Digging the Dead in a Digital Media Age

Abstract

A number of recent events inside and outside of the heritage sector have triggered a lively and largely constructive debate about the excavation, display, and conservation of human remains in the UK (see Jenkins 2008, 2010; Moshenska 2009; Sayer 2009, 2010a; Parker Pearson et al. 2011; Giesen 2013). Two events have been of particular significance: the reburial of human remains prompted by requests to museums from the Pagan community, and independently of these requests the Ministry of Justice decided to revisit its conditions for the excavation of human remains (Parker Pearson et al. 2013). In the short term, these issues seem to have been resolved through open consultation and campaigning by archaeologists. British archaeologists consider that they have public support; public-facing archaeology develops strong links within local communities, the Portable Antiquities Scheme engages members of the public in the discovery of metal objects on a national scale, and TV and Radio programmes regularly include archaeology or excavation as their central theme. There are various ways to engage with archaeology outside of a traditional museum environment: people can shift soil or sit back and read about it in numerous academic and popular books, in magazines, and digitally on the internet. This chapter discusses this new digital environment by describing and analysing three events in British burial archaeology which deliberately sought coverage online and within global media. These are: 1) the burial campaign which was instrumental in raising the profile of the reburial problem in England; 2) the discovery of a cow and woman buried in the same grave in a fifth- and sixth-century cemetery at Oakington, Cambridgeshire; 3) the investigation of King Richard III’s final resting place in the city of Leicester. One of us was instrumental in publicizing the first two events; neither of us was involved in the third. We will refer also to a recent case in East Anglia where negative media publicity came unsought by the archaeologists concerned. In the mid-twentieth century, archaeology found a place in mass broadcasting and early shows like Animal, Vegetable and Mineral or Chronicle captured the public imagination (Bailey 2010).

Interdisciplinary Explorations of Postmortem Interaction: An Introduction

“…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).…”

Archaeodeath as Digital Public Mortuary Archaeology

“…In the context of Western modernity's simultaneous fascination with mortality but disengagement from the physical and corporeal traces of the dead, archaeologists increasingly operate as deathdealers (Meyers and Williams 2014;Giles and Williams 2016; see now Büster et al� 2018). Mediating and evaluating archaeology's dialogues with death and the dead, 'public mortuary archaeology' extends beyond the ethics of mortuary dimensions to fieldwork, heritage sites, and educational environments and publications (reviewed by Giles and Williams 2016); it also relates to a host of digital engagements and interactions with the archaeological dead across a range of virtual environments, many accessed via the Internet (Williams and Atkin 2015;Sayer and Walter 2016;Nicholson 2018;Williams 2018;2019a). As part of a spectrum of means by which mortuary archaeology is disseminated and transformed in the digital age, blogging not only offers a textually versatile and image-rich interpretative medium for constructing knowledge about the dead exhibited in archaeological remains (from early prehistory to the contemporary past), but it also promotes key themes in human mortality -dying, death, the dead and commemoration -in archaeological research to wide audiences.…”