Archaeology and the Muses

Archaeology and Her Muses is a salon of workshops hosted by Meg Conkey and Ruth Tringham, and other members of the project. These workshops are open to the public and involve hands-on practice and participation, in a "master-class format". The workshops propose different ways to conceive, reconfigure, and interact with material culture. Additionally, we explore alternative ways in which to interpret archaeological data and methods in a more artistic and humanistic manner, with the express purpose of engaging the general public.  

Once one stops to think about it, we can recognize that  the proliferation of ideas about the human past, about specific sites  and "finds" and  specific personalities (e.g. Cleopatra)  goes on all the time; indeed, selected aspects of the archaeological record have what can be called "cultural afterlives", very often in the arts and popular culture. Often these afterlives , in turn,  influence the work of subsequent archaeology and archaeologists and they certainly influence our many publics. We accept that this is certainly an important route to engaging the public in what archaeologists do and how we think and create narratives about the past. But the practice of these arts themselves is an important route to deepening the multisensorial experience of the archaeological enterprise. Martin Henig writes that “Archaeology illuminates the arts and is in turn illuminated by them”. This reciprocity is something that we endeavor to disentangle in the project. Although the topic seems to stray far from the empirical data of the archaeological record, we shall show that these same data are the inspiration for and basis for the interpretive narratives. At its foundation, this is a course about archaeological imaginations.  

1. Tuesday, 8 February, 9-12noon: Lateral thinking from three-dimensional expression of archaeology: miniaturization, pastiche, sculpture, led by Dr. Douglass Bailey, Dept. of Anthropology, San Francisco State University. Facilitator: Carolyn Smith 
2. Tuesday, 15 March, 9-12noon:Narratives,cultural  afterlives, and the adjacent discourses of archaeology and literature, led by Dr. Karin Sanders, Dept of Scandinavian Studies, UC Berkeley, facilitated by Erin Rodriguez
3.  Tuesday, 29 March, 9-12noon: The photographic gaze on archaeology, led by Dr. Michael Ashley, Dept of Anthropology and Center for Digital Archaeology (CoDA), UC Berkeley

4. Tuesday, 12 April, 9-12noon: Archaeology as Theater, led by Drs. Adrian and Mary Praetzellis, Dept of Anthropology, Sonoma State University

5. Tuesday, April 19, 9-12noon: Musings to subvert archaeology's master narrative: mock documentary, cartoon, satire, graphic novel, games, led and facilitated by Dr. Ruth Tringham, Dept of Anthropology, UC Berkeley
6. Tuesday, April 26, 10-12noon: General musings of the project participants