John Cherry

Felipe Rojas

In 2014, the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World organized an international writing competition calling for accessible and engaging essays about any aspect of archaeology. Nearly 150 submissions from over two dozen countries were received. Archaeology for the People gathers the best of those entries. Their diverse topics—from the destruction of historic, urban gardens in contemporary Istanbul to the fall of the ancient Maya city— offer a taste of the global reach and relevance of archaeology. Their main common trait, however, is that they prove that archaeology can offer much more to a general audience than Indiana Jones or aliens building pyramids. All of the articles collected in this book combine sophisticated analysis of an exciting archeological problem with prose geared at a non-specialized audience. This book also offers a series of reflections on how and why to engage in dialogues about archaeology with people who are not specialists. These include a stunning photo-essay that captures the challenges of life at an archaeological site in northern Sudan, interviews with a number of leading archaeologists who have successfully written about archaeology for a broad public or who are actively engaged in practicing archaeology beyond academia, and a discussion of the experience of teaching a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) about archaeology to over 40,000 students. This book should be of interest to anyone who has wondered how and why to write about archaeology for people other than archaeologists.

Joukowsky Institute Perspectives

Archaeology for the People

Jonathan Ben-Dov

This volume gathers articles by archeologists, art historians, and philologists concerned with the afterlives of ancient rock-cut monuments throughout the Near East. Contributions analyze how such monuments were actively reinterpreted and manipulated long after they were first carved.

Carvings in and out of Time

Afterlives of Ancient Rock-cut Monuments in the Near East

Benjamin Anderson

Antiquarianism and collecting have been associated intimately with European imperial and colonial enterprises, although both existed long before the early modern period and both were (and continue to be) practiced in places other than Europe. Scholars have made significant progress in the documentation and analysis of indigenous antiquarian traditions, but the clear-cut distinction between “indigenous” and “colonial” archaeologies has obscured the intense and dynamic interaction between these seemingly different endeavours. This book concerns the divide between local and foreign antiquarianisms focusing on case studies drawn primarily from the Mediterranean and the Americas. Both regions host robust pre-modern antiquarian traditions that have continued to develop during periods of colonialism. In both regions, moreover, colonial encounters have been mediated by the antiquarian practices and preferences of European elites. The two regions also exhibit salient differences. For example, Europeans claimed the “antiquities” of the eastern Mediterranean as part of their own, “classical,” heritage, whereas they perceived those of the Americas as essentially alien, even as they attempted to understand them by analogy to the classical world. These basic points of comparison and contrast provide a framework for conjoint analysis of the emergence of hybrid or cross-bred antiquarianisms. Rather than assuming that interest in antiquity is a human universal, this book explores the circumstances under which the past itself is produced and transformed through encounters between antiquarian traditions over common objects of interpretation.

Felipe Rojas

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