ABSTRACT
In the context of anthropocentric memory, socio-cultural history and identity politics, burial sites (cemeteries) and human remains are important to the formation of communities and nations, often contributing to the definition of their territorial limits. Thus the dead (their remains and graves), the earth and nationalism (necronationalism) are all closely related. Control over dead bodies is a litmus test for international politics. Dead bodies lay claim to soil. Exhumations, repatriations and reburials of remains resulting from archaeological investigation are akin to nationalistic appropriation of the soil. What is termed the politics of the dead body is fundamental to the formation of the ideology of a national community, while the relocation of remains and reburials (particularly of national heroes and enemies), as well as the construction of memorials or their destruction, remains closely associated with political transformations and the rewriting of history which follows (Verdery 1999; Ferrándiz and Robben 2015; Mihesuah 2000; Tarlow and Stutz 2013).
