Category: Memorial
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Two Cheers for Iconoclasm: Why Pulling Down Monuments Gives Us More To Remember
The statue of the merchant and slave-trader Edward Colston has been pulled from its plinth in Bristol. In Oxford there are renewed calls for the image of Cecil Rhodes to come down. Across the southern United States, monuments to Confederate soldiers and politicians seem to be falling in greater numbers every day, some by order…
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Progress of the DEEPDEAD project featured recently in European media
Ladislav Smejda was recently interviewed by Deutschlandfunk a German Radio station which was an exciting way to let the wider public know about wider ecological implications of the Research Project. The interview discusses how death can be both helpful and harmful to the environment due to the chemical components in our bodies being released…
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Human burials affect the environment for millennia
Ladislav Smejda “Every puff of wind … may blow the father into the sons eyes… Every grain of dust that flies here, is a piece of a Christian…” John Donne, English poet and cleric (1572-1631) People have always been intrigued by what happens to their soul and mortal remains after death. The material part of…
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St. Servatius and the Saxons (again)
By Miriam Edlich-Muth Recently I attended the ‘Parchment, Paper and Pixels’ conference in Maastricht. Set under the glorious arches of the former Franciscan monastery that houses the Regional Historical Centre of Limburg the topics of the conference skirted both the material and the ephemeral. Several papers addressed the digital strategies by which the gap between…
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Shakespearean Exhumations: The Neolithic Romeo and Juliet
In my first public presentation of DEEPDEAD research, I gave a paper at the British Shakespeare Association conference in Hull, UK (October 2016), on “Shakespearean Exhumations.” Here’s a snippet of the talk: In February 2007, a team of Italian archaeologists led by Elena Menotti announced a remarkable discovery. Digging in a Neolithic necropolis in Valdaro,…