I’ve had the lovely opportunity of having part of my undergraduate honors thesis tarted up and reprinted in the artist Susan Kooi’s book, Lonely Planet Yamatai Koku. The book is printed from right to left, Japanese style, and there is an official book launch in Amsterdam on 15 February, between 20:00 and 22:00 at San Serriffe.
From Susan:
There will be books, music and saké for sure, but there is still space for other happenings as well. So if you have anything you would like to contribute, you are very welcome to add something to the program!
I love working with artists pretty much more than anything and it was a great privilege that Susan took an interest in my previous research on Queen Himiko and the Yayoi period of Japanese archaeology.
Title: Human, Posthuman, Transhuman Digital Archaeologies
Abstract:
Our engagement with the digital is reformulating the ways in which we (post/humans) engage with/create our worlds. In archaeology, digital processes and media are affording new practices of production, consumption and reception of knowledge, while throwing new light on existing analog methods. The digital is extending our cognitive and sensual capabilities, allowing us to explore previously uncharted grounds, giving us tools to envision the past in different ways, and enabling large datasets to be processed, distributed, and engaged with interactively. During this process, critical appraisal of the archaeological-digital has been relatively limited.
In this session we will evaluate the growing paradigm of digital archaeology from an ontological point of view, showcase the ways digital technologies are being applied in archaeological practice—in the field/lab/studio/classroom—in order to critically engage with the range of questions about past people and worlds into which digital media give us new insights and avenues of approach. We ask how digital media and technology are being applied, whether they are broadening access to the archaeological record and how they are shifting relationships between archaeologists, the archaeological record and the public.
Papers should have a theory-based approach to digital archaeological methods and set the agenda for future investigation. They should discuss the ways digital archaeology is affecting, disrupting and/or enhancing archaeological fieldwork, public archaeology, education and the publication/dissemination of archaeological data. Of particular interest are papers that engage with creativity and making, digital post/transhumanism, query analog methods through digital media, and feminist, indigenous or queer digital archaeologies.
For the session we have determined to pre-circulate papers and have a more general discussion panel at the conference. This will provide us more time and space for truly grappling with the questions at the heart of the session.
We also expect to publish this session in the European Journal of Archaeology. To that end, the following timeline would be applicable
1 February: Let us know that you are interested + provide a title for your paper
15 February: Submit your paper abstract to the EAA
It wasn’t her first word, but it was early, and fervent.
MOON. Before “mama” even. MOON. She points at the sky, finger connecting to the bright crescent. It doesn’t seem to matter if it is full, or a thin sliver, or covered by clouds. MOON. She asks after it several times a day, like a friend or a sibling. Now I look out for it as well, check when it rises so we can go out and affirm, yes, MOON.
I’m not the first person to observe how having children changes the way you think about things. Recently Rumaan Alam noted how his children’s awe (or lack thereof) changed how he sees art, citing beloved John Berger’s Ways of Seeing. In On Looking, Alexandra Horowitz guides us to look through the eyes of “experts,” including a geologist, artist, physician, urban sociologist…and a dog and a child.
My Tamsin is a similar age to Horowitz’s 1.5 year old son—Tamsin is also “blessed with the ability to admire the unlovely.” Touching, tasting, being, tripping, laughing. Horowitz compares her son’s investigation of things found on their walk to a kind of archaeology, “exploring the bit of discarded candy wrapper; collecting a fistful of pebbles and a twig and a torn corner of a paperback; swishing dirt back and forth along the ground.” I instantly thought of Angela Piccini’s Guttersnipe, still my favorite archaeology movie, wherein Piccini deftly weaves a Bristol history around personal experience through the medium of curbstones. Really. Watch it.
Certainly having a child changes the way that you walk down the street, but it also changes the way I think about the past. Tamsin delighted in long afternoons at our allotment, picking and eating raspberries, blackberries, currants (tart!), then apples and a wonderful plum tree and grapes in the yard of the house in Greece we were at this summer. She became much better than her slightly near-sighted mother at spotting potential edibles, including birds. I’m not sure she’s better than other children at this sort of thing, and I rather suspect not, but I can’t help but think how it might have been incredibly helpful to have a food-spotter lashed to your back as you go along your way.
I realized that I had always thought of children as a burden in the past. The terror of trying to find a warm place for the night, of running out of food, of not being able to keep up with your group after a difficult childbirth…though obviously and sadly these nightmares persist for many people. I had never thought of a baby as a valued sidekick, as a contributing member of the household. The grave goods accompanying a child could celebrate their acumen, their contributions, something more than a parent’s loss.
After finding small caches of socks in books, bananas in couches (ew) and duplo legos in cooking pots, I also think of small finds and deposits I’ve found archaeologically. What an odd collection of small things, it must be a ritual offering….right? Or I wondered how on earth people could have misplaced that obviously valued object, that gold and pearl earring at the bottom of a cooking pit, etc. Now I think of grimy little magpie hands. Probably both are too reductive and mono-causal, but still.
Whether you attribute finds to children or to obscure rituals, these attributions show both our interpretive biases in approaching archaeological remains but also the potential of broadening and changing our archaeological imagination. I have very little in common with people in the past, as I type this blog out on a glowing screen in front of a fire, but small insights from a biological act that I am pretty sure happened in the past—childbearing—helps me think in different ways about their experiences. Yes, my sample is small…but she is growing all the time and she helps me to see things in new and delightful ways.
In 2008 I wrote a fairly shiny, wide-eyed treatment of the use of Facebook in the classroom, arguing that it provided an opportunity to discuss online privacy and a unique way to engage with archaeology. I gave the option for students to create a fake profile for a 19th century resident Zeta Psi fraternity house, a subject of research for one of the classes, when one could still do such a thing. To wit:
A critical pedagogical engagement in archaeology offers the potential to serve as an emancipatory practice, in that dominant political and historical narratives are challenged with the material record, providing a way for students to examine these narratives within their specific historical context and provide their own interpretations (Conkey and Tringham 1996; Hamilakis 2004).
Social media was a great way to get students to translate taught material and research into a sphere that they are more familiar with and use it to query the historical and archaeological record. Great, fabulous…I wrote the short piece for a teaching prize, which I didn’t get. Oh well, add it to my failure CV ala Shawn Graham.
Fast-forward a decade and I receive a notification specifically calling for examples of innovative use of social media within the classroom. Always too early. Oh well. Anyway, I’ve used social media ever since to disseminate archaeological information in various ways, to an almost tedious extent. This autumn I taught a course called Communicating Archaeology wherein the students used blogs as a platform to host archaeological media that they created themselves. I don’t consider this to be radical in any way, just a convenient way to cohesively host content.
….except. Except that I’ve asked them to use WordPress. I quite like WordPress, perhaps obviously, but my (and my students’) content creation provides their bottom line. I can justify this to a certain extent with my own work in that it is a bit like (wince) academic publishing. Would I feel the same if WordPress was funded by adverts and posts actively helping to undermine elections, ala Facebook? Do I know that they are not?
During my last lecture of Communicating Archaeology I emphasized to the students that on social media, the product is YOU. If you choose to engage with social media you may as well try to use it in a way that will benefit you, as those companies are profiting from your participation. For now the pedagogical balance may fall on a structured, critical engagement with social media, but any use in the classroom needs to fully consider the monetization of content and personal information provided.
Colleen Morgan 