Aufgabengebiet
Forschungsprojekt:
"Touch and Greek Art: The Haptics of Burial"
My research project contributes to a growing scholarship on the senses in Greek art by examining the role of touch in the cemeteries of Attica. It investigates how material culture mediated human interaction with the corpse, the tomb, and the community through rites of mourning and remembrance. Although it is a maxim of archaeological literature that the dead don't bury themselves, scholarship has treated material culture at the tomb as providing biographies of the deceased, making displays related to their social status, or showing their civic membership. In contrast, attention to the senses in cemeteries provides a way to look more comprehensively and wholistically at the /work/ of the tomb monument and the material assemblages that accompanied the deceased or were placed at the tomb. With this approach, it is possible to be cognizant of social and political forces, while underscoring the trauma death presented to individuals and communities. In the process of mourning and healing, material culture played a significant but understudied role for linking people to the body, to the tomb, and to one another. This project looks at representations of rituals, at the objects deposited with the dead and at graves, and at the function of assemblages. Rather than consider the burial as a single moment in time, it extends the temporal scale of analysis beyond deposition, and looks at the treatment of the dead body and the frequent return of family members to the tomb. This project on the haptics of burial is part of a larger, mulit-year book project on the haptics of Greek art.
Kontakt
Arbeitsgruppe
Prof. Dr. Ruth Bielfeldt is the host of this Humboldt Research Fellowship at the Institut of Classical Archaeology (LMU)