Themes
  1. Coffins in their funerary context
    Coffins do not exist in isolation: they are nodes in a broader funerary system. This theme encourages contributions that read coffins relationally — in dialogue with other objects, spaces, and texts that together constitute the funerary environment.

    Subthemes

    • The decoration process of coffins, tombs, papyri, cartonnage mummy cases, and other funerary equipment: distinctive features and interconnections.
    • The iconography, texts, palaeography, and visual grammar of coffins and associated funerary materials: continuation, variation, regionality, and innovation.
    • Coffins and texts in dialogue with funerary literature: continuity, transformation, and intertextuality.
    • Artistic networks and workshop organisation.
    • The social and administrative dimensions of coffins as part of funerary production.
       
  2. Materiality and technical investigation
    The materiality of coffins and associated objects is a primary source in its own right. This theme welcomes contributions that bring scientific analysis to bear on what these objects are made of, how they were made.

    Subthemes

    • Multi-technique and multimodal methodology.
    • New insights on materials identification and manufacturing techniques.
    • Comparative studies across time and regionality.
       
  3. Conservation practices and their contribution to coffin studies
    Conservation is not only a practical discipline but an analytical one. This theme explores how conservation work generates knowledge, and how its results can be mobilised beyond the laboratory or the archaeological site.

    Subthemes

    • Preventive conservation, storage environments, and treatment methodologies: new insights.
    • Conservation results as a resource for Egyptological and technical research.
       
  4. The archaeological context of Third Intermediate Period coffins
    The Vatican Coffin Project was built on the study of the so-called ‘yellow coffins’ of the Third Intermediate Period. This theme returns to this chronological focus, asking what can still be recovered — from archival documentation, rejoining dispersed assemblages, and reconstructing collection histories — about the contexts from which these objects came.

    Subthemes

    • Histories of excavation, collection, and trade.
    • Reconstruction of tomb assemblages and their social aspects.
    • Archival documentation and its analytical potential.