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Williams, Wills-Eve and Osborne’s edited volume The Public Archaeology of Death originated in a conference in Chester, UK, organised and populated by Howard Williams’s students. This was one of a s...

This chapter addresses the Reformation as a very long-term process, and will not generally distinguish various episodes of destruction. The Reformation was not a single event, nor even a number of events, but a process which transformed British religious practice, and redefined relations of power, over more than a century. The theological issues confronted by philosophers and clerics of the Reformation were numerous and subtle, but in practice most people encountered the Reformation in the way it impacted on local networks of power, and on daily ritual and liturgy. Religious images, including direct representations, symbols of Catholic belief and fetishized words or letters, all became more or less suspect. The 16th-century reformers were driven by a religious understanding which saw the things of this world as utterly separate from the things of God. Confusion between the two was likely to lead to the transgression of the second commandment.

The bodies of most of those executed under the Murder Act were sent for anatomical dissection by men of science. This blurred the line between scientific needs and judicial arrangements, and many medical men were unhappy about their co-option to the work of the executioner. This was especially so since short-drop hanging, the most commonly practised type of execution, often failed to kill criminals, so that their deaths often occurred on the dissection table rather than the scaffold. Procedures for the anatomisation and dissection of dead bodies varied geographically and took account of the multiple constituencies who wanted or needed access to them.

The bodies of the dead are often contentious sites for contemporary ethical decision making. A number of those ethical anxieties either have their roots in the deep past, or can usefully be examined in light of the history of how dead bodies have changed in meaning and value. The case of the soldiers ‘shot at dawn’ during the First World War for cowardice or desertion illuminates the way that both criminality and the meaning of a dead body can change after death. Finally this chapter draws out some of the main conclusions of the project, and reviews some of the possible interpretive frameworks within which the history of the criminal corpse during the period of the Murder Act might be understood.

In the first of two chapters considering the legacy of the criminal corpse we examine what happened to the physical remains of criminal bodies—partial and fragmented as they were by the end of their post-mortem punishments. Very few remains received any sort of burial, but a number were put to use as mounted skeletons or anatomical preparations for educational purposes. Other remains were curated as macabre souvenirs. Other uses included modelling for artists, experimental subjects for galvanism or phrenology; and the medicinal use of body parts in both orthodox and folk medicine.

Taking a long-term view of the history of crime and punishment problematises any straightforwardly progressive narrative of the history of punishment as one of increasingly humane attitudes. Punishment in the Middle Ages was about retribution, but also about compensation and the restoration of social order. The strong parallels between sin and crime and between punishment and penance affected much of the practice and discourse about punishment throughout both early and later medieval periods, and indeed extended into modernity. The dying and dead body was an important locus in both religious and secular discourses of power.

During the age of spectacular punishment, the bodies of those who threatened the State or social order were subject to highly visible symbolic justice. The executions and dead bodies of traitors in particular were put at the centre of acts of theatre. At the same time, new discourses around the dead body were taking shape at this time: especially discourses about anatomy and medicine; and a new theology that came to dominate British religion after the Reformation and altered profoundly the relationship between the living and the dead.

The legislative framework for the key period of our research is set by the period during which the Murder Act was in force. Its passage and provisions are considered here, as are the alternative ways of strengthening the death penalty which were not in the end written into law. The numbers affected by the Murder Act were nowhere very high, but there was considerable geographical and chronological variation in the frequency with which the provisions of the Act were enacted in full: broadly being more aggressively implemented in the London area and the east of the country than in the west and north. In the nineteenth century the popularity of hanging in chains in particular declined to almost nothing. The effects of the Murder Act are hard to assess. By the early 1830s the savagery of its provisions, and its failure to provide anything like the number of cadavers necessary for scientific work had made it sufficiently unpopular that it was repealed and replaced with legislations that arguably substituted poverty for criminality to meet the demands of anatomists.

Despite their relatively small number, the bodies of executed criminals exercised an impressive hold over the imaginations of writers, artists and storytellers. This chapter considers the range of artistic and creative afterlives of criminal bodies. Some criminals and their ends were remembered in anonymous folk ballads or ghoulish stories; others featured in works of published literature or art. The theatre of execution that was so significant in the late medieval and early modern periods remains a popular subject of artistic reinterpretation, as a brief discussion of the film Braveheart confirms.

For a minority of convicted murderers the decision was taken to gibbet their body rather than send it for dissection. This chapter reviews what was involved practically in gibbeting a body (or ‘hanging in chains’ as it was known), including the locations chosen, and the technology of the gibbet. Three cases of hanging in chains are discussed: two in England and one in Canada. The Canadian one is especially interesting as it is a rare incidence of a woman being gibbeted (no women are known to have been gibbeted in Britain during this period). Finally, some enduring myths of the gibbet are described.

The story of Tom Otter, a murderer who was executed and gibbeted in 1806, has many striking features. Not least, this form of brutal and bodily post-mortem punishment seems rather anachronistic during a period often described in terms of increasing gentility and humanity. It took place within the legal context of the Murder Act (1752), which specified that the bodies of murderers had to be either dissected or hung in chains. Other aggravated death penalties were applied to those convicted of treason and suicide. A number of common misconceptions about the gibbet need to be corrected.

Gibbets could remain standing for many decades. Some were removed because their presence was objectionable; others were eventually brought down by time and the weather. Sometimes, bodies were stolen . Folklore was attached to the locations of gibbets and to the remains which stayed there, and often the names of gibbeted criminals are still attached to places in their landscapes. Parts of the gibbet and of the bodies themselves were collected and curated, sometimes for utilitarian or scientific purposes but often just as curiosities. The case of Eugene Aram ’s skull is a case in point.

The criminal corpse undertook a journey from the scaffold to the gibbet. The gibbet was commonly located near the scene of crime and in a conspicuous location, usually within sight of a major road. Customary gibbet places existed in London and in some coastal location , but usually the body was transported from the place of execution to the place of hanging in chains. Sometimes, especially earlier in our period, criminals were executed and hung in chains from the same scaffold at the scene of crime. Gibbet cages were made quickly and did not develop local styles. The scene of a gibbeting was often a rowdy and carnivalesque occasion.

Given the very high cost of hanging somebody in chains, why was it ever carried out? It was intended to make a deterrent impression on potential criminals and to demonstrate the power and order of the State. However, the many and variable responses to hanging in chains meant that the practice did not always have the intended effect. Gibbetings were infrequent and memorable and served to make the names and histories of those so treated memorable and enduring. Even the very last occasions of hanging in chains were massively popular events, so the distaste expressed by some newspaper commentators was not universally shared.

In the contributions that follow seven archaeologists, of different backgrounds and working in different ways and places, attempt to answer the question ‘Can an archaeologist be a public intellectual?’ This discussion follows a special forum, sponsored by this journal, held at the European Archaeologists’ Association annual conference in Helsinki in 2012. The participants in that forum were Åsa Larsson, Layla Renshaw, Ghattas Sajey, Audrey Horning and Thomas Meier, who was unfortunately unable to offer his contribution for publication. The published discussion is supplemented by contributions from Cornelius Holtorf, Fredrik Svanberg, Nathan Schlanger and Jaime Almansa Sánchez. We hope that this special section captures some of the spirit of lively debate that characterized the forum.

Not only did the criminal corpse have actual medicinal and magical power for Europeans, it also had social and cultural meaning as an object, a curio or secular relic. This paper considers the appeal of notorious bodies. From books bound in the skin of a criminal, to preserved and exhibited heads, from fragments of the hangman’s rope to the exhibition of the skeleton, the story of the afterlife of criminal bodies and the material culture most immediately associated with them begins with the collection and exchange of bodies and moves into contemporary preoccupations with authenticity. This paper considers the bodies of three notorious criminals of the eighteenth century: Eugene Aram, William Burke and William Corder. It ends with some reflections on the glamour of the authentic body of a notorious or celebrated individual – using the response to the discovery of the body of Richard III as an example.

The literature on the archaeology of emotion and affect is mostly quite recent and is not extensive. This review considers the main lines of approach taken so far and explores how different understandings of what constitutes an emotion underlie the work of archaeologists in this area. A distinction is made between past emotion as a subject of study and examination of the emotional subjectivity of the archaeologist as a method. The potential contribution of archaeology to emotion studies in the future includes bringing a sense of contextual historicity to the discussion and developing our knowledge of how material things and places are involved in shaping and expressing emotion. Inspired by some historians of emotion, a focus on shared emotional meanings, values, and codes seems a more productive direction than the exploration of idiosyncratic personal emotional experience.

Harris and Sørensen's paper is a welcome attempt to address the question of ‘finding’ and interpreting emotion in the deep past. Their contribution to this emerging area of debate is particularly valuable in that it treats upon a prehistoric context, and is thus unaided by the rich contextual information provided by historical sources; and it moves the debate away from the mortuary context towards other areas of lived experience – here the processes of constructing, inhabiting, engaging with and ultimately destroying an architecturally defined space. These are more ambitious and less obvious contexts for constructing emotional pasts. Where the authors are most successful is in the identification of cultural loci where emotions are developed and are involved in the construction of experience – such as in the production and reproduction of ‘sense of community’. Less convincing, for me, were the places where they follow the (mainly British prehistoric) ‘phenomenological’ tradition. My own view is that shared and expressed emotional values are more amenable to archaeological identification and analysis than personal emotional experience, and I shall try to explain why. I think by separating the social meanings of emotion from the physical experience of emotion the authors of this article might be able to pursue more fruitful kinds of enquiry.

In the late-19th century, impelled by a dissatisfaction with American “competist” values and inspired by a vision of cosmic truth, Dr. Cyrus Teed, known as Koresh, left Chicago with a small group of followers to build their New Jerusalem in the swamplands of Estero Bay, Florida. The central tenet of Koreshanity was that the earth is a hollow sphere, and we live on the inside. This conception of the universe encouraged a theology, political science, and philosophical understanding that stressed the finite, knowable, and internally complete nature of the world. The history and material remains of the Koreshan community are discussed, and the article ends with some reflections on how their utopian project has been, and should be, represented in a modern context. There are political implications in what is chosen to be said or left unsaid about dissenting groups like the Koreshans.

The study of graveyards and memorial monuments in Britain in the early modern and modern periods is underdeveloped. Despite the many (maybe thousands) of graveyard survey and recording projects that have been undertaken, wide-ranging historical research questions have barely begun to be addressed. This paper identifies a number of possible directions for academic research, clustering around the three areas of demographic, family and social structure; the production and expression of identity and changing beliefs about the living and the dead. It is suggested that the full potential of graveyard studies has not yet been exploited for a variety of reasons. First, the essentially local remit and interest of most projects has not encouraged any orientation towards ambitious historical questions; secondly, the absence of any standardised way of recording graveyards and any way of monitoring the work that has been done; and thirdly, the failure of post-medieval archaeologists to develop many extensive o...

The study of utopias is riddled with contradictions: we admire and fear them; they are a radical critique of the modernist societies that surround them, and yet they are in some ways the archetypal product of modernity. This paper suggests that studying Utopia could be of value in analyzing some of the complexities and contradictions of Western society and ideology in the nineteenth century, as well as causing us to question some of the preconceptions we regularly bring to the study of the archaeological past. Finally I will suggest that a different kind of nineteenth century, one which includes the radical dissent and resistance of utopian thinkers and experimenters, provides a strong basis for a critique of the social values of modern capitalism.

Despite the establishment of significant traditions of emotion research in many disciplines, there has been little discussion of the state and potential of the archaeological study of emotion. This paper aims to review archaeological approaches to emotion—to assess the significance of existing studies and outline the potential for the incorporation of emotion into archaeological research. It argues that the study of emotion in the past is both necessary and possible; it considers which understandings of emotion we might find most useful, how the archaeology of emotion might be carried out, and what are the most promising avenues to explore. In archaeology, both the sociobiological approach and one based on empathy have serious problems. After reviewing and rejecting the dichotomy between emotions as entirely biological, universal, and hard‐wired, on one hand, and entirely social and constructed, on the other, a view of emotions as historically specific and experientially embodied is advanced. Finally it i...

During the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, garden cemeteries were founded in most cities in Britain. Their characteristic appearance owes much to a British tradition of naturalistic landscape design but has particular resonances in the context of death and mourning in the nineteenth century. This article considers some of the factors that have been significant in the development of the British landscape cemetery, including public health, class relationships and foreign influences (particularly that of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris). It is argued that none of these things explains the popularity of this particular form of cemetery in Britain; rather, the garden cemetery offered an appealing and appropriate landscape for remembering the dead and mediating the relationship between the dead and the bereaved.

(2009). Philip Schwyzer, Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature. Reformation: Vol. 14, No. 1, pp. 210-212.

Archaeological approaches to death and commemoration which privilege the negotiation of power relationships can underestimate the importance of personal and emotional responses to bereavement and mortality. Remembrance of the dead of the First World War is often understood in terms of the promotion of nationalist ideologies, but emotional factors such as grief and shock were also involved in the shaping of commemorative responses. In this article, responses to the First World War at national, local, and individual levels are considered. I suggest that people select monuments, places and ways of remembering for their power to express intense and personal feelings.

(2005). Colonialism as material fact: Archaeology and colonialism cultural contact from 5000BC to the present By Chris Gosden. Public Archaeology: Vol. 4, No. 4, pp. 283-285.

The archaeological study of death is a multifaceted field of study. Rapidly developing scientific and technical methods of examining human remains allow modern scholars to examine past lives throug ...