The PresentDead team is not particularly chatty – well, at least when it comes to blogging (a topic we have brought up before). But this has been quite a long break – whilst a lot happened in the project. The most important of which being that the PresentDead project moved to the Department of Classics, University of Graz, and that we have been hiring and, for now, have completed our team, with:
- Michelle Sima, as the student assistant, who was the first to join in autumn
- Laura Elmer, followed soon after and took over all data-related business
- Jasmin Özyurt for analysis of archaeological finds
- Eliza Orellana-Gonzalez started work in February on the bio-anthropology and taphonomic analysis of graves (together with Astrid Noterman)
- And finally, Regina Csordás has just joined the team, to work as an external team member on the archaeological evidence from Hungarian cemeteries
The rest of the team remains unchanged, with Thom Gobbitt as the project historian and Ali Klevnäs currently already preparing for the publication of the papers of our 2025 European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) session #35 on Grave reopening in the first millennium CE - connecting European regions – anyone out there who is not in the session but interested in contributing to the edited volume please do get in touch!
Finally, this is also the occasion to express my BIG thank you to Elisabeth Todt, our project assistant during the time when the PresentDead was based at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) in Vienna: great job done in so many ways, thank you for your support and expertise!
Our advisory board has been enhanced through the running of a couple of small workshops on artefact preservation and on data modelling. Information on the panel and also about the project is available on our new homepage at the University of Graz:
We also had a short project summary published here:
PRESENT DEAD
Edeltraud Aspöck (2025), "Investigating interactions with the dead in early medieval Central and Eastern Europe from 5th to 8th centuries CE", pp.74-77. Available at https://www.europeandissemination.eu/article/investigating-interactions-with-the-dead-in-early-medieval-central-and-eastern-europe-from-5th-to-8th-centuries-ce/23256. (Accessed: 12 May 2025).
So here we are again, with more to follow soon.