During the Great War of 1914-1918, the British government recognised the need to honour the fallen, and show official gratitude to their next of kin. This commemoration of the dead took the form of a Bronze Memorial Plaque that later came to be known as the ‘Dead Man's Penny' or the ‘Death Plaque'. For the bereaved, these plaques, sometimes displayed in domestic shrines, were anchoring points for emotion, memory, and meaning, and often came to represent absent loved ones. As time passed, these artefacts, like many private war memorials, passed out of memory and were largely forgotten. Today, the Death Plaque is a material-culture legacy of a war which has come to symbolise the destruction, trauma, and loss which marked the devastating collective experience of the world's first industrialised conflict. Across 90 years, these objects have accumulated many new and layered meanings, as they have been lost, discarded, bequeathed, collected, researched, traded, and displayed in public and private collections. This talk will examine the biography of the Dead Man's Penny, for it is in the complex processes of transformation and entanglement between people and objects that meaning given to things is revealed as the same process by which meaning is given to human lives.

Julie Dunne, MSci, is a postgraduate researcher in the Organic Geochemistry Unit at the University of Bristol. She is currently researching the effects of climate and environmental change on subsistence strategies throughout the Holocene in the Libyan Sahara, using an integrated molecular, isotopic and archaeological approach. Her current research interests also include the archaeology of conflict and modern day burial grounds. During her time at Bristol University she studied for an MSci in Archaeological Science.