Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a recent development. However, with increasing computational capabilities, AI has developed into Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning, technologies particularly good at detecting correlations and patterns, and categorising, predicting, or extracting information. Within archaeology, AI can process big data accumulated over decades of research and deposited in archives. By combining these capabilities, AI offers new insights and exciting opportunities to create knowledge from archaeological archives for contemporary and future research. However, the ethical implications and human costs are not yet fully understood. Therefore, we question whether AI in archaeology is a blessing or a curse.

Throughout history, women in archaeology have encountered substantial and systemic obstacles in pursuit of their profession.

As archaeology Professor Claire Smith FAHA notes,

“Much has been accomplished since the 1990s, and in the early twenty-first century, women are a fundamental part of the archaeological social landscape. Despite this, women have not yet achieved equity in all parts of the workplace.

While almost 60% of Australian archaeologists are women, female archaeologists have difficulty in gaining tenure-track entry-level employment in Australian universities and are under-represented in senior positions.

Women are more evenly represented in the government sector, where they outnumber men in museum work and in cultural heritage management in the private sector consulting. Some barriers that women in archaeology face result from a glass ceiling — invisible barriers to advancement that are imposed from above — while other barriers relate more to the constraints fashioned by gender ideologies and gender roles.”

This International Women’s Day, we feature ten women in archaeology who have made significant contributions to their field, as recognised by our archaeological Fellows.

For more stories, check out today’s article from COSMOS profiling ‘remarkable and inspirational women in Australian science’.

Ten women in archaeology you should know about

1. Dr Anna Florin, Australian National University

An archaeobotanist, Dr Anna Florin is interested in the role of plant foods, and their processing and management in world economies.

She works with charred plant macrofossils — food scraps from ancient fireplaces — to chart the diets of people in the past. Anna’s research covers Australia, Papua New Guinea and Southeast Asia, and offers insights into early human migration patterns outside Africa, ongoing adaptations to climate change throughout history, and reflections on plant and land management in ‘hunter-gatherer’ societies.

2. Dr Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek, Macquarie University

Dr Anna-Latifa Mourad-Cizek is a historian and archaeologist exploring the links between ancient and cultural encounters. Her research has focussed on relations between ancient Egypt and Western Asia during the second and third millennia BCE, and she is particularly interested in the dynamic movement of concepts, objects and people across geographic, social and cultural borders, and how this could lead to change.

From 2019 to 2022, Anna-Latifa researched how communities negotiate and maintain foreign relations by examining interactions between ancient Egypt and the Near East in the first half of the second millennium BCE, to inform our understanding of connections and adaptation in an increasingly globalised world.

Her other research interests include network dynamics, ancient community resilience to ecological and socio-political change, Old and Middle Kingdom tomb art and architecture, as well as digital epigraphic and archaeological technologies.

3. Dr Kellie Pollard, Charles Darwin University

A Wiradjuri archaeologist, lecturer and researcher at Charles Darwin University, Dr Kellie Pollard researches Indigenous-Australian contact archaeology, with a particular interest in Indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies, and truth-telling Australian history.

Kellie’s PhD examined thirty fringe camps, known as ‘long-grassers’, in the Darwin region in the Northern Territory, and illuminated the insights these camps provide into First Nations social, cultural and economic adaptations to colonialism from the initial contact period to the present. Learn more about long-grass camps in this article from The Conversation.

4. Dr Jillian Garvey, Dja Dja Wurrung Enterprises

Currently working with DJANDAK, an enterprise of the Dja Dja Wurrung Clans Aboriginal Corporation (DJAARA) in central Victoria, Dr Jillian Garvey is a zooarchaeologist who combines her background in science (vertebrate palaeontology) and archaeology to focus on the role of fauna in Australian archaeology.

Through zooarchaeology she has collaborated with Traditional Owner groups to study the role of animals in the lives of First Nations people, including the economic and nutritional value of bush tucker. Jillian has more recently focused on combining Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and science to develop frameworks that weave together cultural knowledge and ontologies with zooarchaeology.

After spending 18 years as a research fellow in the Department of Archaeology and History at La Trobe (including ARC DECRA and LTU Tracey Banivanua Mar Senior Research Fellowship), Jillian is using her expertise to develop and lead the Dja Dja Wurrug Cultural Values Assessment program, a method that allows Djaara (Dja Dja Wurrug People) to record tangible and intangible cultural heritage across Djandak (Country). She is also helping to develop Djaara research capabilities which will help empower Djaara to lead their own research.

Outside of work, Jillian continues to be involved in research collaborations with several Traditional Owner communities, helping to tell the story of how people and animals lived on Country for millennia, and working towards decolonising zooarchaeology and the natural sciences.

5. Professor Lynley Wallis, Griffith University

With over twenty-five years’ experience in remote area fieldwork, Professor Lynley Wallis has presented new models that challenge fundamental notions about the timing and nature of colonisation of Australia. Her major research achievement is a highly significant contribution to the advancement of knowledge in Australian and global archaeology.

Lynley contributed to the recent re-excavation and analysis of Australia’s oldest evidence for human occupation, the oft-cited 65,000-year-old site of Madjedbebe in northern Australia, and is now leading a major survey and excavation program in Cape York Peninsula. She has explored aspects of frontier conflict in Queensland with Native Mounted Police, working to truth-tell and decolonise archaeological practice.

6. Dr Tristen Jones, The University of Sydney

Dr Tristen Jones is a lecturer of Museum and Heritage Studies, archaeologist, and curator. Her research interests are Australian Indigenous archaeology and heritage, with a focus on rock art, cultural landscapes, material culture and museum collections.

Recent research focused on understanding Pleistocene colonisation by Australia’s First Peoples and the role of rock art, as an ancient communication tool, in revealing more about the lives of early inhabitants. She has active research projects in the Kakadu region, Sydney and Cape York Peninsular working with First Nations communities to document and conserve rock art, in addition to museums collection research projects in Germany and the UK.

7. Dr Ariana Lambrides, James Cook University

Dr Ariana Lambrides’ research focuses on the human palaeoecology of island and coastal settings through the study of archaeological fish remains, notably the dynamics of Indigenous fisheries across millennia, and how people have shaped biodiversity and landscapes throughout time.

She has worked across the Asia-Pacific region and is an ARC DECRA Fellow.

Currently, Ariana is researching Holocene fisheries around the Great Barrier Reef, specifically the dialogue between people and the local environment and how this shaped culture, landscape dynamics, and biodiversity over millennia. This research aims to provide a deep time perspective relevant to contemporary fisheries management within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.

8. Dr Caitlin D’Gluyas, University of New England

Dr Caitlin D’Gluyas specialises in Australian archaeology, cultural heritage and history, focusing on the impacts and outcomes of British colonisation in the eighteenth-and-nineteenth centuries with a particular interest in the management, and consequences, of unfree labour.

Her archaeological thesis focused on the historical study of juvenile convict labour that occurred at Point Puer, providing insight into past and present understandings of youth, masculinity and justice reform. In 2023, Caitlin received the Dr AM Hertzberg AO Fellowship at the State Library of New South Wales for her archaeological research of ‘people and things in early convict Parramatta’.

9. Dr Sofia Samper Carro, Australian National University

With two masters degrees and two doctorates, Dr Sofia Samper Carro is an expert in the taphonomic analysis of fauna remains to study human-animal interactions mainly on Pleistocene and early Holocene periods, particularly throughout Southeast Asia.

A self-described ‘Neanderthal fan’, her recent publications examine how Homo sapiens in Southeast Asia developed prehistoric fishing practices and technologies, and how this knowledge was passed down through generations.

10. Dr Shimona Kealy, Australian National University

Dr Shimona Kelly is an archaeologist and palaeobiologist with a key interest in the early movements of people, cultures, and animals throughout the Southeast Asia and Australasia.

In particular, she’s interested in the patterns of occupation and cultures in island communities over the last 50,000 years in Wallacea, and the biological and ecological impacts of early human arrival on islands.

Her current research examines the prehistoric history of Lombok Island focusing on the early movement patterns of people crossing Wallace’s Line.

The post Ten women in archaeology you should know about appeared first on Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Two biological anthropologists analyze archaeological and physiological evidence to debunk enduring assumptions about the gendered division of labor in ancient times.

This article was originally published at The Conversation and has been republished with Creative Commons.

IN ANCIENT TIMES, men hunted and women gathered. At least, this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women.

The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks too.

A common argument is that a sexual division of labor and unequal division of power exists today; therefore, it must have existed in our evolutionary past as well. But this is a just-so story without sufficient evidentiary support, despite its pervasiveness in disciplines like evolutionary psychology.

There is a growing body of physiological, anatomical, ethnographic, and archaeological evidence to suggest that not only did women hunt in our evolutionary past, but they may well have been better suited for such an endurance-dependent activity.

We are both biological anthropologists. I (co-author Cara) specialize in the physiology of humans who live in extreme conditions, using my research to reconstruct how our ancestors may have adapted to different climates. And I (co-author Sarah) study Neanderthal and early modern human health. I also excavate at their archaeological sites.

It’s not uncommon for scientists like us—who attempt to include the contributions of all individuals, regardless of sex and gender, in reconstructions of our evolutionary past—to be accused of rewriting the past to fulfill a politically correct, woke agenda. The actual evidence speaks for itself, though: Gendered labor roles did not exist in the Paleolithic era, which lasted from 3.3 million years ago until 12,000 years ago. The story is written in human bodies, now and in the past.

We recognize that biological sex can be defined using multiple characteristics, including chromosomes, genitalia, and hormones, each of which exists on a spectrum. Social gender, too, is not a binary category. We use the terms female and male when discussing the physiological and anatomical evidence, as this is what the research literature tends to use.

FEMALE BODIES: ADAPTED FOR ENDURANCE

One of the key arguments put forth by “Man the Hunter” proponents is that females would not have been physically capable of taking part in the long, arduous hunts of our evolutionary past. But a number of female-associated features, which provide an endurance advantage, tell a different story.

All human bodies, regardless of sex, have and need both the hormones estrogen and testosterone. On average, females have more estrogen and males more testosterone, though there is a great deal of variation and overlap.

Testosterone often gets all the credit when it comes to athletic success. But estrogen—technically the estrogen receptor—is deeply ancient, originating somewhere between 1.2 billion and 600 million years ago. It predates the existence of sexual reproduction involving egg and sperm. The testosterone receptor originated as a duplicate of the estrogen receptor and is only about half as old. As such, estrogen, in its many forms and pervasive functions, seems necessary for life among both females and males.

Estrogen influences athletic performance, particularly endurance performance. The greater concentrations of estrogen that females tend to have in their bodies likely confer an endurance advantage—an ability to exercise for a longer period of time without becoming exhausted.

Estrogen signals the body to burn more fat—beneficial during endurance activity for two key reasons. First, fat has more than twice the calories per gram as carbohydrates do. And it takes longer to metabolize fats than carbs. So, fat provides more bang for the buck overall, and the slow burn provides sustained energy over longer periods of time, which can delay fatigue during endurance activities like running.

In addition to their estrogen advantage, females have a greater proportion of type I muscle fibers relative to males.

These are slow oxidative muscle fibers that prefer to metabolize fats. They’re not particularly powerful, but they take awhile to fatigue—unlike the powerful type II fibers that males have more of but that tire rapidly. Doing the same intense exercise, females burn 70 percent more fats than males do, and unsurprisingly, are less likely to fatigue.

Estrogen also appears to be important for post-exercise recovery. Intense exercise or heat exposure can be stressful for the body, eliciting an inflammatory response via the release of heat shock proteins. Estrogen limits this response, which would otherwise inhibit recovery. Estrogen also stabilizes cell membranes that might otherwise be damaged or rupture due to the stress of exercise. Thanks to this hormone, females incur less damage during exercise and are therefore capable of faster recovery.

WOMEN IN THE PAST LIKELY DID EVERYTHING MEN DID

Forget the Flintstones’ nuclear family, with a stay-at-home wife. There’s no evidence of this social structure or gendered labor roles during the 2 million years of evolution for the genus Homo until the last 12,000 years, with the advent of agriculture.

Our Neanderthal cousins, a group of humans who lived across Western and Central Eurasia approximately 250,000 to 40,000 years ago, formed small, highly nomadic bands. Fossil evidence shows females and males experienced the same bony traumas across their bodies—a signature of a hard life hunting deer, aurochs, and woolly mammoths. Tooth wear that results from using the front teeth as a third hand, likely in tasks like tanning hides, is equally evident across females and males.

Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in a world where everyone performed multiple tasks. It was not a utopia, but it was not a patriarchy.

This nongendered picture should not be surprising when you imagine small-group living. Everyone needs to contribute to the tasks necessary for group survival—chiefly, producing food and shelter, and raising children. Individual mothers are not solely responsible for their children; in forager communities, the whole group contributes to child care.

You might imagine this unified labor strategy then changed in early modern humans, but archaeological and anatomical evidence shows it did not. Upper Paleolithic modern humans leaving Africa and entering Europe and Asia show very few sexed differences in trauma and repetitive motion wear. One difference is more evidence of “thrower’s elbow” in males than females, though some females shared these pathologies.

And this was also the time when people were innovating with hunting technologies like atlatls (spear throwers), fishing hooks and nets, and bow and arrows—alleviating some of the wear and tear hunting would take on their bodies. A recent archaeological experiment found that using atlatls decreased sex differences in the speed of spears thrown by contemporary men and women.

Even in death, there are no sexed differences in how Neanderthals or modern humans buried their dead or the goods affiliated with their graves. These indicators of differential gendered social status do not arrive until agriculture, with its stratified economic system and monopolizable resources.

All this evidence suggests Paleolithic women and men did not occupy differing roles or social realms.

Critics might point to recent forager populations and suggest that since they are using subsistence strategies similar to our ancient ancestors, their gendered roles are inherent to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

However, there are many flaws in this approach. Foragers are not living fossils, and their social structures and cultural norms have evolved over time and in response to patriarchal agricultural neighbors and colonial administrators. In addition, ethnographers of the last two centuries brought their sexism with them into the field, and it biased how they understood forager societies. For instance, a recent reanalysis showed that 79 percent of cultures described in ethnographic data included descriptions of women hunting; however, previous interpretations frequently left them out.

DISCARD THE CAVEMAN MYTHS

The myth that female reproductive capabilities somehow render them incapable of gathering any food products beyond those that cannot run away does more than just underestimate Paleolithic women. It feeds into narratives that the contemporary social roles of women and men are inherent and define our evolution. Our Paleolithic ancestors lived in a world where everyone in the band pulled their own weight, performing multiple tasks. It was not a utopia, but it was not a patriarchy.

Certainly, accommodations must have been made for group members who were sick, recovering from childbirth, or otherwise temporarily incapacitated. But pregnancy, lactation, childrearing, and menstruation are not permanently disabling events, as researchers found among contemporary Agta people of the Philippines who continue to hunt during these life periods.

Suggesting that the female body is only designed to gather plants ignores female physiology and the archaeological record. To ignore the evidence perpetuates a myth that only serves to bolster existing power structures.

The post Dismantling the “Man the Hunter” Myth appeared first on SAPIENS.

Here I excavate a theme — or, rather, a line of flight — which I addressed in a recent seminar paper: what can posthumanism offer Roman army studies?

What do we think of when we think of Roman armies?

Perhaps it is Roman legionaries, marked out by a rectangular shield (scutum) and overlapping plate armour (lorica segmentata), and marching in uniformed unison (a trope which is somewhat ahistorical). Or perhaps it is the daily life activities of soldiers and their many (sometimes outnumbering) camp followers; communal drinking with cups, spinning with wheels, or playing games with dice.

Regardless of what you conjured up, in all these instances our Romans are being shaped through their interactions with objects and ‘things’: equipment, cups, spindle whorls, dice and more. Our Romans emerge from these relations anew, constantly becoming ‘Roman’ through their (inter)actions with these (and other) things.

However, when the more social dimensions of armies have been conceptualised in scholarship, objects are often passive and placed in the theoretical backseat. This is not to say that materials are not considered — there are many great works which catalogue, examine, and analyse our material record, such as the illuminating works by S. Sommer on the settlements that grow around forts, or the extensive and detailed volumes, edited works, and monographs on military equipment in all its splendour and mundanity (the latter, of course, a feature of its splendrousness).

Rather, this is to say that objects are seen as passive in the emergence of social fabric; forces of change and affect1 only because they act as media of feedback between social structures and agents (such as spinners) or because of some perceived symbolic importance. These were indeed parts of their ‘role’, but we should move away from this conceptualisation of the world, where humans sit at the centre of the tree and objects lay suspended in its canopy. As Rachel Crellin and Oliver Harris observe:

“human beings are one of many components that make up our world, and things cannot be understood apart from the wider relational assemblages, and specific historical process of which they are part”.

We thus need a more horizontal view: one which sees objects and humans on the same playing field, free from a universal anthropocentric ‘centre stage’ and embedded in their wider assemblages.

This view is offered by posthumanist and new materialist archaeologies. These are (in short) centred around the critique of universal truths, essentialist opposing dualisms, and the centrality of ‘man’, with new materialism specifically also focusing on the emergence of all things via difference (Crellin Harris 2021).

But what would this look like in Roman armies?

Instead of seeing the scutum as a product (solely) of human ingenuity and mastery over nature, we can see the Roman scutum as a product of various material and immaterial happenings. Instead of simply an item used as intended by a Roman soldier, a scutum’s material properties affected how soldiers were able to fight, facilitating certain ways of acting which were not possible prior (I assume it would be quite difficult to do a perfect testudo without one) and closing off others (it is now harder to run).

In short, the Roman soldier emerges through the coming together of both scutum and soldier.

Does this mean Romans could not do stuff intentionally? Does this mean the markings on a scutum were not meaningful? No. This does not deny agency nor meaning, it explores how these emerge from arrangements of things.

Despite valid fears expressed concerning its supposed apolitical nature, a new materialist posthumanist archaeology pays heed to the complexity of life. As Kathleen Stewart writes in Ordinary Affects, agency is:

…not really about willpower but rather something much more complicated and much more rooted in things.

Eva Mol and others have already brought this thinking to Roman studies, demonstrating the complexity of what Others (both human and object) could do in the Roman world. Like Eva, I believe that new materialist posthumanism is a future for Roman studies, one we should explore. And, while there is a great deal more to say, I challenge us all to muse on how we can explore what things and people could do in the Roman world.

Reading list

Rachel J., and Oliver J. T. Harris. 2021. ‘What Difference Does Posthumanism Make?’ Cambridge Archaeological Journal 31 (3): 469–75 (and other contributions to this issue).

Mol, Eva. 2023. ‘New Materialism and Posthumanism in Roman Archaeology: When Objects Speak for Others’. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 33 (4): 715–29.

Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary affects. Duke University Press

All of the JRMES!

The LatEpig tool allows you to query all the inscriptions from the Epigraphic Database Clauss Slaby (www.manfredclauss.de) in a reproducible manner: it saves the search results in a TSV and a JSON file and plots them on an interactive map of the Roman Empire without any prior knowledge of programming in a matter of minutes.

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Authors

• Brian Ballsun-Stanton, Macquarie University,
• Petra Heřmánková, Aarhus University,
• Ray Laurence, Macquarie University,

Description

This programme allows to extracts the output of a search query from the Epigraphik-Datenbank Clauss / Slaby (EDCS) in a reproducible manner and saves it as a TSV file (i.e. tab separated value) that can be easily opened in your favourite spreadsheet software, or as a JSON file. The search results can be also plotted to a map of the Roman Empire, along with the system of the Roman Provinces, roads, and cities. More on the used datasets in the Data Sources section.

Cite this software

Ballsun-Stanton B., Heřmánková P., Laurence R. LatEpig (version 2.0). GitHub. URL: https://github.com/mqAncientHistory/Lat-Epig/ DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5211341

If you're using this tool in your research, Star us on Github! (This way, we don't need to put tracking pixels into this notebook to get a sense of how many folks are using our tool!)

If you find a bug or have a feature request, raise an Issue!

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This post was originally posted on the AAPHN blog on May 17, 2023 as Roman Archaeology Down Under: Facilitating Engagement through Openness. Shared in line with CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

Roman archaeology down under

Roman archaeology is offered in several institutions across Australia and Aoteoroa (New Zealand), from the University of Western Australia to Otago University, typically as a component of history or archaeology degrees. There are also several projects and a sizeable contingent of active researchers in the field, many of whom are members of groups such as the Mediterranean Archaeology Australasian Research Community MAARC and the Australasian Society for Classical Studies ASCS.

As an assistant at the Centre for Applied History and a Roman archaeologist (a label I am still learning to embrace) at Macquarie University Wallamattagal campus, I am always looking for ways to collaborate with community and facilitate public engagement with Roman archaeology in Australia. Indeed, I agree with Karen Milek, that archaeologists “have an ethical obligation to improve the accessibility and portability of archaeological science in order to enable citizen science” (to which I would add public history and archaeology). To achieve this, open and public participation, publication, and outreach elements of research need to become embedded within research, “not an addendum relegated to ‘impact statements, ‘open days’ or ‘public engagement events’” (Milek 2018: 41, 43). This is not to say these other components are not still valuable pieces of the puzzle, rather that they should not be the sole forms of public engagement activities, after which researchers dust off their hands and say ‘job done’.

Naturally, the field of Roman studies in Australia already does a sizeable deal of quality community engagement and collaboration. Historians and archaeologists consult on new curricula, provide or organise public lectures, and appear on radio (like so). A particularly exciting event last year, hosted by the Chau Chak Wing Museum and Wayward brewing, saw US-based Professor Sarah E Bond hold a virtual talk on ancient and mediaeval brewing.

Open access, publication, and data

However, the incorporation of more open access (OA) practices into our research methodologies, most notably OA publishing and (where circumstances permit) open data, remains under-explored. OA outputs do of course exist, including public facing web articles (such as this Lighthouse article) and openly accessible academic journal articles (such as this Worthing et. al. 2020 study of pollution at Pompeii). That said, much more could be made freely available. Uploading pre-prints to fully open repositories such as Zenodo could have real impact here. This would make these papers completely free-to-use, help deliver academic research to the public, and circumvent the sometimes ridiculously expensive APCs for OA articles (Marwick 2020). Indeed, I think some researchers would be pleasantly surprised about some publishers’ policies regarding open archiving of pre-prints and even published versions.

Open (preferably ‘Linked’) archaeological data — ‘structured archaeological data published in a free and accessible online linkable format ‘ — is another avenue for public engagement with research. With more Roman archaeological data made openly accessible, interested parties could interact and engage with Roman material — the collation of which they likely inadvertently funded — for free, whenever they wish, and at their own pace. This has pedagogical and accessibility benefits too, allowing students to develop their skills with ‘real’ archaeological data and reducing physical, logistical, and financial barriers for enthusiasts, students, HDRs, and ECRs alike (Garstki 2022: 3). Further down the track, community events where research data is presented, engaged with, manipulated, and even produced could be developed and presented as integral pieces of major archaeological research projects. The UK-based Arch-I-Scan project has seen great success in this realm, using community volunteers and holding public colloquia.

There are of course challenges. For one, artefacts and analyses must be produced in ways with which the public can engage, and channels must exist to advertise these resources. Archaeological data can also sometimes require computer skills to properly ‘use’ and even create. Nevertheless, OA tables, visualisations, maps, images, and other outputs are a good start (See this Internet Archaeology volume for example). Also, there are data publishing services which use, or are developing, relatively user friendly interfaces with drop down menus (such as Open Context and Archaeology Data Services). Also, whilst image copyright always throws up issues, something as simple links to open source websites with the desired images can be more than enough (a practice of Linked Open Data). This is what Brian Ballsun-Stanton and myself tried to do with our recent contribution to Open Context for instance. There are several institutional and cultural barriers relating to outdated or misinformed views on data-sharing, publishing, and even the purpose(s) of academic research, but these are for another blog… Also, one should note that OA practices and the somewhat related but separate issue of digitisation are by no means appropriate in all settings and with all data types (see Odumosu 2020), and we must ensure to properly engage with the pros and cons of OA whenever publishing material and research.

That said, nothing is ever easy, and by incorporating OA practices into our research from the start we will confront (or begin to confront) several of these key issues. Which will be worth it, because increased engagement with OA practices can help Australasian-based archaeologists of the Roman world facilitate engagement beyond, or following, the ‘open days’ and ‘public engagement events’ mentioned above — allowing interested communities to engage with knowledge production however and whenever they wish. I for one cannot wait to hear what questions they ask.

Further reading and watching

YouTube Series on Open Linked Archaeological Data by The Fitzwilliam Museum: YouTube

Garstki, Kevin (2022) ‘Introduction: Challenges of a Critical Archaeology in the Modern World’ Critical archaeology in the digital age. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0vh9t9jq

Hillard, Tom W. (1998) Ancient history in a modern university. https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/530778

Marwick, Ben (2020) ‘Open Access to Publications to Expand Participation in Archaeology’ NAW 53(2): 163–69. https://doi.org/10.1080/00293652.2020.1837233