Category: Research
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A Hundred Hungry Graves
By Sarah Briest The recent excavation of an early 17th-century plague pit in London led archaeologists to somewhat unexpected conclusions. Whereas contemporary written accounts highlight the horrors and indignities of plague burial, the new-found site indicated an unforeseen degree of care and respect bestowed on the bodily remains of plague victims. The discovery was made…
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Beyond death Conference 2 – 4 May 2018
Exploring the Uses of Dead Bodies, Funerary Objects, and Burial Spaces through Time This conference, which is one of the outputs of the HERA UP-funded project DEEPDEAD (Deploying the Dead: Artefacts and Human Bodies in Socio-Cultural Transformations), explores the uses and meanings of dead bodies, objects and burial spaces over long periods of time. As…
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Deploying the Dead II: Dead Bodies and Social Transformations – Call for Papers
Estella Weiss-Krejci Sebastian Becker Ladislav Šmejda This session is the second part of “Deploying the Dead” which was successfully launched at last year’s EAA in Maastricht. It explores the question of how the bodies of the long-dead and the material artefacts associated with them effect the living. We pursue an interdisciplinary methodology equally focused on…
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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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The DEEPDEAD session at the EAA’s annual conference in Maastricht: a summary
By Sebastian Becker Maastricht is surely known as one of Europe’s most sought after tourist destinations, but this summer it also became a meeting point for archaeologists from Europe and beyond. The occasion was the annual conference of the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA), an event that happens every summer in a different city. The…
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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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EAA Maastricht – Call for Papers
Deploying the Dead Interdisciplinary Dialogues Session 402 EAA Maastricht August 30 – September 2 2017 Organizers: Estella Weiss-Krejci, Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences Sebastian Becker, Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences Ladislav Šmejda, Czech University of Life Sciences, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, Department of Ecology,…
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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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Why the dead are so loud in Bosnia
by Miriam Edlich-Muth 21st century excavations of dead bodies usually only impinge on the public consciousness in the context of violent crime or atrocities. My area of the DEEPDEAD project will be dealing in part with the ways in which narratives of violence have been attached to human remains in the description of medieval relics.…
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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,…