Perceptions of Properness and the ‘Reemergent’ Dead

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Every dead person has the potential to be claimed or disputed by someone long after their death. Drawing on the definition of ‘affect’ by Crellin and Harris (2021), Weiss-Krejci et al. (2022) refer to these dead as 'reemergent'. Whether a 'reemergence' of the dead takes place depends to a large extent on their affective capacities, which in turn are influenced by the real or imagined identities of the dead and culturally contingent perceptions of properness within the society that deals with them in the respective present. Using several examples, primarily from historic Europe, the author will analyze the circumstances under which the dead have reemerged and discuss how the lessons of history can illuminate our understanding of contestation and appropriation of bodies and burial sites in prehistoric contexts.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50657