Archaeologists and the Dead

by Williams, Howard; Giles, Melanie

• ISBN13: 9780198753537
• ISBN10: 0198753535
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2016-08-09
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Author Biography

Howard Williams is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Chester. His research interests focus on medieval, post-medieval, and contemporary mortuary archaeology, archaeologies of memory, and the history of archaeology. His fieldwork includes Project Eliseg, investigating the context of the Pillar of Eliseg (Denbighshire, Wales). Howard has published over 70 book chapters and journal articles as well as edited books, most recently Early Medieval Stone Monuments: Materiality, Biography, Landscape and he is Honorary Editor of the Archaeological Journal (2013-2017). His monograph is titled Death and Memory in Early Medieval Britain.

Melanie Giles in an expert in the British and northern European Iron Age, specializing in funerary archaeology as well as Celtic art and artifacts. She is the author of A Forged Glamour: Landscape, Identity and Material Culture in the Iron Age and the forthcoming Bog Bodies: Face-to-Face with the Past.

Table of Contents

Foreword Mike Parker Pearson
1. Introduction: Mortuary Archaeology in Contemporary Society, Melanie Giles and Howard Williams
Part 1: Investigating The Dead
2. Questions Raised in Excavating the Recent Dead, Sian Anthony
3. Personhood and Re-Embodiment in Osteological Practice, John McClelland and Jessica Cerezo-Roman
4. Separating the Emotions: Archaeological Mentalities in Central Italian Funerary Archaeology, Ulla Rajala
5. Slave Trade Archaeology and the Public: The Excavation of a 'Liberated African' Graveyard on St Helena, Andrew Pearson and Ben Jeffs
6. Habeas Corpus: Contested Ownership of Casualties of The Great War, Martin Brown
7. Bones Without Barriers: The Social Impact of Digging the Dead, Faye Sayer and Duncan Sayer
Part 2: Displaying the Dead
8. Museum Practice and the Display of Human Remains, Hedley Swain
9. Displaying the Dead: The English Heritage Experience, Sarah Tatham
10. The Immortals: Prehistoric Individuals as Ideological and Therapeutic Tools in our Time, Nina Nordstrom
11. Covering the Mummies at the Manchester Museum: A Discussion of Authority, Authorship and Agendas in the Human Remains Debate, Karen Exell
12. Making an Exhibition of Ourselves: Using the Dead to Fight the Battles of the Living, Tiffany Jenkins
13. To Gaze Upon The Dead: The Exhibition of Human Remains as Cultural Practice and Political Process In Scandinavia and the United States, Liv Nilsson Stutz
14. Firing the Imagination: Cremation in the Museum, Howard Williams
Part 3: Public Mortuary Archaeology
15. Contemporary Pagans and the Study of the Ancestors, William Rathouse
16. 'Tomb to Give Away': The Significance of Graves and Dead Bodies in Present-Day Austria, Estella Weiss-Krejci
17. Digging The Dead in a Digital Media Age, Duncan Sayer and Tony Walter
18. Writing About Death, Mourning and Emotion: Archaeology and Creativity, Trevor Kirk
19. Reconstructing Death: The Chariot Burials of Iron Age East Yorkshire, Melanie Giles
20. Reflections on Intersections of Mortuary Archaeology and Contemporary Society, Lynn Goldstein