Emerging Cypriot + Archaeology Films

While I was doing a bit of background for a short piece I’m writing (that is late!), I came across the Emerging Cypriot project, which has several short films that were made by a professional filmmaker collaborating with the Pyla-Koutsopetria Archaeological Project.  I’m always happy to find more archaeological media available on the web, and it’s interesting to see how other people frame the same topics.

As I may have mentioned previously, this semester I am TA’ing Introduction to Archaeology with Ruth, which is fairly media-heavy, as one might imagine.  For their midterm we had the students watch two short movies, the first being about Ruth’s Opovo project and a professionally made film called Under These Fields 1,000 years ago.  They compared these two projects, and had to write a critical examination of the authorship, intended audience, and variable audience response, using knowledge from the textbook. I just graded a whole passel of them and was surprised to see that most of them liked the Opovo film better–the shaky, handheld, goofy homemade thing that it was. It will be interesting to see how things like youtube and the greater ubiquity of DIY media will shape aesthetics and the perception of media products.

Author: colleenmorgan

Dr. Colleen Morgan (ORCID 0000-0001-6907-5535) is the Lecturer in Digital Archaeology and Heritage in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York. She conducts research on digital media and archaeology, with a special focus on embodiment, avatars, genetics and bioarchaeology. She is interested in building archaeological narratives with emerging technology, including photography, video, mobile and locative devices. Through archaeological making she explores past lifeways and our current understanding of heritage, especially regarding issues of authority, authenticity, and identity. View all posts by colleenmorgan