Keynote lectures

Archaeology to help build better futures

Time: Wednesday, 3 September, 18:45-19:45 CET
Place: Online through conference web platform integrated with Zoom

Rachel J. Crellin

The last two decades of thinking in archaeological theory have been marked by the emergence of a wide range of relational theoretical approaches. Symmetrical archaeology, new materialism, assemblage theory, entanglement, posthumanism, the new animisms and Indigenous thinking have all pushed archaeological theory in new directions to reconsider the role of humans, our understandings of matter, the intransigence of dualisms and the political implications of our discipline. In a world marked by polycrisis, an engagement with archaeological theory offers one means through which to critically consider how we make our work relevant. In my own work I draw on posthumanist feminism as an affirmative relational framework through which I can not only better describe the diversity of pasts but also open up new ways of thinking that can contribute to the project of building better tomorrows. We have long known that whilst our discipline might study the past, it exists in the present and plays a role in shaping our futures. In this talk I will argue that archaeological theory offers a key way through which we can contribute to this collective process.

Biography

Rachel is Associate Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leicester. She is the author of Change and Archaeology and a co-author of Archaeological Theory in Dialogue (with Craig Cipolla, Lindsay Montgomery, Oliver Harris, and Sophie Moore, 2021, Routledge) and Archaeology for Today and Tomorrow (with Craig Cipolla and Oliver Harris). Her research interests centre on archaeological theory, especially posthumanist feminism and new materialism, Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain and Ireland, and metalwork wear analysis. She currently co-directs the Round Mounds of the Isle of Man fieldwork project and leads the Leverhulme-funded project A New History of Bronze.

From an imagined past to an imagined future: a cross-section of archaeology, public archaeology, and heritage

Time: Tuesday, 2 September, 10:00 CET (during Opening Ceremony)
Place: Online through conference web platform integrated with Zoom

Tatjana Cvjetićanin

Heritage-making, along with heritage policies and practices, is often perceived as a domain where binary opposites meet: pasts and presents, professionals and publics, individuals and communities, economic and scientific interests or governmental and civic society priorities.

Initially concerned primarily with archaeological heritage management — sites and objects, their stewardship, conservation, environmental monitoring and sustainability — archaeologists and heritage scholars gradually turned their attention to the processes of the construction of meaning of archaeological heritage. Concepts such as identity, memory, place, landscape, value, authenticity, representation, temporality or future(s) came into the focus. An important realm for critical archaeological heritage studies emerged through public archaeology, seen as a “place and practice” for critical reconsiderations of political, economic or legal contexts of making and preserving archaeological heritage.

Although critical heritage studies and public archaeology have already raised numerous questions challenging traditional approaches to heritage creation and entanglements (not interactions) within the heritage realm, there is still the need to ask some of the questions again.

1. What, in fact, constitutes archaeological heritage? Is archaeological heritage every archaeological deposit and each record? Why do archaeologists prefer to excavate heritage rather than archaeological sites? Archaeological heritage seems to be a “thing”. “Archaeological Heritage constitutes the basic record of past human activities” (EAA Rome 2024, topic 3).
2. Who or what may enter into the making of archaeological heritage? Are participation, inclusion, mediation or citizen science just buzzwords?
3. Do archaeologists and heritage professionals with archaeological background clearly recognize the necessity to change and to use their knowledge to grow from “gatekeepers” to community collaborators and activists, to contribute to societal transformation?

Biography

Tatjana Cvjetićanin is a curator at the National Museum of Serbia (since 1990), at present of the Late Roman and Early Byzantine collection, as well as a full professor at the Department of Archaeology, Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Belgrade (since 2020). She holds Ph.D. in archaeology from the Belgrade University, Serbia (1997), and she is an alumna of the fellowship programme of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. She is the former director of the National Museum in Belgrade (2003-2012).

Her interests are equally divided between topics related to archaeology in museums – public archaeology and museology and histories of those disciplines, with rich experience in museum management, strategic planning and development, and collection presentation and interpretation, and Roman pottery and phenomena related to the fortified Roman border. At present, she is the president of the Society for the Roman pottery studies, Rei Cretaria Romanae Fautores. She was involved in the development of the Balkan Museum Network, a regional NGO that recognizes museum professionals and museums as force for a change and important part of the peacebuilding effort at Balkan, and currently is the president of the Steering Board of the Network.

What does it mean to be Ethical as an Archaeologist in 2025?

Interrogating our relationship to Scientific Integrity, Activism, and Social Responsibility in uncertain times

Time: Thursday, 4 September, 18:45-19:45 CET
Place: Online through conference web platform integrated with Zoom

Liv Nilsson Stutz

As European Archaeologists we are currently living in an era of multiple challenges to our integrity as intellectuals and researchers. Our now entrenched neo-liberal economic structures and ideologies deeply impact the mechanics of everyday work in universities, museums, and contract archaeology (including austerity measures, privatization, and productivity measured by speed and quantity). At the same time, neo-conservative politics yet again prey on our prehistoric and historic pasts and the institutions devoted to these, to provide fodder for myth making and nationalist narratives. There is talk of “a crisis in the Humanities,” but paradoxically, the moment our critical thoughts start to have an impact on debates and policies, with regards to topics such as race, gender, colonialism, climate change, diversity and equality, they are attacked for being “woke” and “ideological.” The situation is exasperated by the undermining of scientific knowledge in public discourse, in particular online.

The past has always been political, but today the challenges are developing fast. These changes occur within the scientific realm, where new methods yield large quantities of new data (and new ways to analyse and process them), and outside of it, where a new political and cultural climate increases the stakes for how we work and the place we claim in cultural debates and scientific knowledge production. As archaeologists working with the silent materiality of the past, the labor of interpreting it has yet again become a profession with great responsibility to the present and the future. Archaeology as a discipline has the potential to be a vehicle to think through not only the complexity of human nature, culture, and experience, but also to visualize and critique systems of power, and perhaps even to offer alternatives. But to achieve this we must be critical, curious, and courageous. This keynote asks how we as archaeologists living and working in Europe, in 2025, can understand and address these challenges? More precisely:

• What does it mean to be a truly interdisciplinary archaeologist with integrity in an era characterized by the third science revolution and the neo-liberal university?
• What does it mean to be a specialist of the past in an era of nationalist and conservative myth making?
• What does it mean to be a socially conscious archaeologist devoted to meaningful engagement with communities in an era of “Elite Capture”? How can we do activism right?

Biography

Liv Nilsson Stutz is a professor of archaeology at Linnaeus University in Sweden. She has a background in both archaeology and biological anthropology, and her work is focused on merging archaeological methods (archaeothanatology in particular) with archaeological and cultural theory to provide a framework to approach the human experience of death in the past. While the models she uses are general, most of her work has been in prehistoric archaeology. She is also committed to exploring and problematizing the professional ethics of the handling of human remains in museums and research. She is the director of the Linnaeus University Research Centre “Concurrencs in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies” and currently serves on several editorial boards including the Yearbook of the American Association of Biological Anthropology and the Cambridge University Press series in World Archaeology.