Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction Dead Bodies, Funerary Objects, and Burial Spaces Through Texts and Time

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 as incommensurable 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.

Chapter 1. Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Agency: An Introduction.- Chapter 2. Visitors, Usurpers, and Renovators: Glimpses from the History of Egyptian Sepulchral Monuments.- Chapter 3. Literary Tombs and Archaeological Knowledge in the Twelfth-Century ‘Romances of Antiquit.- Chapter 4. Anachronic Entanglements: Archaeological Traces and the Event in Beowulf.- Chapter 5. The Distant Past of a Distant Past …: Perception and Appropriation of Deep History during the Iron Ages in Northern Germany (Pre-Roman Iron Age, Roman Iron Age, and Migration Period).- Chapter 6. In Search of an Acceptable Past: History, Archaeology, and ‘Looted’ Graves in the Construction of the Frankish Early Middle Ages.- Chapter 7. From Saint to Anthropological Specimen: The Transformation of the Alleged Skeletal Remains of Saint Erik.- Chapter 8. Dissolving Subjects in Medieval Reliquaries and Twentieth-Century Mass Graves.- Chapter 9. The Graves When They Open, Will Be Witnesses Against Thee: Mass Burial and the Agency of the Dead in Thomas Dekker’s Plague Pamphlets.- Chapter 10. Shakespearean Exhumations: Richard III, The Princes in the Tower, and the Prehistoric Romeo and Juliet.- Chapter 11. Cemetery Enchanted, encore: Natural Burial in France and Beyond.- Chapter 12. The Cemetery and Ossuary at Sedlec near Kutná Hora: Reflections on the Agency of the Dead.

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 in Central 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).