What To Do When The Dead Linger: First Response

Abstract

The connections between archaeology and haunting – the intrusion of the dead into the world of the living, breaking down the barriers between past and present – are a familiar trope of contemporary culture, firmly established in the fiction of the early twentieth century. Archaeologists and antiquarians delve recklessly in graveyards and abandoned churches and abandoned villages and shuttered rooms, they read forbidden texts and open doors and unseal barriers, and they find more than they bargained for.