Histories of Archaeology Conference

23–27 March 2020

The Australian National University, Canberra

The ‘Collective Biography of Archaeology in the Pacific’ (CBAP) Australian Research Council Laureate Project, led by Professor Matthew Spriggs will be hosting the Histories of Archaeology conference, airing new ideas on the history of archaeology worldwide.

Invited keynote speakers include Margarita Díaz-Andreu, Stephanie Moser, Oscar Moro-Abadia, Tim Murray, Lynette Russell and Nathan Schlanger.

Prof Schlanger is an archaeology professor from the Ecole Nationale des Chartes in France, and his travel is supported by AFRAN through the association's annual call for initiatives.

He will talk about interdisciplinary in his keynote: "André Leroi-Gourhan in the Pacific: disciplinary tensions between ethology, archaeology and museology"

The two years spent by French ethnologist and technologist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) in Japan just before the Second World War were of decisive influence for the rest of his career, providing much material for his books on technological classification (1943, 1945) as well as his doctoral thesis on "Archéologie du pacifique Nord" (1946). This case study, illustrated with rich archival textual and iconographic sources, will serve me to address a key issue in the history of archaeology – that of the benefits, consequences and even pitfalls of interdisciplinary. With museum practices of the 1930s looming in the background, the idea that "archaeology is but the ethnology of the past", springing as it did from humanist theoretical concerns, proved nonetheless to have also less welcome repercussions – on which there are lessons for us to learn to draw.

More information about the conference on this link