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 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. Until quite recently, literary sciences and archaeology were generally regarded asincommensurable in their aims, methodologies, and source material. Although archaeologists and literary critics have been increasingly willing to borrow concepts and terminology from the other discipline, this book is one examples of a genuinely collaborative endeavor.This is an open access book.

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 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. Until quite recently, literary sciences and archaeology were generally regarded asincommensurable in their aims, methodologies, and source material. Although archaeologists and literary critics have been increasingly willing to borrow concepts and terminology from the other discipline, this book is one examples of a genuinely collaborative endeavor.

Chapter 1. Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Agency: An Introduction.- Chapter 2. Visitors, Usurpers, and Renovators: Glimpses from the History of Egyptian Sepulchral Monuments.- Chapter 3. Literary Tombs and Archaeological Knowledge in the Twelfth-Century ‘Romances of Antiquit.- Chapter 4. Anachronic Entanglements: Archaeological Traces and the Event in Beowulf.- Chapter 5. The Distant Past of a Distant Past …: Perception and Appropriation of Deep History during the Iron Ages in Northern Germany (Pre-Roman Iron Age, Roman Iron Age, and Migration Period).- Chapter 6. In Search of an Acceptable Past: History, Archaeology, and ‘Looted’ Graves in the Construction of the Frankish Early Middle Ages.- Chapter 7. From Saint to Anthropological Specimen: The Transformation of the Alleged Skeletal Remains of Saint Erik.- Chapter 8. Dissolving Subjects in Medieval Reliquaries and Twentieth-Century Mass Graves.- Chapter 9. The Graves When They Open, Will Be Witnesses Against Thee: MassBurial and the Agency of the Dead in Thomas Dekker’s Plague Pamphlets.- Chapter 10. Shakespearean Exhumations: Richard III, The Princes in the Tower, and the Prehistoric Romeo and Juliet.- Chapter 11. Cemetery Enchanted, encore: Natural Burial in France and Beyond.- Chapter 12. The Cemetery and Ossuary at Sedlec near Kutná Hora: Reflections on the Agency of the Dead.