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 as incommensurable 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.
