16 papers presented from an EAA session held at Krakow in 2006, exploring various aspects of the archaeology of death. Contents: Chapter 1. The Materiality of Death: Bodies, Burials, Beliefs (Fredrik Fahlander & Terje Oestigaard); Chapter 2. More than Metaphor: Approaching the Human Cadaver in Archaeology (Liv Nilsson Stutz); Chapter 3. A Piece of the Mesolithic. Horizontal Stratigraphy and Bodily Manipulations at Skateholm (Fredrik Fahlander); Chapter 4. Excavating the KingsAe Bones: The Materiality of Death in Practice and Ethics Today 9Anders Kaliff & Terje Oestigaard); Chapter 5. From Corpse to Ancestor: The Role of Tombside Dining in the Transformation of the Body in Ancient Rome (Regina Gee); Chapter 6. Cremations, Conjecture and Contextual Taphonomies: Material Strategies during the 4th to 2nd Millennia BC in Scotland (Paul R J Duffy and Gavin MacGregor); Chapter 7. Ritual and Remembrance at Archaic Crustumerium. The Transformations of Past and Modern Materialities in the Cemetery of Cisterna Grande (Rome, Italy) (Ulla Rajala); Chapter 8. Reuse in Finnish Cremation Cemeteries under Level Ground - Examples of Collective Memory (Anna Wickholm); Chapter 9. Life and Death in the Bronze Age of the NW of Iberian Peninsula (Ana M. S. Bettencourt); Chapter 10. Norwegian Face-Urns: Local Context and Interregional Contacts (Malin Aasbe); Chapter 11. The Use of Ochre in Stone Age Burials of the East Baltic (Ilga Zagorska); Chapter 12. oDeath Mythso: Performing of Rituals and Variation in Corpse Treatment during the Migration Period in Norway (Siv Kristoffersen and Terje Oestigaard); Chapter 13. Reproduction and Relocation of Death in Iron Age Scandinavia (Terje Gansum); Chapter 14. A Road for the VikingAes Soul (Ake Johansson); Chapter 15. A Road to the Other Side (Camilla Gr); Chapter 16. Stones and Bones: The Myth of Ymer and Mortuary Practises with an Example from the Migration Period in Uppland, Central Sweden (Christina Lindgren).

This collection of texts is a first step towards providing a theoretical and methodological platform for the study of social encounters. The social encounter is a particular sort of concept, focusing on confusion, tension, trauma, and possibly social change that may emerge in situations of contact when people and things interact. A social encounter is, however, not only about negotiation or contemplating existence, but is rather about what happens when people interact actively, when they involve themselves with people and materialities, when they move around, fetch things, use things, leave things etc. The repeated social encounter is often a confrontation with something, such as an opinion, a performance, or with materialities and the effects are often unpredictable. Encounters may reproduce a social pattern, but also contain potential for transformation and change. Such varied responses to encounters will certainly have effects on the archaeological record. The primary focus of the volume is the effects and processes involved in intra- and inter-societal encounters. The collection hence fills a theoretical and methodological gap in the study of the encounter in archaeology. There is a need for elaborating aspects of postcolonial theory in order to develop new ways of approaching the archaeological record. The articles of this volume include examples from various regions and time periods. They range from Scandinavian Stone Age, through Buddhist social practices of the first millennium AD, Maya warfare and ideology, to Aboriginal-European encounters in 20th century Australia.Per Cornell (PhD, Ass. Prof.) is currently lecturer at the Department of archaeology, University of Gothenburg. Cornell has been involved in extensive field-work in Latin America and current research topics include settlement archaeology, formation processes and social theory. Among his recent books are Local, Regional, Global, co-edited with Per Stenborg (Gotarc, 2004).