Members Only: Touching the Past: Archaeology, Memory and the Importance of Cultural Heritage

Lecture Information

In excavations we deal mostly with tangible remains of the past. The most recent technical term for these remains is “things”. This term has been used in archaeological theory to explore how complex the relationship is that humans have with objects. In this lecture I will use examples from my archaeological work in Amarna, Berenike, Qasr Ibrim and the Fayum to explore this relationship and how it helps us to understand the past.

Speaker Bio

Willeke Wendrich (PhD 1999, Leiden University, the Netherlands) holds the Joan Silsbee Chair in African Cultural Archaeology and is professor of Egyptian Archaeology and Digital Humanities in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA. She has worked for 30 years in Egypt, and has directed archaeological projects in Egypt, Yemen, Ethiopia and recently in Italy. Her research interests are settlement archaeology and ancient craftmanship, with a strong focus on the intersection of archaeology, intangible heritage, science and indigenous knowledge through communal cultural natural heritage studies. From 2012 to 2016 she was the Director of the Center for Digital Humanities and presently she directs the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA. She is the Vice-President of the International Association of Egyptologists, the Editor-in-Chief of the online UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, and Board Chair of the Institute for Field Research.