We are very excited to share with you the abstracts provided by our invited speakers! They will be speaking on three very different topics. NASTA Organising Committee member Brodhie Molloy has worked very hard on accompanying the abstracts with an abstract “picture book” as part of her investigation of the ways we communicate archaeological stories to non-expert audiences, both within the discipline and to the public. We would like to thank our invited speakers for graciously agreeing (and enthousiastically participating) in Brodhie’s project!
With less than a month to go before the conference, we’re working hard to finalise the schedule for the day and setting up the programme book (with all the accepted abstracts). Stay tuned as we will publish the schedule and programme book over the next two weeks!
You can also register for the conference by clicking the trusty Register Now! button at the top of the page. You will be redirected to the official conference hosting platform Hopin. We hope to see you on May 20th!
"Telling a Different Kind of Story: Using comics to talk about local, threatened and indigenous archaeology and cultural heritage."
John Swogger, Archaeological Illustration
From museums to excavation sites, the way in which we talk about the past is being ever more bound up with the way in which we talk about the present – and the future. This is good thing! But it has shed new light on how exactly we as archaeologists talk about the past, and who gets to do that talking.
Over the past fifteen years, I have worked with comics as a medium for explaining, presenting and discussing the past. These comics have been created as interpretation and outreach materials for museums, archaeological excavations, government programmes, community engagement projects, academic publications and repatriation cases.
I have come to appreciate the way in which the medium has enabled me to not only tell stories about past peoples, places and events in a very different way – but to also tell very different kinds of stories about the past. This has been really clear when using comics to talk about local history, threatened sites and monuments, and indigenous heritage.
My talk will look back at some of the comics projects I’ve worked on over the past fifteen years, and highlight how comics have helped tell such stories differently, helped tell different kinds of stories, and helped connect with communities and voices who often are not part of that process.
From museums to excavation sites, the way in which we talk about the past is being ever more bound up with the way in which we talk about the present – and the future. This is good thing! But it has shed new light on how exactly we as archaeologists talk about the past, and who gets to do that talking.
Over the past fifteen years, I have worked with comics as a medium for explaining, presenting and discussing the past. These comics have been created as interpretation and outreach materials for museums, archaeological excavations, government programmes, community engagement projects, academic publications and repatriation cases.
I have come to appreciate the way in which the medium has enabled me to not only tell stories about past peoples, places and events in a very different way – but to also tell very different kinds of stories about the past. This has been really clear when using comics to talk about local history, threatened sites and monuments, and indigenous heritage.
My talk will look back at some of the comics projects I’ve worked on over the past fifteen years, and highlight how comics have helped tell such stories differently, helped tell different kinds of stories, and helped connect with communities and voices who often are not part of that process.
"Interpretations, reconstructions, and popular views of the past: the complexities of gender stereotypes" (working title)
Bisserka Gaydarska, Durham University
Archaeological interpretations, museum reconstructions and popular views of the past are riddled with gender stereotypes. This is a continuous and common practice, despite years of excellent scholarship challenging such uncritical notions of the past.
This paper will not offer a digest of how to smash gender stereotypes (to borrow a phrase from this year’s conference theme) but will attempt to open a conversation about the complexities of gender identity in the past and the present.
Projecting current debates to the past is as unhelpful as is picturing past identities as simple and fixed. The conversation will include questions about how we acquire knowledge and how we assess data and information, how we gather evidence and what (and whom?) we can trust.
The overarching message of this presentation makes a plea for critical awareness, fair assessment of the evidence and responsibility in the creation of both grand narratives and local storytelling.
Archaeological interpretations, museum reconstructions and popular views of the past are riddled with gender stereotypes. This is a continuous and common practice, despite years of excellent scholarship challenging such uncritical notions of the past.
This paper will not offer a digest of how to smash gender stereotypes (to borrow a phrase from this year’s conference theme) but will attempt to open a conversation about the complexities of gender identity in the past and the present.
Projecting current debates to the past is as unhelpful as is picturing past identities as simple and fixed. The conversation will include questions about how we acquire knowledge and how we assess data and information, how we gather evidence and what (and whom?) we can trust.
The overarching message of this presentation makes a plea for critical awareness, fair assessment of the evidence and responsibility in the creation of both grand narratives and local storytelling.
"Make new things but keep the old: a social archaeology of innovation"
Catherine J. Frieman, Australian National University
Innovation—at its basic level an anthropocentric process of change over time—looms large in the contemporary world, being bound up in the core economic, social and political relations of the capitalist world. Unsurprisingly, this fascination has inspired research into and critical of innovation and innovative practices across myriad academic fields, archaeology among them. We archaeologists have a longstanding and probably inescapable fascination with the temporality of change. From biblical and evolutionary models to scientific dating methods, change over time has been a continuing focus of our research. Even as archaeological thought has fragmented over the last several decades – with new interpretative approaches emerging almost as fast as new scientific methods – how and why new ideas emerge and spread has remained a central concern of archaeologists around the world. Despite this persistent fascination, I argue that we have rarely engaged with innovation as a social phenomenon—and even more rarely considered the social processes of non-innovation: conservatism, tradition, and resistance. In this paper, I outline a social archaeology of innovation that sees both innovation and non-innovation as emergent from the complex relationships between people, technologies and the wider world. This model gives us fertile ground to revisit old debates, pose new questions, and side step the old evolutionary approaches in order to envision a more complicated, more human past.
Innovation—at its basic level an anthropocentric process of change over time—looms large in the contemporary world, being bound up in the core economic, social and political relations of the capitalist world. Unsurprisingly, this fascination has inspired research into and critical of innovation and innovative practices across myriad academic fields, archaeology among them. We archaeologists have a longstanding and probably inescapable fascination with the temporality of change. From biblical and evolutionary models to scientific dating methods, change over time has been a continuing focus of our research. Even as archaeological thought has fragmented over the last several decades – with new interpretative approaches emerging almost as fast as new scientific methods – how and why new ideas emerge and spread has remained a central concern of archaeologists around the world. Despite this persistent fascination, I argue that we have rarely engaged with innovation as a social phenomenon—and even more rarely considered the social processes of non-innovation: conservatism, tradition, and resistance. In this paper, I outline a social archaeology of innovation that sees both innovation and non-innovation as emergent from the complex relationships between people, technologies and the wider world. This model gives us fertile ground to revisit old debates, pose new questions, and side step the old evolutionary approaches in order to envision a more complicated, more human past.