EAA STUDENT AWARD 2017

The European Association of Archaeologists awards the 2017 Student Award of the European Association of Archaeologists to Emma Brownlee for her paper The Dead and their Possessions: The Agency of the Cadaver in Early Medieval Europe.

The European Association of Archaeologists awards the Runner-Up 2017 Student Award of the European Association of Archaeologists to Yftinus van Popta for his paper No Country for Men. Linking Material and Immaterial Datasets for a Modern Day Perception of the Medieval Battle against the Zuiderzee, the Netherlands (A.D. 1100–1400).

Emma Brownlee reacts against the widely accepted idea that ‘the dead do not bury themselves’, which focusses on the perspective of mourners. Instead, Brownlee emphasizes the agency of the corpse in funerary rites, with reference to recent archaeological thinking about dead bodies. The case of the Early Medieval cemetery at Pleidelsheim in Germany is considered, which sees a steady decrease then cessation in the use of grave goods. This, it is argued, could have been due to the influence of changing Christian notions of personhood, possessions and the resurrected body. In this way, a bold theoretical position is worked through via a carefully considered case study.  The resulting paper is very interesting, persuasively argued, well supported, and excellently presented.

Yftinus van Popta explores the late medieval maritime culture in the area of the former Zuiderzee, a large tidal lagoon of the North Sea in the northwest of the Netherlands, part of which was reclaimed as land during the twentieth century. Particular attention is paid to the drowned medieval settlement of Fenehuysen. van Popta recently discovered this site as a consequence of constructing a layered GIS-model, which combined a wide range of datasets from geology, geography, history, and maritime archaeology. Through this interesting high-quality study, then, new light is being shed on the dynamic late medieval maritime cultural landscape of the Zuiderzee.

We would like to thank the sponsors of the EAA 2017 Student Award who kindly donated book vouchers and benefits worth EUR 1,500:

Antiquity
Archaeolingua
BAR publishing
Cambridge University Press
Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press
Oxbow Books
Oxford University Press
Society for American Archaeology
Springer
SUNY Press
Taylor and Francis
Thames and Hudson
Wiley and Blackwell