Karina Croucher

Assembling archaeological pedagogy. A theoretical framework for valuing pedagogy in archaeological interpretation and practice

Drawing on relational theoretical perspectives in archaeological discourse, this paper considers how we can address the undervaluation of pedagogy and pedagogic research in archaeology. Through examining the relationships between fieldwork, teaching, and research, in light of Ingolds concept of the meshwork and DeLandas assemblage theory, the division between teaching and research is undermined, and students and pedagogy are recentred as fundamental to the production of archaeological knowledge. This paper provides a theoretical grounding for resituating our current practices, suggests practical means for change, and highlights the benefit to the archaeological discipline arising from a revaluation of archaeological pedagogic research and an enmeshed understanding of archaeological practice.

Road my body goes: re-creating ancestors from stone at the great moai quarry of Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui (Easter Island)

Abstract Recognizable throughout the world, the stone statues (moai) of Rapa Nui (Easter Island) represent the largest monolithic architecture produced in Polynesia. The exquisitely carved and finished head and torso of each statue testifies to a skill in stone carving and dressing unmatched throughout the Pacific. Yet, approximately one thousand ‘classic’ statues were produced at the quarries within a few hundred years. What was the ritual status of the quarry and the labour necessary to produce the numbers of statues that allowed Heyerdahl to declare that the ‘whole mountain massif has been reshaped, the volcano has been greedily cut up’ (1958: 83)? What was it like to go to work at Rano Raraku? By drawing on a range of evidence we argue that walking to and labouring at Rano Raraku represented a spatial and temporal journey to a place of highly dangerous forces, a cosmogonic centre where prehistoric Rapa Nui people came face to face with their ancestors and the Polynesian gods.

Personal, Political, Pedagogic: Challenging the Binary Bind in Archaeological Teaching, Learning and Fieldwork

In this paper, we consider how we can undercut the various binaries of gender and sexuality in archaeological practice and particularly in our teaching. We argue that taking an assemblage theory approach enables us to look at the multiplicity of identities of those practicing archaeology as different and intersecting assemblages that bring one another into being through their connections at different scales. In particular, we examine how this approach can be applied to archaeological pedagogy and how this in turn enables us to move away from modern binary distinctions about sex and gender identities from the ‘bottom up’, fostering an approach in our students that will then go on to be developed in professional practice.

Digitised Diseases: Seeing Beyond the Specimen to Understand Disease and Disability in the Past

Digitised Diseases is a major web-based 3D resource of chronic disease conditions that manifest change to the human skeleton. The resource was established through funds from Jisc, the University of Bradford and Bradford Visualisation. The multi-disciplinary team, involving project partners MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology) and the Royal College of Surgeons of England, undertook a programme of mass digitisation of pathological type specimens from world-renowned archaeological, historic and medical collections at the University of Bradford, in London and York. We continue to augment this resource through ingestion of new content. The resource was always envisaged as needing to appeal to a diverse user community, having impact not just among academic and clinical beneficiaries, but also enriching the wider understanding of public health in the past. From the outset, our focus was on making sure that the digitised palaeopathological exemplars were represented and understood within a broader clinical context. We wanted to emphasise the impact of living with disease and disability in an era before modern therapies were available, and the significance of the health-related care provision that would have been required at a societal level in view of the longevity of many of these conditions.

Prioritizing death and society: the archaeology of Chalcolithic and contemporary cemeteries in the Southern Levant

and Faulkner, Sherman seeks to carve out a space for the restoration of symbolic value to the bodies of the dead. He makes modernism new and rejuvenates its defiant spirit by bringing current theoretical approaches to bear on these canonical works. The chapter on the queer erotics of death in T.S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes is particularly original and provocative. The sheer breadth of Sherman’s scholarship is one of the book’s great strengths, but it does not bear its knowledge lightly. The proliferation of citations, particularly in the introductory chapter, weighs the narrative down somewhat, and it is difficult at times to discern the author’s voice amid the wealth of writers and critics he draws from. Ultimately, however, this is an impressive work of scholarship that makes strange the dearth of critical attention previously granted its topic. Largely neglected in studies of modernism, the figure of the corpse, in Sherman’s hands, emerges not only as a potent symbol of the cultural and creative deadlock out of which the extraordinary achievements of the moderns were borne, but as a site of impasse in its own right. The historian Philippe Ariès claimed that no serious work on death is free of ambiguity and Sherman places ambiguity at the centre of his analysis (Ariès, 1991, p. 377). Neither fully absent nor properly present, disruptive of the temporal flow of life, and obstinately inassimilable, these modernist corpses, in their strange rooms, interrupt the aggressive machinery of modernisation within which the demands of the dead remain under threat of being drowned out.

Field Schools, Transferable Skills and Enhancing Employability

During the summer months of 2004 and 2005, the archaeology team of the History, Classics and Archaeology Subject Centre (Higher Education Academy (HEA)) carried out the most comprehensive survey of the opinions and experiences of archaeological fieldwork among archaeology students and staff in the UK. Our aim was to investigate perceptions and expectations of fieldwork in archaeology at undergraduate degree level in Britain. To do this, we visited 32 excavations that were either explicitly run as field schools or that provided training opportunities for archaeology undergraduates. In this chapter, we outline some of the key findings of this study in order to explore the role of field schools in providing transferable skills and enhancing employability.

Beyond human: The materiality of personhood

Archaeological research has been influenced by feminist thought and critique for decades. In the early 1990s, new narratives began to be written about the past. Starting with a search for women and gendered identities in our prehistories, these have developed into a new way of understanding the relationships between people, objects and animals, both in the past and in the present. Archaeological research has been concerned with the relationships between the ‘human’ and the ‘other’ for a number of decades, whether they involve nonhuman animals, objects we use and create, or attitudes to the landscape and environment. The nonhuman, in other words, is central to our work. We hope in this piece to demonstrate the contribution archaeological insights could make to feminist theorising about the nonhuman.

Keeping the dead close: grief and bereavement in the treatment of skulls from the Neolithic Middle East

Abstract Theories of Continuing Bonds, and more recently, the Dual Process of Grieving, have provided new ways of understanding the bereavement process, and have influenced current practice for counsellors, end-of-life care practitioners and other professionals. This paper uses these theories in a new way, exploring their relevance to archaeological interpretation, with particular reference to the phenomenon of the plastering of skulls of the deceased in the Neolithic of South-west Asia (the Middle East/Near East), suggesting that traditional archaeological interpretations, which focus on concepts of status and social organisation, may be missing a more basic reaction to grief and a desire to keep the dead close for longer.

Archaeology and modern reflections on death

Professionals working with patients at end of life need to feel comfortable and confident discussing death, dying and bereavement (DDB), however this is not always the case.1 2 The Continuing Bonds Project sought to explore the impact of archaeology on the confidence and comfort for health and social care professionals and students in talking about DDB.3 4 Case studies from the distant and recent past, across cultures and geographical space, were used in themed workshops facilitating participants to reflect on and discuss memorialisation, legacy, age and circumstance of death, images of the dead, ancestors, place, treatment of the dead and objects. The impact of the workshops has been evaluated using a number of methods including discussion with participants as to what they did as a consequence of attending a workshop. As an illustration of the impact that is emerging we share here one specific outcome: a poem that one participant wrote as a consequence of attending a workshop and the continued impact on …