Thursday, December 22, 2005

Archaeology is good fun but unimportant to most people

On 12 November I was a guest speaker at the Nordic Contact Seminar for archaeology students. These seminars take place every few years and are attended by students from all the Nordic countries. The 2005 seminar took place at Granö, one of the autumnally deserted summer camps of Väddö on the Roslagen coast of Sweden.

When I arrived, the students had been shacked up together for four days and nights, listening to each other's presentations, pausing only for a bus excursion to visit archaeological sites. The main theme of the final discussion, to which I had been invited, was "Who is archaeology's target audience? And who should be its target audience?".

The seminar's participants had just spent four days and nights thinking about nothing but archaeology. The reason that I had been chosen as a speaker, was, I believe, that in my opinion archaeology is good fun but unimportant to most people.

Here's what I said to the students. The discussion afterwards was animated.

[More blog entries about , , .]

1 Comments:

Blogger Johan said...

Interesting reading. And appliceable to all the humanities, of course.

//JJ

30 December, 2005 03:59  

Post a Comment

<< Home

eXTReMe Tracker