SPMA's Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture 2026: ‘Rot with thy author: the history and archaeology of buried books‘ by Prof Gabriel Moshenska

The 2026 Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Gabriel Moshenska (University College London, Institute of Archaeology).

The lecture and following drinks reception will take place during the Theoretical Archaeology Group Conference (TAG) (https://tag2026.square.site/) in Exeter, UK. As always, the lecture will be free to attend: attendees need not be conference delegates. The Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture is hybrid.

Gabe Moshenska is Professor of Public Archaeology (https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/2587-gabriel-moshenska) at University College London Institute of Archaeology. His current areas of research include nineteenth-century mummy unrollings, buried books, forgotten air raid shelters, and antiquarian ghost stories.

He is the editor-in-chief of Public Archaeology (https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/ypua20), editor of Teaching and Learning the Archaeology of the Contemporary Era (https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/teaching-and-learning-the-archaeology-of-the-contemporary-era-9781350335639/), and author of Material Cultures of Childhood in Second World War Britain (https://www.routledge.com/Material-Cultures-of-Childhood-in-Second-World-War-Britain/Moshenska/p/book/9780367786564).

Professor Gabriel Moshenska, ‘Rot with thy author: the history and archaeology of buried books‘

Book burial is a narrow, neglected, but enduring thread in fiction, folklore, history, ethnography and archaeology. In my research I have encountered stories of buried books entwined with the lives of prophets, prisoners, artists, exiles, demons, magicians, kings, soldiers, blasphemous scientists, baffled archaeologists, degenerate poets, and impecunious university administrators. As book lovers know, habent sua fata libelli: books have their destinies, and sometimes it is to be buried in the earth. The domesticity of books and their association with orderly, dry, indoor spaces makes the burial of books in the cold wet ground a fascinating and disturbing idea.

In this talk I will explore some of the histories, archaeologies and mythologies of buried books in search of insights into human-book relations and the nature of books as things. Books are buried to protect or honour them, to dispose of them, to accompany the dead, and to pass them on to future generations. The accounts of book burial presented in this talk are drawn from archaeological reports, renaissance and early modern literature, conversations with conservators, interviews with scholars of Islam and Judaism, and research into time capsules, garbology, lost libraries and hidden archives. The buried books themselves range from the dull ubiquity of a telephone book in a landfill to the astonishing revelations of ancient Chinese bamboo strip manuscripts and the precious fragments of the Faddan More Psalter. I also (almost) found a patron saint of buried books.

Description supplied by the event organiser.