BEYOND DEATH, INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, VIENNA 2–4 MAY 2018

One-day Interdisciplinary Conference funded by HRC (as winner of the HRC Doctoral Fellowship Competition, University of Warwick) Visit the website: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/hrc/confs/body/ On Twitter: @Remains2021 Scope and main objectives The question of corporeality has provoked and challenged critical thinkers across the centuries, and remains the subject of sustained and varied examinations, to which the burgeoning lists of new titles devoted to the body testify. This event intends to tackle the current issue of how bodies are marked, organised and produced as cultural entities that leave traces in imagery after their total or partial material dissolution. The aim is to gather an interdisciplinary network of scholars to explore the ways in which the body, or part of it, is preserved and remembered over time through different aspects of representation, in order to evaluate its cultural impact. The conference's key concepts include: sacralisation/desacralization; the legacy of the body; the body as a relic of a past age; immortality or techniques for enduring posthumous fame/life; remembrance; memory; and commemoration. What is aimed to be explored is then, specifically, the relationship between the body, death and memory, thereby assessing the legacy of bodies. The conference welcomes papers from a broad chronological period and dealing with any geographical area without restrictions. The preservation of bodies/corpses, or parts of them, can be related to various and different cultural manifestations, such as religious beliefs, patriotism, and pledges of love. This event has thus been conceived as fully interdisciplinary, and intends to convene students, PhD candidates, early-career scholars and professors from both the humanities (literature, history of art, history, classical studies, film and media studies) and the social sciences (anthropology, philosophy, sociology, politics, popular culture/folklore studies, medical culture, and history of medicine), and would address various approaches (gender studies, fashion, Körperkultur, the making of the nation). This conference is also meant to reflect upon the importance of remembrance and commemoration; as a consequence, the remains of the body are pertinent to issues such as: the tombs of unknown soldiers, which scatter our cities; the relics of saints and martyrs shielded in our places of worship; and the myriad gendered depictions of dead bodies in visual culture. Perspectives The discussion emerging from the conference should pose a series of questions, such as: how did different cultures depict dead bodies at different times, and how were they understood as important and valuable? In which way is the body of a male hero represented? How does this representation differ from the body of a dead woman? How much is the body important in issues of national identity and popular folklore?

2021

Death can be understood as a socially transformative process which is to be regulated by funerary practices. The material results of these intentional and structured actions – often conceptualized as rituals – are, among others, burial sites, graves and their contents. In this context, objects are often used to support the transfor- mational processes. Material culture can therefore be understood as a form of communication. Its functions and meanings are not static but depend on the context and can form a complex relationship with ideologies and actions. Human remains, too, are a part of this material culture, as they can be used as objects within burial practices and become means of expression. Archaeologically, only the materialization of burial rituals can be recorded by analyzing human remains and other objects found in the context of burials. The corresponding functions and meanings must then be interpreted using historical, ethnological, and sociological analogies. From a religious studies perspective it is possible to perceive how the bodily remains of a deceased person can become the focus not only of veneration or remembrance, but also of self- focused religious development. These studies, however, due to their abundance of options, often neglect the material culture, which is the main focus of archaeological research. An interdisciplinary dialogue between archaeological sciences and religious studies will therefore open opportunities for both sides to learn from each other and come to new perspectives. The aim of this workshop is to look at the significance of objects as they are created in the interaction of human beings and materials. In order to understand the functions and meanings of burial practices and burial sites, objects should be approximated to the physical as well as the social context they are part of. Social sciences and the humanities can witness historical and contemporary burial rites with additional tools, such as narratives and ethnological participation.

The Public Archaeology of Death , 2019

Introducing the ten chapters of the book which each explore different dimensions of the public archaeology of death, this introduction asks: why and how are the archaeologically derived traces of human remains and mortuary monuments "dead relevant"? In other words, how has mortuary archaeology, from catacombs to cremated remains, come to enthral and gain significance in contemporary society, and how does it continue to do so? Considering the diversity of archaeological field investigation, curation and display in museums, contestation and dialogues between archaeologists , stakeholders and descendent communities, and the publications and popular receptions of the archaeological dead in the arts, literature and media, as well as via ancient monuments and historic landscapes, the public archaeology of death is a vibrant field of future research.

When invited to write a keynote article on the contemporary archaeol- ogy of death and burial, I admit that I struggled to find the focus for such a potentially broad and complex theme. The archaeology of death and burial is a dynamic field that long has held, and probably will continue to hold, a central place within archaeology more broadly. This position is demonstrated by the steady stream of large and/or significant volumes on the topic across different academic traditions since the 1970s (e.g. Saxe 1970; Brown 1971; Chapman et al. 1981; O’Shea 1984; Duday & Masset 1987; Anderson Beck 1995; Jensen & Høilund Nielsen 1997; Parker Pearson 1999; Crubézy et al. 2000, Knüsel & Gowland 2009; Tarlow & Stutz 2013). It is also girded by the emergence of bioarchaeology, which studies human remains most commonly from burial contexts (e.g. Buikstra & Anderson Beck 2006; Argawal & Glencross 2011). Despite its prominent role within the wider discipline, burial archaeology faces a series of interesting conceptual challenges, most of which reflect very general intellectual trends in this contemporary moment. When deconstructing the archaeology of death and burial in its current state I note three broad categories of problematic and interesting challenges.

Archaeologists have often taken it for granted that death is a taboo topic in modern society. However, the fear of death hypothesis is contested within the social sciences, so does it still follow that the display of the ancient dead is in some way shameful or unacceptable? In this paper it is argued that death is not taboo and that modern death scholars use archaeological source material as a way to understand the subtlety of the human experience. Funerary archaeology is not a dangerous topic; rather it makes a very real and valuable contribution to modern society, providing one of the few ways that people can experience a corpse and so explore their own mortality and with it their place within the larger human story.

This course is a survey of mortuary archaeology, that is how cultural norms, social relations, belief systems, and ideas about life and death shaped mortuary practices in the past. In this course, we will look at death and the body in terms of ideas about mortality, afterlives, and social identity. We will also address the fact that the dead do not bury themselves, and practices surrounding death do not reflect solely the individual but can tell us about broader social, political, economic, and religious systems.

Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2020

This text comprises a critical discussion of assemblage theory and its application to burial studies. In recent research, burials have been viewed as fluid and indeterminate assemblages that 'become' in varied ways depending on different perceptions (concepts and ideas) and apparatuses (e.g. excavation tools and measuring instruments). The past and the present are thus mixed in potentially ever-new configurations which run the risk of replacing epistemological relativism with ontological fluidity. It is argued here that the hypothetical mutability of burial assemblages can be reduced significantly by addressing the varying speed and degree of the involved processes of integration and disintegration. By doing this, the main focus is shifted to the animacy of such processes and how they may have been understood and utilized in burials. Using both general and specific examples, it is argued that cremation burials can be studied as carefully compiled amalgamations that utilize the properties and animacies of different materialities to deal with death, corpses and the afterlife. This is a proof, you can find the final version here: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0959774320000116 It is Open Access.