Karina Croucher

University of Bradford | UB · Department of Archaeological and Environmental Science

People in the Global North often have a problem talking about — and processing — the inevitability of death. This can be because death and care of the dying has been professionalised, with encounters of death within our families and communities no longer being ‘normal and routine’ (Kellehear 2005). Young people are particularly excluded from these...

Death, bereavement, and grief are experiences suffused with conflict and disenfranchisement. Intricately connected is ‘etiquette’ – the sense of ‘should’ ‘must’ ‘right’ ‘wrong’ ‘appropriate’ and ‘inappropriate’ individuals feel in death and bereavement situations. This paper is the first of two answering the question, ‘where does etiquette arise in...

Rituals are central to the everyday life of the nurse, yet the fundamental roles that rituals play in caring for the dead and dying has often been neglected. This paper explores modern palliative and post-mortem care – its practices, practitioners and arenas – against the background of long-held, global concerns regarding the dead and dying. Compar...

Introduction: Across the UK, many anatomy departments possess historical potted wet cadaveric specimen collections, such as organs preserved in fluid-filled jars. Although considered obsolete by some for anatomical education, there is immense potential for their utilisation in teaching, particularly in institutes that have limited access to cadave...

The Continuing Bonds toolkit team were developing a resource for counsellors and therapists when lockdown hit, causing a rapid transition to digital workshops and collaborations. Initially this was seen as a setback, however we soon realised the benefits that online delivery can bring. This paper introduces the toolkit, which uses archaeology to pr...

Dying to Talk is a project in Bradford and Wolverhampton aimed at encouraging young people to talk about death, using Archaeology as a facilitator to those conversations. Starting conversations early in life could buttress people’s future wellbeing when faced with bereavement and their own mortality (Ribbens Mccarthy, 2007). Based on the principles...

While death is universal, reactions to death and ways of dealing with the dead body are hugely diverse, and archaeological research reveals numerous ways of dealing with the dead through time and across the world. In this paper, findings are presented which not only demonstrate the power of archaeology to promote and aid discussion around this diff...

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultura...

In order to examine the issues that perpetuate inequalities in archaeology in higher education and their consequences, this chapter addresses the areas of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, disability, and socioeconomics, in both the global demographic profile of the profession, and in archaeological research and practice. It begins by considering these...

Chapter 8 highlights how scales of global, local, personal, and political are relevant in the assemblages of becoming archaeologists and therefore of teaching, learning, and doing archaeology, arguing that an assemblage approach is required to understand the intersection of these different scales, whilst avoiding the reductionism arising from privi...

This chapter introduces the context of research, teaching, learning, practice, and pedagogy in archaeology, connecting this with changing trends in global higher education, and demonstrating how pedagogy and teaching have been seen as less valuable than research. A history of pedagogic research in archaeology is then presented to demonstrate how th...

This chapter returns to the semi-fictional narrative of Student X, who is now attending her first excavation. Student X’s experiences on the excavation are a mixture of elation and increasing frustration, and they are compounded by her experiences of off-site dynamics, which in turn feed into her learning experience when she returns to the campus a...

This chapter outlines how political economy—particularly neoliberalism and marketization—has impacted on pedagogy within higher education globally, and specifically on archaeological pedagogy. This is most explicitly seen in debates on vocational training, where concerns with speed, efficiency, and market forces frame training in banking instrument...

This chapter begins with a final semi-fictional narrative, emerging partly out of the narrative in Chapter 9, but now returning to Lecturers X and Y, explaining how their use of cake in a conference paper can be deployed to explain the approach advocated in this book. In turn, the chapter sums up the arguments made throughout the volume, providing...

Throughout this volume are a series of semi-fictional assemblages of learning as a means to illustrate the nuances of the arguments made. These merge the experiences of authors, students, and others who have shared their many learning and life assemblages with us. In turn, the semi-fictional accounts both structure debate and illuminate the learnin...

Chapter 9 returns the reader to the semi-fictional narrative of Student X. Spoiler alert: Student X has a happy ending! The chapter follows Student X’s development over her degree and into her career beyond, exploring how she addressed the issues of discrimination and marginalization that are presented in Chapters 3 and 5 , and how this process of...

Once again, the book returns to the semi-fictional narratives that structure Chapters 3 and 5. This time, our focus shifts from the semi-fictional story of Student X to a wider cast of people and things. In this chapter, we encounter Student A, Lecturers X and Y, Archaeologist X, and Heritage Professional X. The semi-fictional narratives about each...

This chapter introduces the theoretical concepts at the heart of our argument, beginning with a discussion of critical pedagogy, then demonstrating how archaeology requires its own pedagogic principles. It discusses the material components of archaeological teaching and learning, emphasizing how archaeological learning takes place in multiple locat...

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultura...

This book provides a radical rethinking of the relationships between teaching, researching, digging, and practicing as an archaeologist in the twenty-first century. The issues addressed here are global and are applicable wherever archaeology is taught, practiced, and researched. In short, this book is applicable to everyone from academia to cultura...

Modern, advanced healthcare detects and monitors long-term and life-limiting illness more comprehensively than ever before. Death is now, however, often considered as medical failure, and is a virtually taboo topic of conversation in daily life. At a time when the relevance of archaeology is under scrutiny, the AHRC-funded ‘Continuing Bonds’ projec...

Background What happens when archaeology meets health and social care? The Continuing Bonds Study, a pilot project lead by Dr Karina Croucher, Professor Christina Faull and Laura Green, uses case studies of the dead from the recent and distant past to spark discussions about death and dying. Via a series of workshops, the study investigates what va...

Background The care of a person who has died is of importance to the person themselves and to their loved ones. Nurses have a unique role in providing this care. This work explored the literature concerning the formal practices of the care of a dead person, the teaching of such practices and the cultural and informal curriculum by which such practi...

Background Recent research in palliative care has focused on understanding how the dying (and immediately post-mortem) process affects nurses. The literature notes the increasingly complex environments in which nurses find themselves, such as in the care of heart-beating and non-heart-beating cadaver donors, whose legal status as variously ‘alive’...

Theories of Continuing Bonds, and more recently, the Dual Process of Grieving, have provided new ways of understanding the bereavement process, and have influenced current practice for counsellors, end-of-life care practitioners and other professionals. This paper uses these theories in a new way, exploring their relevance to archaeological interpr...

Digitised Diseases is a major web-based 3D resource of chronic disease conditions that manifest change to the human skeleton. The resource was established through funds from Jisc, the University of Bradford and Bradford Visualisation. The multi-disciplinary team, involving project partners MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and the Royal College o...

In this paper, we consider how we can undercut the various binaries of gender and sexuality in archaeological practice and particularly in our teaching. We argue that taking an assemblage theory approach enables us to look at the multiplicity of identities of those practicing archaeology as different and intersecting assemblages that bring one anot...

Aims This interdisciplinary project aims to discover untold stories about relationships between hospice practitioners and patients, from a novel, objects-based perspective. Our aim is to understand the role of material things in palliative care – including how hospice staff and volunteers relate to and remember those they care for. Introduction The...

Tringham Ruth & Stevanović Mirjana (ed.). Last house on the hill: BACH area reports from Çatalhöyük, Turkey (Monumenta Archaeologica 27). xxvii+594 pages, numerous b&w illustrations and tables. 2012. Los Angeles (CA): Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press; 978-1-931745-66-6 hardback $76. - Volume 87 Issue 337 - Karina Croucher

Drawing on relational theoretical perspectives in archaeological discourse, this paper considers how we can address the undervaluation of pedagogy and pedagogic research in archaeology. Through examining the relationships between fieldwork, teaching, and research, in light of Ingold's concept of the meshwork and DeLanda's assemblage theory, the div...

Background The disciplines of palliative care and archaeology have rarely had the means or incentive to engage. This research introduces a new project which initiates dialogue between the study of the ancient and the contemporary. The project is in its exploratory stages and participation in PCC will inform future research direction. Archaeological...

An Archaeology of the Senses. Prehistoric Malta. By SkeatesRobin. 250mm. Pp 287, 37 figs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. ISBN 9780199216604. £75 (hbk). - Volume 92 - Karina Croucher

This article addresses Anatolia during the Neolithic, a time-span covering approximately 5,000 years, and a geographical region broadly covering modern-day central and southern Turkey. The period is traditionally divided up chronologically into time spans which broadly correspond to those of the Levant. These are, the Pre-Pottery Neolithic (PPN), w...

During the summer months of 2004 and 2005, the archaeology team of the History, Classics and Archaeology Subject Centre (Higher Education Academy (HEA)) carried out the most comprehensive survey of the opinions and experiences of archaeological fieldwork among archaeology students and staff in the UK. Our aim was to investigate perceptions and expe...

Here be Dragons? - Enterprising Graduates in the Humanities is based upon interviews with graduates from a range of humanities subjects who are currently running their own businesses. This report is not intended to be a guide to teaching business skills to humanities students, but aims to demonstrate to lecturers, tutors, careers advisors and other...

Figurines have traditionally been investigated in terms of their typology and related function. However, the figurine record may additionally contribute to studies of the body and identity, providing evidence into how the body may have been physically treated or manipulated, such as through examples of artificial cranial modification. We discuss th...