Funerary Textiles in Situ

Description

Textiles have always played a prominent role in death. They were and continue to be used to hide the body and to re-create it into a “deceased”. This prominent role is well illustrated in ethnology but often ignored in archaeology. Rarely recorded together in situ, textiles are removed from the human remains, stored in different locations, and studied by different specialists. We are thus destroying precious evidence and limiting our understanding of funerary events. How was the body prepared before the funeral? How was it seen and perceived by its relatives and community? What role did textiles play in its metamorphosis into a deceased?
This workshop aims at exploring these questions by bringing a small but highly
specialized team of experts from the fields of bioanthropology, archaeology, textile research and conservation. Its first geographical focus will be the ancient Nile Valley (Egypt and Sudan), where climatic conditions permitted the good preservation of textiles and human remains. The second focus will be Europe, with case-studies from Greece, Finland, Poland, Austria, the Iberian peninsula, and elsewhere. Going beyond these geohistorical frameworks, the workshop will strive to build new methods for the study, retrieval and conservation of funerary textiles in situ during excavations. We believe that it will provide useful tools for future research in both textile archaeology and bioarcheology and promote interdisciplinary collaborations for textile scholars.

Period	15 Apr 2021 → 16 Apr 2021
Event type	Workshop
Location	Warsaw, PolandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International