2022-10-20 Hamilakis, Fall Talk: New histories of humanity or stories of multi-species assemblages?
Channel: Archaeological Research Facility, UC Berkeley
Date: 2023-01-10

Title: "New histories of humanity or stories of multi-species assemblages? Lessons from Neolithic Greece" Speaker:  Yannis Hamilakis, Joukowsky Family Professor of Archaeology & Professor of Modern Greek Studies, Brown University
How do we tell stories of "humanity" today? And should we? In the aftermath of the astonishing and highly valuable "Dawn of Everything" event (by David Graeber and David Wengrow), I will reflect on archaeological story-telling at a moment of planetary crisis and emergency. In doing so, I will recount the lessons we have learnt in engaging with the site of Koutroulou Magoula in central Greece, as part of the Koutroulou Magoula Archaeology and Archaeological Ethnography Project which I co-direct since 2010. In discussing especially the "Neolithic" material configurations of the site, I will be advocating for the need to recount stories about the multi-species and multi-sensorial assemblages that have resulted in the entities we call archaeological sites. Furthermore, I will claim that any story-telling today will have to confront the instability of categories such as past and present, and the regimes of temporality and historicity that have shaped the constitution of modernist archaeology.

Relevant Links: 

On-line exhibition: blogs.brown.edu/transientmatter/

Greenberg, R. and Hamilakis, Y. 2022. Archaeology, Nation, and Race: Confronting the Past, Decolonizing the Future in Greece and Israel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/archaeology-nation-and-race/A82939A30B9C761A245211B11A441D11

Hamilakis, Y. 2022. Food as affirmative biopolitics at the border: liminality, eating practices, and migration in the Mediterranean. World Archaeology.
https://www.academia.edu/70478287/Hamilakis_Y_2022_Food_as_affirmative_biopolitics_at_the_border_liminality_eating_practices_and_migration_in_the_Mediterranean_World_Archaeology_on_line_

Hamilakis, Y. 2022. Border assemblages between surveillance and spectacle: What was Moria and what comes after? American Anthropologist 124(1): 212-220.
https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/aman.13693

Hamilakis, Y. 2022. A handbook for a haunted, new nomadic age: potential material histories. 
https://www.versobooks.com/blogs?post_author=446026