And #PresentDead hit the ground running: 29th – 30th September 2023 we visited the colloquium ‘Between Goths, Huns and Gepids. The Middle Danube Region in the Early Migration Period’ in Târgu Mureș in Romania. It was organised by Mureș County Museum (Târgu Mureș) in collaboration with the National Museum of Transylvanian History (Cluj-Napoca) to mark the publication of the migration-period inhumation cemetery from Ernei from the Transylvanian Plateau: The Migration Period Cemetery from Ernei, BMM sa XIX, Cluj-Napoca, 2023 (edited by Alpár Dobos and Sándor Berecki). Ernei is a site that we plan to investigate together with other cemeteries in the region for in-depth analysis of the grave reopening.
On Friday the colloquium was opened by our colleague and cooperation partner Alpár Dobos, with a presentation on the cemetery Ernei, a cemetery with 70 graves and hence untypical for the 5th century in this region, where solitary graves and small grave groups are common. However, its dating to the mid-5th century CE is secured not only by grave goods but also by recent radiocarbon dates. The publication of the C14 results is a collaboration of the excavators with Ali Klevnäs (one of the outcomes of her project ‘Interacting with the dead. Belief and conflict in Early Medieval Europe (AD 450-750)’ and currently in preparation. For PresentDead, the high number of reopened graves – all but one of the graves were reopened – raises interesting questions about the start of the reopening phenomenon.
Whilst the presentations on the first day provided more insights on migration period artefacts and sites of the region, with interesting discussions also in relation to PresentDead research questions, on day 2 the whole morning was dedicated to the discussion of grave disturbances: Ali Klevnäs started with a presentation on the state-of-the-art of research on reopened graves in Western Europe. I provided an overview of PresentDead, its overall aims and objectives and a focus on case studies and the specific approach I had developed to overcome current hinderances of research. Thom Gobbitt gave an overview of the textual sources that he will be working with for PresentDead and gave examples of texts that will be relevant from the Langobard laws, his specialism. The third talk from the PresentDead project was presented by Astrid Noterman, who presented on methods that we will use, primarily from within her specialism as an biological anthropologist and taphonomist (archaeothanatology). We had an interesting discussion, once again drawing our attention to terminology (is reopening the right term? We say yes, in English, German and French, but possibly not in other languages), but also what role ethnic labels may play in PresentDead (or not!).
In the second part of the session on grave disturbances Alpár Dobos was introducing newly excavated sites in Transylvania and how they would fit into the picture (and which interesting questions they pose about the origin of reopening); Regina Viktória Csordás gave a first presentation on her new PhD project on reopening of Transdanubian cemeteries in Hungary that she just started at Eötvös Loránd University; and the section was concluded by Coriolan Horațiu Opreanu who presented on a mortuary custom that is still upheld by the Romanian Orthodox Christians, the exhumation and reburial of the human remains of their dead. A reminder, that reopening of graves can be the cultural norm for engagement with the dead. The afternoon provided us – among other presentations – with more insights in particular on artefacts and even more specifically we learnt of new material analyses that were carried out as part of the ‘Power and Culture in the Carpathian Basin during the Early Middle Ages’ project and that gave us more ideas to think about in particular in relation to ways of recycling – an important factor when it comes to discuss the whereabout of objects removed from graves.
