 June 2022
Series ISSN: 2567-6776
Series E-ISSN: 2567-6814
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XII, 317
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Archaeology, Biological and Physical Anthropology, Literary History