Community Archaeology at the Trowel's Edge

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 398-408
Author(s):  
Laurie E. Miroff ◽  
Nina M. Versaggi

ABSTRACTThe Public Archaeology Facility's (PAF) Community Archaeology Program (CAP) at Binghamton University began 25 years ago in response to intense community interest in participating in archaeology. Although non-archaeologists have unlimited access to programming and social media about archaeology, there is more limited access to professionally supervised opportunities. PAF developed CAP to provide non-archaeologists with the opportunity to participate in highly supervised archaeological research projects to share in the process of discovery at the “trowel's edge.” CAP recognizes the challenges and critiques of community programs and mitigates these by creating a climate of ethical practice. Our goal is to educate individuals about the presence of a rich and fascinating past in their own communities and create the sweat equity that can result in advocates for preservation. We operate under the principles that the heritage story embedded in an artifact is worthy of our respect and protection, and that an educated public is more likely to support the preservation of this heritage. Making a connection to people through artifacts builds not only a deeper understanding of the past but also an empathy for preservation. In this article, we introduce the program and reflect on the 25-year history of CAP and future directions.

Plants ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Adrian S. Monthony ◽  
Serena R. Page ◽  
Mohsen Hesami ◽  
Andrew Maxwell P. Jones

The recent legalization of Cannabis sativa L. in many regions has revealed a need for effective propagation and biotechnologies for the species. Micropropagation affords researchers and producers methods to rapidly propagate insect-/disease-/virus-free clonal plants and store germplasm and forms the basis for other biotechnologies. Despite this need, research in the area is limited due to the long history of prohibitions and restrictions. Existing literature has multiple limitations: many publications use hemp as a proxy for drug-type Cannabis when it is well established that there is significant genotype specificity; studies using drug-type cultivars are predominantly optimized using a single cultivar; most protocols have not been replicated by independent groups, and some attempts demonstrate a lack of reproducibility across genotypes. Due to culture decline and other problems, the multiplication phase of micropropagation (Stage 2) has not been fully developed in many reports. This review will provide a brief background on the history and botany of Cannabis as well as a comprehensive and critical summary of Cannabis tissue culture. Special attention will be paid to current challenges faced by researchers, the limitations of existing Cannabis micropropagation studies, and recent developments and future directions of Cannabis tissue culture technologies.


2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Chris J. Magoc

This essay attempts to counter the scarcity of efforts to address issues of natural resource extraction and environmental exploitation in public history forums. Focused on western Pennsylvania, it argues that the history of industrial development and its deleterious environmental impacts demands a regional vision that not only frames these stories within the ideological and economic context of the past, but also challenges residents and visitors to consider this history in light of the related environmental concerns of our own time. The essay explores some of the difficult issues faced by public historians and practitioners as they seek to produce public environmental histories that do not elude opportunities to link past and present in meaningful ways.


2014 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gülru Necipoğlu

In this volume marking the thirtieth anniversary of Muqarnas, the Editor reflects on the evolution of the journal over the years. To that end, the members of the Editorial and Advisory Boards were sent a questionnaire, asking them to comment on the contributions of Muqarnas and its Supplements series to the field of Islamic art and architecture studies over the past three decades, and to provide suggestions for future directions. Their observations, thoughts, and hopes for Muqarnas have been anonymously incorporated into this essay, which, in conversation with their comments, looks back on the history of the publication and offers some possibilities for the path it might take going forward.
The goal here is neither to assess the historiography nor to examine the current state of the field thirty years after the opening essay of volume 1. Instead, the focus is on the development and impact of both Muqarnas and the Supplements series in a highly specialized field with relatively few and short-lived or sporadic journals, before turning to the successes and shortcomings of these publications, as outlined by some of the board members. 



Chapter One deals with several central issues with regard to understanding the role of religious motifs in contemporary art. Besides being a repetition of imagery from the past, religious motifs embedded in contemporary artworks become a means to problematise not only the way different periods in the history of art are delimited, but larger and seemingly more rigid distinctions as those between art and non-art images. Early religious images differ significantly from art images. The two types are regulated according to different sets of rules related to the conditions of their production, display, appreciation and the way images are invested with the status of being true or authentic instances of art or sacred images. Chapter One provides a discussion of the important motif of the image not made by an artist’s hand, or acheiropoietos, and its survival and transformation, including its traces in contemporary image-making practices. All images are the result of human making; they are fictions. The way the conditions of these fictions are negotiated, or the way the role of the maker is brought to visibility, or concealed, is a defining feature of the specific regime of representation. While the cult image concealed its maker in order to maintain its public significance, and the later art image celebrated the artist as a re-inventor of the old image, contemporary artists cite religious images in order to reflect on the very procedures that produce the public significance and status of images.


Author(s):  
Wendy Ayres-Bennett ◽  
Helena Sanson

This Introduction outlines the need for a ‘true history’ (Lerner 1976) of the role of women in the history of linguistics, which considers them on their own terms, and challenges categories and concepts devised for traditional male-dominated accounts. We start by considering what research has already been conducted in the field, before exploring some of the reasons for the relative dearth of studies. We outline some of the challenges and opportunities encountered by women who wished to study the nature of language and languages in the past. The geographical and chronological scope of this volume is then discussed. In a central section we examine some of the major recurring themes in the volume. These include attitudes towards women’s language, both positive and negative; women and language acquisition and teaching; and women as creators of new languages and scripts. We further explore women as authors, dedicatees, or intended readers of metalinguistic texts, as interpreters and translators, and as contributors to the linguistic documentation and maintenance. We consider how women supported male relatives and colleagues in their endeavours, sometimes in invisible ways, before reviewing the early stages of their entry into institutionalized contexts. The chapter concludes with a brief section on future directions for research.


STADION ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-75
Author(s):  
Alan McDougall

On 15 April 1989, Liverpool FC played Nottingham Forest in an FA Cup semi-final at the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield in northern England. Catastrophic errors by the police and other organisations led to the deaths of 96 Liverpool supporters, crushed against the perimeter fences on the Leppings Lane terrace. Though the horrific facts of the disaster were quickly and widely known, they were lost beneath another narrative, promoted by the police, numerous politicians, and large sections of the media. This narrative blamed the disaster on “tanked up yobs”: drunk and aggressive Liverpool supporters, who turned up late and forced their way into the ground. Over the subsequent years and decades, as Hillsborough campaigners vainly sought justice for the disaster’s victims in a series of trials and inquests, the destructive allegation remained in the public realm. It was reinforced by establishment dismissal of Liverpool as a “self-pity city”, home to a community incapable of accepting official verdicts or of leaving the past in the past. This essay uncovers the history of the myths of the Hillsborough disaster. It first shows how these myths were established - how false narratives, with powerful backers, shifted responsibility for the disaster from the police to supporters, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. It then examines how these myths were embedded in public discourse - how Liverpool was demonised as an aggressively sentimental city where people refused to admit to “killing their own”. It finally analyses how these myths were overturned through research, media mobilisation, and grassroots activism, a process that culminated in the 2016 inquest verdict, which ruled that the 96 Hillsborough victims were unlawfully killed. In doing so, the essay shows how Hillsborough became a key event in modern British history, influencing everything from stadium design to government legislation.


2006 ◽  
Vol 34 ◽  
pp. 67-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Melissa Bilal

Nınçir mangig im sirasun, Oror yem asum, Baydzar lusinn e meğm hayum, Ko ororotsum.By analyzing the transmission of Armenian lullabies within the changing contexts of identity and cultural politics in Turkey, this paper addresses displacement and loss as two interrelated experiences shaping the sense of being an Armenian in Turkey. I criticize the liberal multiculturalist perspective that represents cultures in a way that cuts the link between the past and the present, by dissociating different cultures from the history of their presence in Anatolia and the destruction of that presence. I argue that in such a context where cultures are detached from lived experiences and memory, it becomes impossible to share the stories of violence and pain in the public sphere; hence, the loss itself becomes the experience of being Armenian. Finally, I try to explain how today young generations of Armenians in İstanbul, in their search for an Armenian identity, have developed a certain way of belonging to the space and culture, a way of belonging that is very much shaped by the experience of loss.


1970 ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Wenche Brun ◽  
Kristine Orestad Sørgaard

Norwegian museums have been the subject of a great deal of public attention in recent years. Unfortunately, this is not because of their interesting, compelling and thought-provoking exhibitions, but because of poor preservation practices and deteriorating collections. Previous reports have highlighted numerous failings in the management of these collections. A large portion of the collections has suffered through decades of poor storage. Some objects have even been damaged as a result of unacceptable storage conditions. Proper management of the collections has been hampered still further by the lack of common management systems. In the past ten to fifteen years, several projects have been launched in order to enhance collection management and to make the collections more accessible to the public. In this paper, we give a brief outline of the history of collections. We also provide a critical review of the projects and offer some suggestions as to what museums can do to further improve access to and the preservation of collections. 


This handbook takes on the task of examining the history of music listening over the past two hundred years. It uses the “art of listening” as a leitmotif encompassing an entanglement of interdependent practices and discourses about a learnable mode of perception. The art of listening first emerged around 1800 and was adopted and adapted across the public realm to suit a wide range of collective listening situations from popular to serious art forms up to the present day. Because this is a relatively new subject in historical research, the volume combines case studies from several disciplines in order to investigate whether, how, and why practices of music listening changed. Focusing on a diverse set of locations and actors and using a range of historical sources, it attempts to historicize and reconstruct the evolution of listening styles to show the wealth of variants in listening. In doing so, it challenges the inherited image of the silent listener as the dominant force in musical cultures.


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