Abstract
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 literature, 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. In this introduction, we highlight some unifying aspects of this book.
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1.1 Introduction
On 3 April 2021, the city of Cairo witnessed a lavish nighttime event in which 18 mummified kings and four queens of ancient Egypt were paraded in custom-built shiny vehicles from their old home at the Egyptian Museum to the new National Museum of Egyptian Civilization. The convoy, filmed by the Egyptian state television and broadcast live to a worldwide audience,Footnote 1 showcased the glory and beauty of ancient Egyptian civilization (Abu Zaid, 2021; Hussein, 2021). This parade of the dead formed an antithesis to the clandestine mass transport of coronavirus victims in the city of Bergamo just over a year earlier, on 18 March 2020. Loaded into camouflaged military trucks, the corpses were taken out of town under the cover of night because the local crematorium could no longer handle the rising number of victims of the pandemic.Footnote 2 This incident caused a worldwide shock after a cell phone snapshot and several videos of the convoy had been published on the Internet—a cruel realization that all are not equal in death (Battistini, 2020; MacGuill, 2020). While the kings and queens of ancient EgyptFootnote 3 were welcomed into their new home by the Egyptian president, the deceased residents of Bergamo did not even receive a proper funeral for fear of a deadly virus.
The circumstances that prompted these two dead-body convoys are in polar opposition to each other, as were emotions and reactions. We have chosen these two recent examples as a starting point for this introduction because they illustrate how diverse the manifestations of postmortem interaction can truly be. Postmortem interaction not only encompasses mourning and funerary rituals and the veneration of ancestors (Bloch, 1971; Hertz, 1960; Hill & Hageman, 2016; Metcalf & Huntington, 1991; Rakita et al., 2005; van Gennep, 1960) but can imply the handling and disposal of corpses in the absence of proper funerary ritual (Crossland, 2009a; Robben, 2000; Weiss-Krejci, 2013), as well as encounters with bodies that have been dead for decades, centuries, and millennia (Bartlett, 2013; Klevnäs et al., 2021; Parker Pearson et al., 2005; Stavrakopoulou, 2010; Verdery, 1999; Williams & Giles, 2016). Disrupting chronological time and collapsing temporal distance, the dead have the capacity to emerge into the limelight anytime and anywhere, whether they were buried for good or never given a proper burial, regardless of the circumstances of death, their premortem social status, whether famous individual persons or an anonymous collective.
The past two decades alone offer numerous examples of celebrated but also controversial encounters with these reemergent long-dead: the removal of Francisco Franco’s remains from his mausoleum outside of Madrid and reburial at a city cemetery (Taladrid, 2019); the conflict over the burial place of Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe of the Sac and Fox Nation (Arnold, 2014, p. 524); the exhumation of the last Romanov tsar and tsarina at St. Petersburg for the purpose of DNA analysis (Katz, 2018); the reburial of the Irish rebel and nationalist Thomas Kent in Cork (O’Connell, 2015); the finding of fragmentary bones belonging to Lisa Gherardini (Leonardo’s Mona Lisa) in a tomb in Florence (Killgrove, 2015); the discovery of the remains of the English King Richard III in Leicester and the controversies over the appropriate site and manner of his reburial (Chap. 10); the reopening of the shrine and renewed osteological analysis of Saint Erik of Sweden at Uppsala (Chap. 7); the investigation and reburial of the remains of Edith of England at Magdeburg (Meller et al., 2012); and the bioarchaeological attention to the remains of Charlemagne, the unrivalled symbol of European unity and integration (Schleifring et al., 2019).
Some long-dead have been drawn into violent conflicts as the objects of destructive assault or of daring rescue. In 2015, Turkey sent ground forces into Syria to retrieve the remains of Suleyman Shah , whose tomb was one of many targeted by the Islamic State (Girit, 2015). In its well-publicized assaults on tombs and shrines in Iraq and Syria, from that of the Biblical Jonah in Mosul (Samuel et al., 2017) to the mausoleum of Saddam Hussein (Toppa, 2015), ISIS struck a tender nerve well outside its immediate area of operation.
In some countries, celebrated exhumations have occurred against the backdrop of campaigns to recover the bodies of the less famous dead. Calls for the exhumation and identification of victims of civil conflicts, wars, and genocide have intensified over the past decades (Mark, 2010; Renshaw, 2013a, b; Robben, 2000; see also Chap. 8). After almost half a century of demanding the repatriation of all of their ancestors (Fforde, 2004) and three decades after the implementation of NAGPRA in the US (Daehnke & Lonetree, 2011, p. 90; Parker Pearson, 2000, pp. 171–176; Watkins, 2013, p. 697), returning anonymous human remains from colonial collections to their indigenous owners has now become a global practice (Fforde et al., 2020). In an apparent paradoxical turn, as campaigns continue to remove sets of human remains from public display for repatriation and reburial, public fascination with the dead appears to be unbroken (Buikstra, 2019a, b; Williams & Giles, 2016).
As human remains seemingly excite extraordinary media interest in the digital age, the prehistoric dead have not been spared from these developments (Jenkins, 2016; Redfern & Fibiger, 2019; Robbins Schug et al., 2019; Sayer & Walter, 2016; Watkins, 2013, pp. 698–700). Some even have turned into emblems of contemporary cultural values. In the UK, the 2002 discovery of the Amesbury Archer, a richly furnished Bell Beaker grave containing the remains of a man, and the oxygen isotope analysis of his teeth pointing to his origin in Central Europe, awoke the public imagination to issues of migration.Footnote 4 A pair of embracing Neolithic skeletons—the so-called ‘Lovers of Valdaro ’—unearthed near Mantua, Italy in 2007 was greeted in the international media as an emblem of undying romantic love (Geller, 2017, pp. 1–2; see Chap. 10). Another pair of skeletons from a Late Antique grave known as the ‘Lovers of Modena’ sparked a debate about homosexuality in the past (Mason, 2019), as the skeletons were identified as belonging to two men (Lugli et al., 2019), and a male skeleton found in a Czech Corded Ware grave equipped with ‘female’ artifacts was hailed as a “gay caveman”Footnote 5 and “5,000-year-old ‘transgender’ skeleton”Footnote 6 (cf. Geller, 2017, pp. 11–12).
1.2 Staking Out the Research Field
When we speak of interaction with ‘the dead’ we refer not only to corpses, mummies, bones, and cremains. The dead can exist in various material and immaterial forms: as coffins, urns, funerary monuments, tombstones, statues, effigies, masks, paintings, photos, and audiovisual records like sound recordings and film; in oral histories, books, and house and street names; in places where they once lived, died, or were (re)buried; in objects believed to be associated with the deceased; in the soil; in virtual sites on the Internet; and in the imagination. Interaction with the dead can take place ‘face to face’ or over long distances, mediated by tangible or intangible agents. As a consequence, the study of postmortem interaction is related to a vast field of interconnected research strands: dying, care, and death (Das & Han, 2016; Farman, 2020; Green, 2008; Laqueur, 2015; Robben, 2018; Troyer, 2020); memory and commemoration (Hallam & Hockey, 2001; Jones, 2007; Koselleck, 2002; Williams, 2006); postmortem agency (Crandall & Martin, 2014; Crossland, 2017; Harper, 2010); bodies and embodiment (Hamilakis et al., 2002; Houston et al., 2006; Scheper-Hughes & Lock, 1987; Sofaer, 2006); personhood, ontologies, and assemblages (Alberti, 2016; Carr, 2021; Fahlander, 2020; Fowler, 2004, 2013; Harrison-Buck & Hendon, 2018); emotion and politics (Ahmed, 2004; Mark, 2010; Stavrakopoulou, 2010; Tarlow, 2012; Verdery, 1999); formation processes, object biographies, and object networks (Appadurai, 1986; Knappett, 2011; Meskell, 2004; Schiffer, 2010; Walker, 1995); landscape and monuments (Bradley, 1998; Díaz-Guardamino et al., 2015; Holtorf, 1998; Tilley, 1994); the agency of objects and materials (DeMarrais et al., 2004; Dobres & Robb, 2000a; Fowler & Harris, 2015; Gell, 1998; Hodder, 2012; Jones & Boivin, 2010; Joyce & Gillespie, 2015; Knappett & Malafouris, 2008; Latour, 2005); digital postmortem identity and legacy on social media (Brubaker, 2015; Maciel & Pereira, 2013; Walter, 2019); and inquiries into multitemporality and non-linear chronology (Dinshaw, 2012; Harris, 2009; Koselleck, 2004; Nagel & Wood, 2010). Since many of the aforementioned themes and research strands are beyond the scope of this book, while others are mentioned only occasionally, in this section we would like to single out the most salient ones.
One of the issues that has inspired past debates is whether dead bodies are human beings or things. Julia Kristeva’s notion of abjection is frequently employed to explain the transformation of a once living person into an object. Unless mummified or cremated, the body becomes an abject, a repulsing something, that can be assigned neither to person nor object (Buikstra, 2019a, p. 20; Crossland, 2009b, p. 103; Nilsson Stutz, 2015, p. 3; Sørensen, 2009, pp. 125–126). The subject/object issue has been part of a discourse which considers the view of a shift from subject to object as highly subjective, as it cannot account for the vitality that is felt in human remains that are not corpses. The permeability between subject and object is also particularly evident in examples of medieval bodies preserved from corruption either through embalming or putatively miraculous means, the phenomenon of relic theft, and the production of contact relics (Angenendt, 2002; Brown, 1981; Geary, 1990; Nagel & Wood, 2010; Smith, 2012; Walsham, 2010). The subject/object problem is closely related to the question of whether images, masks or monuments create presences that substitute for the absent dead body (Knappett, 2011, p. 209) or if these images, statues, etc. actually can become the dead body. While the former would speak for a distinction between subject and object, the latter dissolves the subject/object division.
At this point it is fitting to introduce the concept of postmortem agency. The agency of the dead is a relatively young topic of study (Arnold, 2014; Crossland, 2017; Harper, 2010) that has been closely positioned to approaches to the agency and properties of things, objects, and materials. The term ‘postmortem agency’ was coined by sociocultural anthropologist Benjamin Wilreker (2007) and introduced into archaeology in a special section on “The bioarchaeology of postmortem agency” in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (Crandall & Martin, 2014). As observed by numerous scholars, ‘agency’ per se is an ambiguous concept (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998, p. 962; Robb, 2013, p. 448). Although agency is now widely regarded as a relational property, there is no single definition. One of the most imminent problems with agency has been the tension between (a) intentionality versus (b) consequence (Díaz de Liaño & Fernández-Götz, 2021; Dobres & Robb, 2000b; Dornan, 2002, p. 319–324; Robb, 2010; Tung, 2014, pp. 441–442). Whereas in the former definition, (a) agency is seen as initiating causal sequences of events by acts of mind, will or intention (originally only attributed to living human people), in the latter definition, (b) agency implies initiating action only, something that also can be applied to objects and dead bodies. In order to overcome the problem of will and causation or the lack thereof, designations such as ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ agency (Gell, 1998, 20) have been developed (cf. Tung, 2014, p. 441). Recent studies focusing on agency, animacy, soul concepts, and personhood with respect to ‘other-than-human persons’Footnote 7 from non-European perspectives have provided important contributions to this discussion, underscoring the historical and cultural contingency of these concepts (Carr, 2021; Harrison-Buck & Hendon, 2018).
Because of the diverse meanings of agency and Cartesian dualisms, such as human and non-human, nature and culture, subject and object, posthumanist scholars have started to critically discuss (Lindstrøm, 2015) and reject agency as analytically useless (Crellin & Harris, 2021). Departing from approaches to emotion, the senses, and affective capacities (Hamilakis, 2013; Harris & Sørenson, 2010), Crellin and Harris (2021) have advocated a reorientation to the concept of ‘affect’ to overcome the difficulties with agency. This approach is fundamentally relational, as it argues that people, things, monuments, etc. emerge through relations. Affects are the capacities of a human and non-human body,
to be affected by the world and to affect the world around it. These capacities are clearly historically situated and emergent, and do not have to be exercised at any one moment to be real. The capacities human beings have today to read, for example, are not historically eternal, but emergent, and you do not have to be reading at the moment to be able to read later today or tomorrow. (Crellin & Harris, 2021, p. 471)
As we show later in this chapter, this is a useful approach to the study of postmortem interaction. In most of the contributions to this book, however, the term ‘agency’ is used in a more general sense, as ‘acting upon the living’, ‘causing an effect’, ‘making a difference’, ‘producing transformation’, ‘leaving a trace’. A theoretical treatment of the concepts of agency and affect can be found in Chap. 8.
Another relevant topic, and originally discussed in the context of the Middle Ages, is that of the reopening of tombs (Chaps. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8, and 10). Since the end of the Communist era in Eastern Europe, there is increased scholarly attention on the sociopolitical significance of acts of grave disturbance, exhumation, desecration, and reinterment (Mark, 2010; Verdery, 1999; Zempleni, 2015). In her groundbreaking study, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, Katherine Verdery has demonstrated how the movement of large numbers of people, along with their monuments, aided nation-building in postsocialist Eastern Europe after the end of the Communist era. Through a process that compressed chronological time and reconfigured temporality, it became possible to forget and obliterate certain dead, while others were evoked and remade (Verdery, 1999, pp. 4–13 and 111–124). The dead came to embody the past in the present, collapsing essential distinctions in temporality (on multiple temporalities, see Chap. 4). The trajectories described by Verdery are reminiscent of the Black Lives Matter movement, in which not only current victims of police violence (Engelke, 2019, p. 34) but also the defacing and toppling of statues of historical celebrities have been deployed to underwrite, rewrite, and overturn narratives of national and community origin in order to remake identities in the present (Bracelli, 2020). Verdery also poses the question: “How does this [postsocialist] dead-body politics differ from examples in other times and places?” (Verdery, 1999, p. 3). Although this remains more of a rhetorical question in Verdery’s book, archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, and literary scholars have increasingly focused on the far-reaching implications of such forms of postmortem interaction in other eras and places (Aspöck, 2011; Aspöck et al., 2020; Gardeła & Kajkowski, 2015; Kinkopf & Beck, 2016; Klevnäs, 2013; Klevnäs et al., 2021; Prendergast, 2004; Osterholtz et al., 2014; Weiss-Krejci, 2001, 2011a). This interest is spurred by the realization that the in-depth study of interaction with the remains of the dead could be a means to unmasking past social, political, and economic processes and ideals.
This volume draws from a variety of disciplines such as archaeology, literary studies, Egyptian philology and literature, bioarchaeology, and sociocultural anthropology providing an interdisciplinary account of the ways in which the dead are able to transcend temporal distances and engender social relationships. While interdisciplinary approaches between archaeology, biological anthropology, and social anthropology go back a long way (Boas, 1904; Hicks, 2013), the integration of literature is a rather new endeavor. Until quite recently, literary sciences and archaeology were generally regarded as incommensurable in their aims, methodologies, and source material (especially for the postclassic era). Although archaeologists and literary critics have been increasingly willing to borrow concepts and terminology from the other discipline (Schwyzer, 2007), there have been only a few examples of genuinely collaborative endeavors. Recent studies (Gill et al., 2021) have begun to reveal the rich potential for dialogue and collaboration between two disciplines that are, albeit in very different ways, fundamentally concerned with the traces of past life.
1.3 The Chapters in This Volume
The book is one of the principal outputs of the DEEPDEAD projectFootnote 8 and developed from an international workshop and a conference session, both held in 2018. Additional contributions were commissioned between 2018 and 2019. Through a series of case studies ranging from ancient Egypt through prehistoric, historic, and present-day Europe, the volume explores the complex interplay of various text genres, dead bodies, monuments, and material artifacts.
In Chap. 2, Roman Gundacker examines a range of textual and material interactions with ancient Egyptian sepulchral monuments that took place from the Old Kingdom to the Graeco-Roman period. Egyptian tombs were designed to preserve the memory, social being, mummified body, and soul of the dead for all eternity. Through inscriptions, the dead appealed for prayers and offerings from passers-by, while visitors left ‘letters to the dead’ requesting favors. Predominantly in the New Kingdom, reuse of tombs and sarcophagi was commonplace, yet this did not always involve outright appropriation or attempted erasure of the previous occupant; in some cases the name and decorative program of the original possessor were preserved alongside those of the new occupant, perhaps in order to claim a connection with an individual or family esteemed in bygone days. Gundacker notes the growing pessimism concerning the survival of physical monuments expressed in the harper’s songs accompanying depictions of musicians within the tombs. Predating by more than a millennium the comparable sentiment in the Odes Footnote 9 of the Roman poet Horace, the Eulogy of the Scribe concludes that immortal memory is not achieved by those dead who built elaborate tombs but only those who made heirs unto themselves of the writings.
Continuing the focus on poetry, eternity, embalmed bodies, and tomb reentry , Chap. 3 by Naomi Howell explores the detailed descriptions of marvelous tombs found in the ‘romances of antiquity’ of the later twelfth century AD. While these Old French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle High German poems are based on classical models, there is no Greek or Roman precedent for their extended ekphrastic descriptions of tombs. Rather, Howell argues, the romance authors were responding to accounts of actual excavations and tomb openings in the preceding century, including the entry into the tomb of Charlemagne in Aachen by Otto III in the year AD 1000 and the supposed discovery of the tomb of Pallas in Rome. Exemplifying the medieval archaeological imagination, romance authors drew on these reports to revive the ancient past and describe the entombment of classical heroes. Whether or not any real event lies behind the ramifying web of references, Howell demonstrates how repetition, embellishment, and the accumulation of ekphrastic motifs lend these tombs and the dead they contain a kind of intertextual agency.
Whereas Chap. 3 deals with an entire medieval literary genre, the dead bodies and objects in Chap. 4 exist only within one very famous text. In Andrew James Johnston’s study of archaeological ‘traces’ in Beowulf , the Old English poem’s material world is revealed as a dense fabric of fragments from Germanic Iron Age, Roman, and still more distant pasts. Material traces like a sword recovered from a creature’s lair or a cup stolen from an ancient barrow invest the poem with complex, competing temporalities. Like the sword with an enigmatic inscription whose blade melts away in the hero’s hand after having served in the killing of the creature’s mother and in the decapitation of her predeceased son, these objects convey only imperfect knowledge of past civilizations, and like those civilizations they seem always on the verge of vanishing. In Johnston’s argument, these historical objects attain a paradoxical agency as they at once constitute and unravel the ‘now’ of Beowulf , leaving the present subject to the pull of multiple pasts.
Like the Egyptians of the New Kingdom and European poets of medieval times, the peoples of Iron Age northern Europe interacted with the deep past by making use of already-ancient artifacts and tombs. In Chap. 5, Robert Schumann examines archaeological evidence for these types of interaction in the context of Iron Age burials in northern Germany. Pre-Iron Age burial grounds were frequently reused, sometimes as the sites of new cemeteries and on other occasions in a more selective way, with the insertion of a small number of cremation urns into a pre-existing mound. Artifacts or antiquities from the past, not originally associated with funerary practices, could also be incorporated into graves: the examples considered by Schumann include a Roman comb , a bronze axe , and even a clutch of Neolithic artifacts already several millennia old. Were these objects intended to express a relation or affinity with forebears? Are they evidence of ancestor veneration , or tools of social legitimation? Can we be sure that those who employed them in burials even understood them to be old? Much more research is needed, but as Schumann concludes, there can be little doubt that objects like these, handed down or rising up from the distant past, played an important role in the construction of individual and collective identities in Iron Age communities.
In Chap. 6, Astrid Noterman and Alison Klevnäs demonstrate how appropriation of grave goods from the past and changing narratives concerning mortuary behavior of past civilizations have shaped national identity in France. Exploring the processes by which the Gauls came to out-compete the Franks as ancestors of the modern French nation, they show how early medieval grave reopening was seized upon by nineteenth-century archaeological literature as evidence of the savagery of the Frankish people. Recent archaeological approaches to the burials of this period have tended to move away from ethnic categories and explanations, and it has now become possible to view the evidence of grave reopening as testimony to the complexity of early medieval societies and their funerary practices, rather than proof of looting and barbarism.
The seventh and eighth chapters deal with the peculiar status and agency of human remains in the form of holy relics. Chapter 7 by Anna Kjellström highlights the shifting fortunes of human remains according to the cultural paradigm of the time. The remains of Saint Erik of Sweden, a martyred saint who was also a king, were of unusual interest in every era from the Late Middle Ages to the present and were repeatedly examined. A telling contrast between the degree of bioarchaeological analysis and the public reverence accorded Erik’s bones in the twenty-first century and the treatment of anonymous medieval skeletons recently discovered near his resting place serves to illustrate the point that the agency of the dead is highly dependent on the stories we attach to them.
A related argument is developed by Miriam Edlich-Muth in Chap. 8 which moves between medieval reliquaries, the anonymous remains in twentieth-century mass graves, and the fake relics jumbled in the bag of Chaucer’s Pardoner. Edlich-Muth, whose discussion is anchored in relational theory, argues that the agency of these ‘hybrid objects’ is “predicated on the networks of relationships that unfold between the remains of the dead and the people or institutions engaging with them.” The bones of the dead accrue power through the narratives they enable and activate; agency emerges in the triangulation of the dead, the living, and the stories that shape (and threaten) the identities of both.
The next two chapters in the volume continue the question of the relationship between textuality and materiality, with a focus on English literature of the early modern period. What happens when texts and excavations tell different stories? As Sarah Briest discusses in Chap. 9, Thomas Dekker’s vivid descriptions of mass burials in seventeenth-century London have not been confirmed in all respects by recent archaeology. Whereas Dekker describes the bodies of plague victims being thrown haphazardly into a pit and “lying slovenly” upon each other, excavations at London’s New Churchyard reveal the remarkable orderliness and care with which the plague dead could be buried, even when the numbers were staggering and haste was essential. Dekker’s belief that the reopening of graves would allow the dead to regain social agency through the act of bearing witness is highly pertinent to the discourse and practice of forensic anthropology.
Similarly, in Chap. 10, Schwyzer explores points of connection between mortuary archaeology and the works of William Shakespeare. Since the middle of the nineteenth century references to Shakespeare’s works have percolated through archaeological discourse and the ways in which archaeological discoveries are reported to the public; recent examples include the exhumations of Richard III and the Lovers of Valdaro . The links drawn between Shakespeare and archaeology in journalistic reports are not always productive or illuminating, yet the persistent conjunction indicates that archaeology and Shakespearean drama play similar roles in the modern popular imagination as technologies for the revival and celebration of the dead.
That the grip of the dead on the living has not died away with modernity is also apparent from Chap. 11 which challenges ideas of a reputed disenchantment of death. Part of the broader ‘disenchantment of the world’ theorized by Max Weber, the idea of disenchantment denotes a more distanced, scientific, and in some ways mechanical approach to death and burial characteristic of modern society. Yet as Saskya Tschebann argues in her study of the natural burial movement, specifically at « Cimetière naturel de Souché » in Niort, France, reports of death’s disenchantment are highly exaggerated. The meaning-making practices of visitors to the cemetery, including leaving vegetal offerings to bloom and wither on the grave, express an underlying understanding of death as a cyclical return to nature; in natural burial the dead may take the role of agents in healing a perceived spiritual rift between humans and the planet. Citing Michael Taussig’s observation that “death […] is the fount of magic,” Tschebann argues that the natural burial movement is only the latest expression of death’s continuous enchanting force.
Focusing not on a specific set of dead people, but on a locale defined by their presence and perceived power, in Chap. 12, the last chapter of the volume, Jan Horák, Estella Weiss-Krejci, Jan Frolík, Filip Velímský, and Ladislav Šmejda examine interactions with the dead in the cemetery and ossuary at Sedlec near the historic mining community of Kutná Hora in the Czech Republic. The chapter draws connections between medieval reports of epidemics and archaeological investigation of burials; between tales of soil brought from the Holy Land to Sedlec and subsequent traditions of corpses miraculously decomposing overnight or being cast out by the soil itself. The famously elaborate decoration of the Ossuary with its bone pyramids and hanging adornments of bone is discussed, along with local traditions of the bones taking vengeance on those who doubted their sanctity. The agency of the dead emerges repeatedly in this discussion, taking many forms: as soil, as relics, as ghosts, as animate bones, and above all as guides and motivators, encouraging and warning the living to remember the interests of the dead.
1.4 Approaching the Living and Dead in This Book
Given that a detailed discussion of all the issues raised in this multifaceted book is hardly feasible within the scope of this introduction, we will limit ourselves to a few questions: Why do certain types of dead bodies attract more interest than others? How do objects and other-than-human beings become sacred through their connection with bodily relics (understood both in the specific religious sense and more broadly)? And how would the people that this book is about respond to the question of whether only humans can have agency?
If one looks at (bio)archaeological papers on the agency of the dead, one finds that they often deal with unusual and uncanny corpses (Alfsdotter, 2019; Novak, 2014; Phelps, 2020; Tung, 2014). This observation has led Bettina Arnold to suggest that there may be limits to the general applicability of postmortem agency (Arnold, 2014, p. 524). The present book also contains stories about real and fictional famous (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 10) and uncanny dead (Chaps. 8, 9, and 12). However, it is not limited to them (Chaps. 2 and 11). Moreover, we try to approach the dead from the perspective of affect. Guided by literature on properness in death (Nilsson Stutz, 2015; van Gennep, 1960; Weiss-Krejci, 2011a, 2013), we will sort the dead in this book into three broad groups: (a) the dead whose burial places, souls, etc. are perceived as being in a proper place and state; (b) the dead that are perceived as being in an improper place/state; and (c) a third group that emerges from either group (a) or (b) when the relations they are part of start to shift. We call them the ‘reemergent dead’.
The dead in group (a) are those that have received proper funerary rites—as defined by the norms and beliefs about death and burial customs of their particular social group—and remain in their designated burial places once the liminal stage of the funerary process is complete. Rites to ensure a safe passage of bodies and/or soul(-like essence)s to the afterlives can include diverse forms of body manipulations as well as exhumation and reburial (Hertz, 1960); the placement of apotropaic objects (Bill, 2016) may provide protection for the dead but also protection from them. After completion of the funeral rites, which may take days, months or years, these dead are remembered or forgotten (Williams, 2006). In this volume we encounter them in a reciprocal relationship with the living by means of objects, materials, and texts. They take the form of benevolent ancestors and intercessors (Chap. 2) and as solace offering entities (Chap. 11). Though the bodies of these dead are often not visible, their presence is felt strongly, in some instances through continued textual engagements. These dead not only remind the living to pray for and respect them, but also issue threats not to invade their graves. The curse written on Shakespeare’s tombstone in Holy Trinity, Stratford (Chap. 10) and the tomb spells from the Pyramid texts, though ineffective (Chap. 2), are but two examples.
There is always a certain risk during the liminal phase that the mortuary rites may not be fulfilled (Harper, 2010).
The loss that comes with death is an absence that needs to be carefully managed, and when it is not, the risk of haunting looms (Knappett, 2011, pp. 208–209).
Apart from not being afforded a proper funeral , the dead in group (b) have suffered violent deaths, fatal disease or other misfortunes, with their bodies neglected, mistreated, dissected, improperly buried or disappeared (Crossland, 2009a, b; Pettigrew, 2000; Renshaw, 2013b; Robben, 2000; Tarlow & Battell Lowman, 2018; Weiss-Krejci, 2013). The manner of death and burial overwrites previous identities that would have determined these persons’ funerary rites. Perceived as not alive but also not (yet) or never socially dead (Weiss-Krejci, 2011b, pp. 71–76), the deceased’s liminal essences hang about and haunt the living (van Gennep, 1960, pp. 161–162). These dead often populate stories about ghosts (Crandall & Harrod, 2014, p. 495) and revenants (Barber, 1988). In archaeology they are sometimes referred to as deviant, unusual, and non-normative burials (Betsinger et al., 2020; Murphy, 2008)
However, not all of the deceased in group (b) remain in this state. When the bodies of the dead are called upon as witnesses to the atrocities inflicted against them, they have a chance to reemerge. This holds true for the victims in popular accounts of forensic anthropology (Crossland, 2009a, 2017), as well as the seventeenth-century English plague victims in mass graves, literally called ‘witnesses’ by plague narrator Thomas Dekker (Chap. 9), the genocide victims of twentieth-century Germany “that testify to mass murder” (Chap. 8), and the Cistercian martyrs murdered by the Hussites in the fifteenth century (Chap. 12). As a matter of fact, the word ‘martyr’, which derives from the Greek μάρτυς (martus), literally means ‘witness’ (Bartlett, 2013, p. 3). Because of the emotional aspects associated with the martyrs’ suffering and gruesome deaths, their remains accrue special powers. These types of dead bodies seem to attract more interest than others, because particular narratives accompany them. They are always on the brink of reemergence.
The reemergent dead (c) are by far the largest group in this book and also the most heterogenous. We discuss them under one label even though one could certainly make many further subdivisions. When bodies are exhumed by accident or intent after the funeral, or burial places have fallen into an improper state through deliberate damage or neglect, a chain of events is set in motion. The fate of the dead not only depends on their affective capacities (e.g. their identities) but is also affected by a host of culture-contingent factors of the society that dug them up. Their bodies can become subject to examination, fragmentation, veneration, display, discard or reburial. The reemergent dead are constituted as multitemporal entities, with the capacity to appear in various places. If investigated by bioarchaeologists, their bodies will bear the marks of their in vivo past as well as their entire funeral and postfuneral existence (e.g. Chap. 7). It is important to note that acts of reburial of these long-dead dead should not be confused with mourning and funerary rituals. One should also be aware of the fact that these newly created deposits and the materials inserted into them create new assemblages (cf. Fahlander, 2020; Fowler, 2013) that will only ever represent the ideals of the society that undertook the redeposition. This book provides numerous examples for these reemergent dead in the form of bodies and objects from reopened graves and shrines as well as charnel houses (Chaps. 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 12).
This brings us to the question of how objects and other non-human-entities become sacred through their connection with dead bodies. There are several interesting objects in this book that could be used to discuss this question, as for example the dead bodies and body parts that populate the poem Beowulf and set in motion a series of events during which objects emerge from distant pasts (Chap. 4) or the golden objects (Napoleon’s bees) discovered in Childeric’s grave (Chap. 6). However, we chose to use the example of contact relics for our discussion, because it is explicitly addressed in some of the chapters of this book.
Saints and their relics are seen as able to infect things and people by a form of contagion (Nagel & Wood, 2010, p. 198; Walsham, 2010, p. 12). Not only objects the saints have touched during their lifetime—clothes, murder weapons, bodily effluvia—are revered among Christians (Bynum, 1995) but the saints’ bones can rub off their sacredness onto objects too. Through the principle of infection these objects become (secondary) relics themselves. The process of infection is traditionally regarded as one-directional and thought to work like ‘contagion’ by bacteria or a virus. Though it can be airborne (as in the example of a woman who is healed from her blindness after looking at Saint Erik’s relics, Chap. 7), touching the relic is more potent. From a posthumanist view, the relationship between the relic and the faithful is not so much a one-directional infection but regarded as permeable in both directions. As Edlich-Muth shows in Chap. 8, relics strongly depend on their labels, in form of tags and inscriptions. As already observed by Patrick Geary, “divorced from a specific milieu, a relic is entirely without significance” (Geary, 1990, p. 5).
One type of relic that appears in this book is fundamentally different from other contact relics in that it was not created through direct interaction with a saint or another contact relic: the Holy Soil (Chap. 12). Holy Soil is the dust or dirt brought from the Holy Land (probably from burial sites in Jerusalem) to Europe in medieval times. Holy Soil was believed to have the capacity to colonize whatever it came into contact with, as for example, the holy fields at Pisa and Rome (Cole Ahl, 2003, p. 95; Nagel & Wood, 2010, pp. 201–202), or the entire Sedlec cemetery (Chap. 12). At Sedlec this soil was very powerful. On the one hand, it denied salvation to those who were not fit to access it, by casting them out of their graves. On the other hand, hundreds of years after parts of the Sedlec cemetery had fallen out of use, the soil still was believed to be able to kill those who plowed its grounds. Though soils today are also understood as living bodies with agency (Given, 2018, pp. 128–129), this is not the same type of affective capacity that the premodern inhabitants of Sedlec attributed to their cemetery soil. Only Holy Soil, not just any soil, could cause such an effect.
As is evident from the contributions to this volume, people of the premodern world (as well as some from the post-Enlightenment era) strongly believed that the dead and other empowered entities were able to act, that they were sentient, and even capable of empathy. European folk tales abound with stories about blind or otherwise disabled people being led by the dead to find and open their graves or, as in the case of the blind monk of Sedlec, to rearrange their bones (Chap. 12). Similarly, the linden trees on which the Cistercian monks had been hung by the Hussites possess a special power (Chap. 12) which is different from the agency discussed for trees in general (cf. Jones & Cloke, 2008). The perspective of the longue durée taken by several contributors in this book, illuminates shifting attitudes to death, memory, and identity crystallized in encounters with human remains, while also highlighting their persistent affective capacities.
1.5 Conclusions
In this introduction, we have highlighted some unifying aspects of the book, even though the contributions are wide-ranging and varying in focus. In the dialogue between literary studies and (bio)archaeology , it has become apparent that both fictional representations in literature and the media give priority to the famous, infamous, and so-called ‘deviant’ and ‘non-normative’ dead. While this is not surprising—don’t we all like exciting stories?—it is hardly representative of the real scope and value of bioarchaeological research. Bioarchaeologists have expressed frustration with this situation (see Buikstra, 2019b), but it is a vicious cycle. More public attention to unusual and uncanny bodies might lead to more research funding, and more researchers will seek out similar research avenues, which in turn will lead to more such stories in the media. The way out of this dilemma should be feasible. Recent attempts, mainly by bioarchaeologists working with human remains, involve the adoption of new literary techniques to produce specific effects. Poetry and narratives that choose less scientific language have been used alongside scientific language to create fictive osteobiographical narratives (Boutin, 2016, 2019; cf. Gill et al., 2021). After all, the imperative to communicate a point of view in writing to a heterogeneous audience (Connah, 2010; Joyce, 2002) and the need for authentic cross-cultural translation (Carr & Weeks, 2021) make the social and human sciences literary disciplines as well. This trend in bioarchaeology not only proves the point that we pay a lot of attention to human remains in present-day society, but in this way the dead also inspire new forms of literary traditions.
To conclude the introduction, we offer an insight and a prediction. The insight is that there are probably many more reemerged and reburied dead bodies in the archaeological record than we assume. The prediction is that more dead will likely reemerge in the near and distant future. Policy-makers, heritage professionals, church authorities, academics, journalists, and the general public should be prepared to answer the questions posed by these famous, infamous, and anonymous dead. Identifying the meanings and mechanisms of past postmortem interaction might inform our understanding of present-day and future discoveries and dilemmas. A deeper understanding of why these forms of matter provoke such a range of responses will help to better anticipate the reactions they elicit. The contributions to this volume testify to a widespread sense that societies must resolve aspects of their relationship with the past, literally embodied in the remains of the dead, before entering into their imagined futures.
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
The deceased kings and queens first received elaborate funerary treatments between the sixteenth and twelfth centuries BC, and, in the early first millennium BC, were rescued by priests from the depredations of ancient grave robbers. Twenty of the mummies that participated in the parade came from royal caches DB 320 and KV 35 (Chap. 2), both discovered in the late nineteenth century, and two (female) mummies were removed from tombs TT 358 and KV 60 by archaeologists in the first half of the twentieth century.
- 4.
- 5.
https://newsfeed.time.com/2011/04/07/archaeologists-find-worlds-first-gay-caveman-near-prague/. Accessed 6 August 2021.
- 6.
https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2011/04/06/5000-year-old-transgender-skeleton-discovered/. Accessed 6 August 2021.
- 7.
‘Other-than-human persons’ was coined by A. Irving Hallowell (1960) to designate inanimate objects, animals, plants, rocks, etc. as well as spiritual and supernatural beings among the Ojibwa.
- 8.
For details see ‘Acknowledgments’ (p. vii).
- 9.
“I have finished a monument more lasting than bronze, more lofty than the regal structure of the pyramids” (“Exegi monumentum aere perennius/regalique situ pyramidum altius”) (Odes III.30.1–2: Horace, 2004, pp. 216–217).
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Acknowledgments
We thank the HERA Joint Research Programme “Uses of the Past” (UP) [Collaborative Research Project (CRP) no. 15.055] and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 649307 for funding our research. (Details regarding the DEEPDEAD team and the conference and session on which this book is based can be found on (p. vii).) Our heartfelt thanks go to the two reviewers whose detailed and stimulating comments enabled us to rethink our approach and restructure our argument.
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Weiss-Krejci, E., Becker, S., Schwyzer, P. (2022). Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction: An Introduction. In: Weiss-Krejci, E., Becker, S., Schwyzer, P. (eds) Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction. Bioarchaeology and Social Theory. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-03956-0_1
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