A Human History of Tinkering 

Recent archaeological evidence suggests that much early socio-technological development in human history — such as agriculture, metalwork, pyrotechnologies, mudbrick architecture, ceramic traditions — is in fact a result of unintentional discoveries, failed experiments, accidental occurrences, and iterative, incremental, improvisational episodes of “tinkering.” Nonetheless, these unintentionalities, repeated breakdowns, and makeshift solutions are routinely retrofitted and celebrated as teleological accounts of progress and mastery — canonized as “cultural heritage” in a predetermined, universal human history. This panel invites contributions that linger with tinkering as a practice of world-making and as an analytic: the quiet, unheroic, and sometimes abject labor of trying, failing, and adjusting. We are especially interested in papers that examine how such tinkering is appropriated, sanitized, or instrumentalized in the present — through national narratives, museum displays, STEM/entrepreneurial imaginaries — and how such appropriations may pervert the situated, relational, and often non-sovereign character of past technical practice. In the spirit of #RESIST, we ask what a quietly resistive archaeology might look like (beyond the meta-narratives) when it attends to the minor, the provisional, and the incomplete that can become a prelude to progress (as they so often do today), contributing to scholarships in: repair and maintenance; apprenticeship and skill; vernacular technologies and low-tech materialities; infrastructures of care; colonial and postcolonial technopolitics; indigenous and community-grounded technical histories; queer temporalities of making; and critiques of heritage and capitalist “innovation” discourse.

Organizers: Casey H. Shi (Dartmouth College), Shandana Waheed (Stanford University)

Contact: Haoran.Shi@dartmouth.edu, swaheed@stanford.edu

Schedule: Saturday 9:30 am -12:00 pm 

Archaeology in New York City: Past, Present, and Future 

New York has a reputation as future-focused city, but it also has a long past that archaeologists have worked to uncover for more than a century. Avocational and early professional archaeologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries excavated numerous Indigenous, colonial, and Revolutionary War sites as urban development expanded beyond Lower Manhattan and Downtown Brooklyn. After the establishment of the Landmarks Preservation Commission in 1965, New York City became an important center for urban archaeology and cultural resource management, with massive professional excavations in Lower Manhattan at the sites of Stadt Huys and 7 Hanover Square by the early 1980s, and the Five Points in the 1990s. Archaeology at the site of the New York African Burial Ground—eventually completed in line with the rightful demands of the descendant community—revealed information available from no other source about the lives of enslaved African-descended people and promoted positive change in archaeologists’ understanding of our ethical obligations to living communities. Archeological survey, excavation, analysis of an increasing number of collections, and collaborations with communities at many different sites continues today. This session brings together papers examining archaeological work in New York City and what it has revealed about the experiences of people in the past, the growth of the city, the development of the discipline, and more, with an eye to future impacts and changes, in typical New York City fashion.

Organizers: Kelly Britt (Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center), Meredith Linn (Bard Graduate Center) and Elizabeth Meade (AKRF)

Contact: kellym.britt@brooklyn.cuny.edu, meredith.linn@bgc.bard.edu, emeade@akrf.com

Schedule: Saturday 9:30 am -12 pm, 2:00 pm - 5:00 pm

Art, Archaeology, Activism 

This session is designed to be a space for conversation on the ties that bind—or could bind—art making with archaeology and activism, in both theory and practice. There are no limits on region, time period, method, or medium, but papers should touch in some way upon all three of the key terms of the session title, broadly defined. Paper proposals from graduate students, early career scholars, artists, activists, and community organizers are especially encouraged, together with those from established scholars in archaeology, art history, art practice, heritage studies, and other relevant disciplines.

Organizer: Lisa Trever (Columbia University)

Contact: lt2731@columbia.edu

Schedule: Sunday 9:30 am -12:00 pm

Bad Pots 

Pottery is among the most abundantly represented materials in the archaeological record. Yet the ubiquity of ceramic sherds can obscure the fact that they constitute only a small fraction of all vessels ever made. Typically, only the “good” pots—those that meet locally defined aesthetic, functional, or material standards—are selected for firing and thus have the potential to enter the archaeological record. The rest, whether awkward beginner pieces, blemished vessels, failed experiments, or otherwise “bad” pots, are usually reclaimed and returned to clay. Only in rare cases are bad pots fired, resulting in their marked absence from the surviving material record.

This session focuses on these invisible “bad” pots as a lens for investigating systems of learning, material attunement, and creativity in past craft communities. Through demonstrations and a round-table discussion, we bring together archaeologists, practicing potters, and ceramic instructors to highlight craft learning as an embodied, practice-based process. This interdisciplinary approach also challenges conventional modes of artifact analysis by considering what archaeological invisibility can reveal about material knowledge in the past.

Organizers: Camilla Sturm (Barnard College) and Gina Tibbott (Greenwich House Pottery)

Contact: csturm@barnard.edu, gtibbott@gmail.com

Schedule: Sunday 2:00 pm -5:00 pm

Between Scylla and Charybdis: Navigating Ethics in a Polarized World 

With an ever-increasing public interest in archaeology, history, cultural identity, and memorialization, coupled with the monetization of nearly everything, personal, societal, and professional ethical codes are more malleable than ever. The contemporary state of polarized and siloed media beholden to the algorithm understanding of what constitutes ethical behavior becomes increasingly fractured, sometimes making it feel like we are all stuck between being swallowed by Charybdis or ripped apart by Scylla. How do we avoid both fates while holding onto a meaningful ethical standard? Nearly every professional organization has their own code of ethics, which may or may not provide ramifications if there are breaches, as well as mechanisms to update said codes to change with the times. However, with the current dregs of the political sphere flowing into every societal niche, the word of a single charlatan can change the course of modern thought, and what a society views as ethical. How do we, as a profession comprised of individuals, create an ethical framework that can stand up to the pressures of a charlatan, advocate for honesty when it is uncomfortable, acknowledge individual and professional limits, and provide the support necessary to contradict power and rumors? Participants are encouraged to imagine and share ways to navigate the shifting seas of professional ethics, accountability, and some

semblance of sanity.

Organizers: Amanda Gronhovd (Minnesota State Archaeologist) and Jennifer Tworzyanski (Assistant to the State Archaeologist)

Contact: Jennifer.tworzyanski@state.mn.us

Schedule:Saturday 2:00 pm - 4:30 pm

Collage as Counter-Archive: Confronting Archaeological Imaginaries (Workshop)

Archaeological knowledge is shaped not only through fieldwork and analysis, but also through visual and narrative conventions in popular media. This workshop invites participants to engage with collage-making as a decolonial method for confronting the field of archaeology's ongoing connections with colonial knowledge production. It treats widely circulated publications, "Archaeology" magazine, "National Geographic," and similar print media, as active colonial archives that continue to shape public understandings of the past. Participants will dissect these materials to examine the assumptions embedded in their images, captions, and narrative structures, and to consider how these forms of media naturalize specific ways of seeing and thinking. Adding onto anti-colonial collage practices and scholarship on the archives, this workshop explores how recombining and recontextualizing archival fragments can serve as a mode of what art critic Hal Foster calls “probing a misplaced past” by revealing the gaps and distortions within dominant archaeological narratives. This project also draws on Trish Luker's work on decolonizing archives to understand how counter-archival practices challenge settler-colonial modes of record-keeping and offer a space for marginalized epistemologies and perspectives. For this workshop, participants will create “counter-archives,” collages that resist extractive language (visual and textual) in colonial archives, re-articulate their own relationships toward archaeology, and imagine alternative futures of the field. In line with TAG’s commitment to experimental and community-centered scholarship, this workshop offers an embodied and creative mode of theoretical inquiry that asks how our disciplinary narratives are constructed and can be deconstructed and reconstructed.

Organizer: Molly Dunfield (University of Buffalo)

Contact: mddunfie@buffalo.edu

Schedule: Sunday 2:00 pm- 5:00 pm

Conductors and Resistors: Archaeologies of Energy and Infrastructure 

What is the relationship of archaeology to infrastructure? How does infrastructure research reveal networks across space and time? For many archaeologists, new energy and infrastructure projects are the bread and butter that keep them gainfully employed through cultural resources management (CRM). What do these investigations reveal about the impacts of new energy installations on heritage landscapes? And to what extent do these projects address the needs of stakeholders? This session invites papers from researchers (in academia and CRM) who address a broad set of topics and experiences in energy or infrastructure, including researching new and historic energy landscapes, industrial landscapes, and networks. This session welcomes papers from 

- archaeologists who work in compliance to support the installation of new energy systems and infrastructure 

- archeologists who focus on the materiality of infrastructure 

- archaeological studies of industry and/or industrial landscapes.

Organizer: Allison McGovern (Brookhaven National Laboratory)

Contact: ajmmcg@gmail.com

Schedule: Sunday 9:30am -12 pm

Coming to Our Senses: Interpreting the Multisensory Experiences of Past People 

The sonorous call of a bell. The musky scent of perfume. The smooth texture of copper, warm to the touch. These are all examples of ephemeral sensory experiences intrinsic to the use of objects and communities they existed within. As noted by Yannis Hamilakis in Archaeology and the Senses: Human Experience, Memory, and Affect, “Sensory experience is material, it requires materiality in order to be activated, and its past and present material traces are all around us.” Through a range of exploration from archaeologists, anthropologists, material culturists, artists and historians, we can begin to disentangle and counter normative approaches to material traces in an attempt to come to terms with “the skin and flesh of the world.” Studies that prioritize visible and tangible material suggest only a portion of human experiences.

We invite papers that undertake a more holistic consideration of the senses, including but not limited to sound, smell, touch, taste, time and space, as methods and or subjects of study. Through such approaches, we intend to incite sensorial analyses in archaeological contexts as a way to resist static interpretations that strictly privilege visible and tangible material. We welcome approaches to the senses as a path to challenge existing narratives, as well as sensory analyses of objects used by past people to resist narratives imposed upon them.

Organizers: Mya Rose Bailey, Allison Donoghue (Preservation Society of Newport County) and Brenna Gomez (Bard Graduate Center)

Contact: myarosebailey1@gmail.com, brenna.gomez@bgc.bard.edu, allisondonoghue@gmail.com, 

Schedule: Saturday 2:00 pm - 04:30 pm 

"CTRL + Z" : Resisting Permanence through the Digital 

Digital workflows have become a nearly unavoidable default, even within a field so entangled in material realities as archaeology. Two decades after the London Charter for the Computer-based Visualisation of Cultural Heritage, we are confronted with rising technological challenges — open access, big data, artificial intelligence — and the ethical questions that accompany them everyday. Some challenges, though, remain unresolved twenty years on. As the penultimate principal of the London Charter, long-term sustainability is identified as an essential consideration for digital outputs. Even in surveys of digital archaeology (e.g. Colleen Morgan’s 2022 review of the field), permanence and maintenance are considered inherent to the work of digital archaeology. However, an unresolved tension between the necessity for documentation and the acknowledged limits of any preservation system persists; an incomplete archive is often accepted as a realistic compromise, given the unpredictable longevity of digital media.

This session seeks to explore the ongoing conflict between our expectations of permanence and the reality of obsolescence in any digital record. We welcome any work that falls under the large umbrella of digital archaeology, inviting participants to consider the impact of time and an ever-shifting digital landscape on digital workflows and outputs. We particularly encourage submissions that critically pair two projects (e.g. a project and its precedent), or that assess the evolution of a single project across various stages or drafts. The format of this session will follow a roundtable structure, with time built in for participants and audience to interact directly with the projects featured.

Organizers: Talia Perry (Carnegie Mellon University) and Elana Neher (Bard Graduate Center)

Contact: taperry@andrew.cmu.edu, elana.neher@gmail.com

Schedule: Saturday 9:30 am -11:30 am 

Disappearing Acts: Presence and Absence in the Archaeological Record 

Archaeological inquiry often focuses on the presence of material culture, yet archaeologists have long argued that the absence of material can be equally important. Themes of presence and absence have long been of interest to archaeologists to explore trade routes, social change, intentional erasure of the past, and various other research interests. Michael Schiffer, for example, considers the presence and absence of archaeological material through the framework of Cultural and Natural Transformations in site formation processes. Others, such as Severin Fowles and Kaet Heupel, have highlighted absence in the archaeological record through the purposeful rejection of certain forms of material culture. Scholars interested in presence and absence have noted that what is and is not preserved in the archaeological record results not only from the inherent properties of materials – some of which endure time while others decay and wither away – but also from the conscious and unconscious choices made by people in the past. This session will build on the growing scholarship related to this topic by considering what is preserved, and more importantly, why. Deliberately broad in scope, we invite papers that explore political, social, economic, and environmental factors related to presence and absence in the archaeological records from any region, culture, or time period.

Organizers: William Dunsmore (ACME Heritage Consultants), Katherine Cohen (NYU), and Tova Kadish (Bard Graduate Center)

Contact: wdunsmore@acmeheritage.com, KatherineLCohen@gmail.com, tova.kadish@bgc.bard.edu

Schedule: Sunday 9:00 am -12:00 pm 

Edgy Archaeology: Narratives from the Academic Beyond 

Anxious to conform to tenets of “science”, many archaeological narratives have shied away from more creative, kooky, kaleidoscopic and perhaps even crazy explorations of life in the past. Inspired by archaeologists who explored the discipline through art and nonacademic practices, we want to resist the pull of normative storytelling or report-writing, and invite participants to explore their work through unorthodox lenses: Be that by engaging with non-archaeological media or formats like poetry or dance; disciplines and practices not usually thought with, such as cryptozoology or esoterica; or forms of nonconformism, satire, and fantasy. We invite you to explore squirrel archaeology, the archaeology of Middle Earth, ghostly encounters in the field, or collaborate with Druids at Stonehenge. Roam through theories, methods, and whet our archaeological appetites!

Organizer: Jenny Ni and Amanda Althoff (Columbia University)

Contact: jn2512@columbia.edu, eaa2167@columbia.edu

Schedule: Sunday 2:00 pm -05:00 pm 

Elevating Indigenous Expertise: Approaches to Access and Care for Indigenous Collections in Colonial Institutions 

This session resists the enduring narrative that Western scientific systems are somehow better or more correct than the knowledge held by Indigenous peoples in relation to their own cultural heritage. The expertise of Indigenous community members and knowledge holders remains intentionally overlooked in museums and academic spaces in favor of Western colonial ways of knowing. Approaches to this framework are changing: the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) requires that museums recognize traditional Tribal knowledge as expertise and accommodate Tribal preferences in curation, care, and access to collections, and museums globally are inviting Indigenous experts and curators to participate in exhibition design and visit with Ancestors and collections. These practices are increasingly visible in international museum contexts in addition to those in the United States. We invite scholars and practitioners to discuss their own approaches by presenting collaborative case studies, theoretical frameworks, institutional policy, community outreach, repatriation, or other practices that aim to elevate Indigenous expertise in colonial museum collections.

Organizers: Krystiana L. Krupa (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), Liz Ellis (Princeton University)

Contact: klkrupa@illinois.edu, ee1916@princeton.edu

Schedule: Saturday 11:00 am -12:00 pm 

Embodied Archives: Memory Beyond Text 

This session takes up the recent interest in the more-than-human to think about alternate forms of archive and the forms of resistance such archives might offer. We call for submissions from archaeologists and other scholars working with environmental archives, embodied archives and non-textual forms of memory to explore what this offers for thinking about archaeology as memory-practice. What would it do to put the critical literature on the creation and management of documentary archives (e.g., Derrida 1996, Mbembe 2002, Jimerson 2009, Stoler 2008, Lee 2020 etc) in conversation with the archaeological and environmental literature on taphonomy, formation processes and sampling? How are questions of power, ethics, and data justice involved in the production, management and dissemination of archaeological archives? These questions are all the more pressing to consider in light of the deletion of climate data by the United States government.

Derrida, J., 1996. Archive fever: A Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press.

Jimerson, R.C., 2009. Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice. Society of American Archivists.

Lee, J.A., 2020. Producing the archival body. Routledge.

Mbembe, A., 2002. The Power of the Archive and its Limits. In Refiguring the archive (pp. 19-27). Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands.

Stoler, A.L., 2008. Along the archival grain: Epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. Princeton University Press.

Organizers: Alexandria Mitchem Hansen, Chiamaka Mangut, and Zoë Crossland (Columbia University)

Contact: atm2161@columbia.edu, lca2146@columbia.edu, zc2149@columbia.edu

Schedule: Sunday 9:00 am -12:00 pm 

Exposing Erasure: Interrogating the Structures of the Settler State 

This session is about how archaeology brings to light the buried and forgotten stories of people marginalized in the making of modern American settler state as well as how their erasure is central to the way contemporary systems thrive. As we focus on the people, events, and ways of life that have disappeared and been forgotten, it is essential that we also interrogate the politics that created and count on their absence in modern consciousness and the fact that discoveries and traces of those pushed underground is part of how social critique is sustained. As concerned archaeologists and allies to the communities we work with, these papers come at a critical moment in this settler colonial state’s history as a single, exclusionary narrative is centered and supported by state power in manifold ways.

Organizers: Christopher Matthews (Montclair State University), Megan Hicks (Hunter College, CUNY), and William Williams (CUNY Graduate Center)

Contact: matthewsc@montclair.edu, mhick@hunter.cuny.edu, wwilliams@gradcenter.cuny.edu

Schedule: Saturday 2:00 pm -05:00 pm 

Hispanic Caribbean Voices: To Own Our Tangible Histories 

Material culture of everyday objects such as a small hand-thrown coffee cup, a pendant pass down through generations, or a comb with bent teeth, have serve as the footprints that hold onto the tangible memories of a peopled past. Within the melting-pot of the Caribbean, objects are a way to connect with a multicultural landscape that has historically shaped the joys and sorrows among generations of communities from colonial wounds and continuous fights for collective liberation. Although plenty has been written from a foreigner’s lens, the Hispanic Caribbean has venture greatly to reclaim their narrative, between its own territories to the continents where their material culture is housed. These continuous journeys and ventures bring warmth and connection to the untold stories now spoken and heard from their own voices. Through currents that ignite collaborations—despite economic, structural, and political difficulties—they carry out this work from an anti-colonial autochthonous perspective to create ways to unit a past present in their everyday lives. This session brings together Spanish-speaking Caribbean professionals from cultural management, academic research and artistic production backgrounds, who engage with the tangible Afro Indigenous history of their territories and nations to democratize knowledge and uplift a shared heritage. Hence, they highlight the relevance of historical objects and artistic practices in community-building spaces and quotidian activities that elevate vital ancestral memory for Caribbean peoples’ subsistence. 

Organizers: Gelenia Trinidad Rivera (CUNY)

Email: gtrinidad@gradcenter.cuny.edu  

Schedule: Saturday 11:00 am -12:00 pm 

Interpretive Dilemmas and Ephemeral Storytelling in Archaeology 

When the power and intention of an object or place lie in their being shared interpersonally and/or experienced physically, in what ways do we fundamentally change meanings and the stories these objects and spaces tell when we remove them from context? Do we disrespect intentions by preserving the object or space in impersonal institutional archives, in museums, or even as deemed-to-be historic places or monuments, either digitally or physically? This session will explore the ethics and politics that surround the material archive, including themes of ephemerality, ontological autonomy, territoriality, the right of refusal, the importance of documenting for the future, multi-sited analysis, and autoethnography/autotheory.

Organizers: Dante Angelo (Universidad de Tarapacá), Margaret Lou Brown (Duke University), Kelly Britt (Brooklyn College and The Graduate Center, CUNY), and Stacey Camp (Michigan State University)

Contact: dangeloz@gmail.com, margaret.brown2@duke.edu, kellym.britt@brooklyn.cuny.edu, campstac@msu.edu

Schedule: Saturday 09:00 am -10:30 pm 

Is the Future of Archaeology Still Antiracist? 

Closed Roundtable discussion with invited speakers. The in-person discussion will be hosted at TAG, and will also be live streamed for accessibility to audiences beyond the conference.

On June 25, 2020, 6 heritage professionals gathered to answer the call, of how archaeology could find ways to concretely engage with the long-standing problems of systemic antiblack racism (Flewellen et al 2020). This public salon was prompted by the unprecedented social unrest resulting from COVID-19 and the public murders of Toni McDade, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd and countless others.  The virtual salon was attended by over 1,700 participants, and has been viewed over 4,000 times, marking a  groundbreaking moment for a reckoning with archaeology’s entanglements with antiblackness. In the years since, the country has been gripped by the equally unprecedented rise of fascism, and its ensuing attacks on Black Study (Harney  and Moten 2013),  antiracism, and free speech. This moment of crisis is further shaped by violent attacks on immigrant communities and the growing genocides in Palestine, Sunday and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. 

In keeping with the Black feminist praxis that shaped the first salon, this 2026 roundtable invites scholars back to the kitchen table to answer the questions of where we’ve been and where we need to go. Our conversation will be grounded in an examination of antiblackness and its permutations in archaeology, however no topic will be out of bounds. 

Organizers: Alexandra McDougle (Columbia University), Ayana Flewellen (Stanford University)

Schedule: Sunday 02:00 pm - 05:00 pm 

Material Resistances, Resistant Materials 

This session engages the conference theme through a focus on materials: how materials may resist decay over time due to their inherent properties, how they may be manipulated to do so via the tools and techniques deployed by their makers and later custodians, and how they may guide forms of artistic, social, or political resistance. On the one hand, our aim is to consider “resistant materials,” that is, how in the absence of human presence and intervention materials might withstand disappearance and degradation over time amid natural forces and climates, or what could be called an “eco-artificial” resistance to archaeology and extraction. On the other hand, we hope to explore “material resistances” in the multiple layers of human intervention during the creation of objects as well as their re-creation across their afterlives. This inquiry includes questions of how makers treat resistant materials such that the inevitable friction in their manipulation is encoded in the resulting objects, or how and why makers attempt to transform their materials into resistant objects. Treatment of the human intervention might also consider how archaeologists, conservators, and preservationists of the past and present envision and work to further make materials resist time through a range of means. Lastly, we are interested in the implications of resistant materials and their treatment by various actors in discourses about cultural memory and identity. This session welcomes papers that interpret these topics and broader questions about the relationship between materials, resistance, and human intervention.

Organizers: Julia Carabatsos (Columbia University) and Maria-Nefeli Panetsos (Bard Graduate Center)

Contact: julia.carabatsos@bgc.bard.edu, marianefeli.panetsos@bgc.bard.edu

Schedule: Sunday 02:00 pm - 05:00 pm 

Packing: A Material History in Brief (Art installation / Poster session)

This artistic installation invites participants to explore the history of transmasculine prosthetics. Through primary source documents, photographs, and handcrafted facsimiles, independent researcher Riah L. Kinsey and multidisciplinary artist Milo R. Wissig provide creative yet substantially researched insights into "packing," "binding," and other material practices that masculine-of-center individuals have used to express transgender identities for over 300 years.

Note: This installation will include representations of human genitalia, as well as (historical) sexual imagery.

Organizer: Riah Kinsey (Independent Scholar)

Contact: rlksop1989@gmail.com

Schedule: Saturday 2:00pm - 5:00pm (Dekalb Gallery)

Queering Materiality and Temporality: Expanding Archaeological Imagination 

Archaeological theory has historically privileged Western epistemologies and hierarchies. This has been challenged in recent years as theories of human/nonhuman interactions, non-linear temporalities, the imagined/imagination, and collective memory are employed to destabilize these dominant frameworks. How can archaeologists resist hegemonic interpretations of material remains in the construction of historical narratives? This session invites participants to explore ways to approach materials and their contexts through a non-normative lens for an expanded and more holistic interpretation of data. Theoretical interventions, case studies offering counter-interpretations, and innovative narratives of (re)constructing the past are all welcome.

Panel Topics (non-exhaustive)

- Materiality

- Queer theory

- Interpretations and historical narratives

- Chronobiopolitics

- Postcolonial archaeology

- Multitemporalities

- Non-normative potentialities

Organizers: Emre Deniz Yurttaş, Milan O. Taylor, and Farah Saqer (Columbia University)

Contact: ey2406@columbia.edu, mot2109@columbia.edu, fs2855@columbia.edu

Schedule: Saturday 09:30 am - 11:30 am 

Racial Alterities 

The making of rigid racial categories was paramount to colonial, capitalist projects. Archaeologists have long contributed to investigating how such worlds were made, as well as the modes through which racialized people resisted the violence of the racial order. At the same time, a growing body of literature challenges an overreliance on racial categories to understand past experience, noting that doing so obscures the complexity of lived experience, reproduces partial or reductive interpretations, and ultimately reifies the very categories we seek to interrogate. Furthermore, archaeologists’ increasing integration of material, oral, ecological, and archival sources has expanded interpretive possibilities. For this session, we invite participants to think through the permeability, inadequacy, and the breakdown of these categories in pursuit of what Aimé Césaire called a “humanism made to the measure of the world”. We’re particularly interested in archaeological approaches that explore the complexities of race-making and the everyday modes through which the subversion of racecraft can contribute to building worlds otherwise.

Organizers: Julia Jong Haines (Syracuse University) and Matthew Reilly (City College of New York and CUNY Graduate Center)

Contact: jjhaines@syr.edu, mreilly@ccny.cuny.edu

Schedule: Sunday 09:30 am - 12:00 pm 

Rebuilding Provenience from Institutional Memory: Ethical and Theoretical Approaches to Legacy Human Remains at the Penn Museum 

Legacy collections of human skeletal remains present logistical, ethical, and theoretical challenges regarding how anthropological knowledge is constructed, preserved, and remembered. At the Penn Museum, the Biological Anthropology collections contain numerous human remains with incomplete, inconsistent, or missing provenance data—a situation common in historic collections across the United States. Archival gaps, dispersed collections, and legacy cataloging systems complicate efforts to reconstruct curatorial histories, highlighting the role of institutional memory in archaeological practice. This paper centers institutional memory in addressing these challenges.

We will present a case study illustrating how we pair documentation with accumulated staff knowledge to recover fragmentary provenance information. Methods include archival cross-referencing, legacy database reconciliation, and collaborative archiving and curation that involve past and current affiliates with the Biological Anthropology Section of the museum. Each (re?)source is key to understanding how the history and materiality of human remains are mediated through changing cataloging practices, ethical standards, human interactions.

We argue that confronting archival absences does more than facilitate responsible stewardship of legacy human remains; it also challenges assumptions about the fixity of knowledge in museums, the authority of institutional narratives, and historical memory. Therefore, reconstructing lost provenance is not merely a technical exercise, but a theoretical intervention that illuminates the intersections of ethics, memory, and knowledge production in contemporary anthropological museums.

Organizers: Rachel Watkins, Stacey Espenlaub, Alex Denning , Hannah Wagner (Penn Museum)

Contact: rachel.watkins@sas.UPenn.edu, staceye@upenn.edu, denninga@upenn.edu, hawagner@upenn.edu

Resisting Master Narratives in Museums 

Since the 1970s and 1980s museums have come under increasing scrutiny for the master narratives they have constructed and maintained. Academics, descendant communities, and different publics have challenged collecting practices, interpretations, and representations grounded in Euro-American imperialism and (settler) colonialism. Out of these critiques, efforts to challenge art historical, anthropological, and archaeological canons have reinterpreted collections through different lenses, inserted alternative histories, and shared authority by reconfiguring relations between museums, communities, and the public. In recent decades, we have seen a plethora of innovative, responsive projects and transformations that decenter traditional approaches to museum work, while also encountering deeply sedimented structures that limit these efforts. This panel interprets “museums” broadly as institutions and sites of collecting and exhibiting and welcomes contributions from different disciplines and methodological approaches. We seek to assemble a group of scholars, practitioners, and artists who explore the affordances of institutional collections, gallery spaces, archiving practices, and representational strategies to resist master narratives. These efforts have often been described as “decolonizing” or “Indigenizing” the museum. While we recognize the underlying intentions of employing these terms, we acknowledge the need to critically examine their use against their actual unsettling effects (Tuck and Yang, 2012). We seek to rethink museums, their responsibilities, and potentials to care for belongings, more-than-human relations, and audiences. We invite proposals that detail the strategies and practices communities, scholars, artists, and museum staff have devised to renegotiate museum futures.

Organizers:David Gassett (Bard Graduate Center) and Leonie Treier (NYU)

Contact: david.gassett@bgc.bard.edu, lt2802@nyu.edu

Schedule: Saturday 09:00 am - 10:30 am 

Reimagining House Museums 

Can archaeology be “reimagined” to illuminate the stories of marginalized people in historic house museums? Since the mid-20th century, alternative narratives have emerged in historic houses, highlighting experiences beyond those of the elite individuals typically used to justify the preservation of these sites. Such efforts can be difficult, especially when archival sources are not available. This session looks to historical archaeology - its methodologies, tools, and frameworks- to explore new and reimagined pathways to accessing these histories and the interpretational affect they can hold.

Organizers: Riah Kinsey (Lefferts Historic House), Niko Berrocal (Brooklyn College) and Scott Ferrara (CUNY Graduate Center)

Contact: rkinsey@prospectpark.org,nikobrcal@gmail.com, SFerrara1@gradcenter.cuny.edu, 

Schedule: Sunday 02:00 pm - 04:30 pm 

Something about Love 

As bell hooks has taught us, there is love in what we do. Whether we think of heart centered work (Supernanat et al 2020) and the transformative capacity of heartfelt thinking in archaeology (Surface-Evans 2020), love as an ethic, as a principle (Odozor 2022), love as a method for stewarding ethical relationships (Flewellen Forthcoming ), or thinking through the love embedded in deep intergenerational relationships with land and country (Rizvi 2025), love has moved beyond being a ‘feel good’ way of talking through experiences to being praxis - rigorous as a theoretical and methodological intervention. In All About Love, bell hooks asserts that love is better understood as a verb than its common theorization as a noun. Within this conceptualization, love is rooted in actions, always in motion, stretching toward a goal that hooks articulates as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one or another’s spiritual growth.”  Love, as a method, is a way to decolonize, to undo and undiscipline, to force the field to contend with those of us for whom this field was not structured, it is to resist.  

Archaeologists have worked, thought, experimented alongside contemporary artists as modes of transdisciplinary engagement and deep research around issues seeped in love and care. In some cases, the archaeologist/artist/scholar/researcher are one and the same. The projects presented in this session queer the line between art and research, both as a lecture performance and as part of a contemporary art exhibition, all focusing on love and resistance. 

Odozor, E.T. 2022. ‘A Love Ethic for Black Feminisms: The Necessity of Love in Black Feminist Discourses and Discoveries’, Hypatia, 37(2), pp. 241–256.

Rizvi, U. Z. 2025. The Form of the Shadow: Decolonial Practice, Refusal, and Feminist Killjoys. Shadow Archaeology: For other modes of archaeological worldmaking. Pp. 11-22. Archaeological Orientations Series: Routledge.

Surface-Evans, Sarah L. 2020. "“I Could Feel Your Heart” The Transformative and Collaborative Power of Heartfelt Thinking in Archaeology." Archaeologies of the Heart: 69-81.

Supernant, K., Baxter, J.E., Lyons, N. and Atalay, S. eds., 2020. Archaeologies of the Heart. New York: Springer.

Flewellen, Ayana Omilade (Forthcoming). The Will to Adorn: Black Women and Sartorial Choice After Slavery. Princeton University Press 

Organizers: Ayana Omilade Flewellen (Stanford University) and Uzma Z. Rizvi (Pratt Institute)

Contact: ayanaf@stanford.edu, urizvi@pratt.edu

Schedule: Saturday 02:00 pm - 05:00 pm 

Theoretical Zooarchaeology: What are we studying and why? 

This session explores the many ways zooarchaeology intersects with questions of resistance, power, and community. What roles have animals played in various societies, and what meanings do their remains continue to carry? From narratives of continuity and interaction to expressions of identity, we ask how animals function as cultural markers in both past and present contexts. We also consider how zooarchaeological methods themselves shape, support, or challenge the heritage and sovereignty of local communities. We welcome papers that investigate resistance, continuity, heritage, power, storytelling, and related themes through the materiality of faunal remains. Contributions that critique existing methodologies or propose new approaches are also encouraged.

Organizers: Sarah Elaebrak (CUNY Graduate Center) and Pam Crabtree (New York University)

Contact: selaebrak@gradcenter.cuny.edu,pc4@nyu.edu

Schedule: Sunday 9:30am -12 pm

You Say You Want a Revolution? Revolution as a Concept in Archaeological Theory and Practice 

Archaeologists often talk about revolutions – either to describe the transformations in the past that they study or as a way to organize and narrate the intellectual and social histories of the discipline itself. Revolution, in this sense, is a commonsense vernacular category in archaeological thought. This session asks participants to explore the heterogeneous ways that revolutions figure in how archaeologists talk about their work or about the past, focusing critical attention on how these pragmatic, and often unreflective, invocations of revolution are in alignment or in tension with the calls to rethink archaeology’s relationship to its own social context.

Participants in the session might explore this theme by:

- Critically engaging the various “revolutions” in the past that archaeologists have identified (and critiqued), such as the cognitive revolution, the Neolithic revolution, the secondary products revolution, the Industrial revolution, etc.

- Critically engaging with narratives about scientific or theoretical revolutions in the history of archaeology or contemporary archaeological practice

- Critically engaging with how archaeologists have (or have not) been in dialogue with revolutionary practices in the world, especially those focused on political action, social justice, and refusal

Organizers: Hannah Chazin (Columbia University) and Camilla Sturm (Barnard College)

Contact: hc2986@columbia.edu, csturm@barnard.edu

Schedule: Saturday 02:00 pm - 04:00 pm 

With Each Marking, We Build Our Resistance: A Textile Craft Workshop

Historically, resistance movements have had a strong connection to craft. From the production of handmade protest signs, to the formation of cooperative quilting bees, or the use of craft to establish economic independence and sustain cultural traditions, the practice of making things together has strengthened collective actions through joy and connection. Often embracing activities that invite participation from individuals with varied skill levels, craft encourages collective action and democratic engagement. The repetitive, meditative motions of slow production are also recognized for supporting the well being of individuals and communities. This drop-in, textile-based workshop, based on previous activities taught with different communities of relevance, invites participants to make art together and learn about the use of botanical materials for printing and dyeing. Come enjoy the impacts of making something with your hands while supporting our individual and collective resistance.

Organizer: Hannah Quaintance (University at Buffalo, SUNY; Buffalo & Erie County Public Library)

Contact: hlquaint@buffalo.edu

Schedule: Sunday 02:00 pm - 05:00 pm