Acronym: DEEPDEAD (HERA.15.055)
Duration: 01/06/2016 - 31/05/2019
Link: http://heranet.info/deepdead/index
Consortium partners:
Philip Schwyzer (PL) and Naomi Howell, University of Exeter, United Kingdom
Estella Weiss-Krejci (PI) and Sebastian Becker, Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Vienna, Austria
Andrew James Johnston (PI) and Jan-Peer Hartmann, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Ladislav Šmejda (PI) and Jan Horák, Czech University of Life Sciences Prague, Czech Republic
Patricia Murrieta-Flores, University of Chester, UK
Associated partners:
Harald Meller (AP), State Office for Heritage Management and Archaeology – State Museum of Prehistory, Halle (Saale), Germany
Maria Teschler-Nicola (AP), Natural History Museum Vienna, Austria
Project description:
The past persists in material objects, perhaps most profoundly in the bodies of the long-dead and the artefacts associated with them. Such bodies, like those of Richard III and Cervantes, are erupting into view in contemporary Europe with increasing frequency. Whilst offering opportunities for education and the promotion of heritage, such encounters with the dead can also pose unsettling questions about cultural identity, the collective past, and the shape of time. Why do the long-dead become flashpoints of identity for the living? Harnessing the disciplines of literature and archaeology, DEEPDEAD will examine historic and prehistoric encounters with human remains and related artefacts in England and Central Europe in order to shed light on their cultural and social power. Through a series of case studies juxtaposing distinct eras, cultures, and modes of recording the encounter, the project will reveal what is constant and what is locally and historically specific in our ways of interacting with the long-dead. Our research will explore the relationship between long-dead bodies and myths of national or community origin, and the ways in which they have been used to reinforce or challenge historical narratives. The project will thus lead to a better understanding of why these forms of matter provoke such a range of responses, and how stakeholders including archaeologists, curators, policy-makers, and the public might better anticipate and understand the reactions they elicit.
The chief methods and techniques:
- Analysis of relevant scientific and archaeological reports
- Scientific analysis of prehistoric human remains (e.g., by AMS-dating)
- Historically-contextualized literary analysis of texts in Old, Middle, and Modern English, Latin, and
- German
- Anthropologically-informed investigation of the social agency of objects
- Geographic Information Systems (GIS)
- Computational approaches including Data Mining, Corpus Linguistics
Research areas:
- Reuse of the prehistoric dead and their monuments
- Medieval and Early Modern Europe
- Modern and Contemporary Uses of the Dead
Expected relevance of the project:
The themes and results of the DEEPDEAD project will find an interested and receptive audience within and beyond Europe. Yet in addition to capturing public attention, our dissemination plans are aimed at prompting informed reflection on the sources of our fascination with the long dead. We will accomplish these aims both through dialogue with other scholars and heritage professionals, and through direct dialogues with the wider public, facilitated by a public lecture programme, media interviews, and engagement in social media. In particular, the results of the project will be useful to heritage professionals and relevant policy-makers in responding to actual discoveries and anticipating the kinds of reactions they are likely to elicit. Equally importantly, they may help relevant professionals and policy-makers develop appropriate and sensitive responses to campaigns to discover or exhume human remains.