Multidimensional Dialogues: Entangling the Americas’ Pasts, Presents and Futures

Convenors

Convenors

• Camila Alday (PhD Student, Department of Archaeology)
• Oliver Antczak (PhD Student, Department of Archaeology)
• Joshua Fitzgerald (Rubinoff JRF, Churchill College, Department of History/Art History)
• Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas (Senior Curator of World Archeology at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology)
• Jasmine Vieri (PhD Student, Department of Archaeology)

Camila Alday is an archaeologist specialising in bast fibres and weaving technologies of Pre-Columbian South America. Camila is also interested in understanding how containers – mostly made of plants, and basketry were critical material culture for past human societies. Camila has received her BA in Anthropology with a major in Archaeology at University of Tarapaca, in northern Chile. She recently finished her PhD at Cambridge University. In her doctoral research, she studied bast fibre materials to understand how the production of nets, looped bags, mats and other fibre materials underpinned maritime subsistence strategies during the Andean Preceramic Period (10,000 – 3,500 BP).

Oliver Antczak is a Venezuelan and Polish anthropologist and archaeologist interested in the intersection between heritage and identity, particularly in the Caribbean. He received his B.A. in Anthropology and Archaeology from Leiden University College (2016) and an MPhil in Archaeology, Heritage and Museum Studies, at the University of Cambridge (2018). His current PhD research, supported by the ESRC and Gates Cambridge, focuses on understanding how heritage is used in the resurgence and maintenance of Indigenous identities in the Southern Caribbean, and his work is currently focusing on a collaborative and comparative approach to Trinidad, Margarita, and Bonaire.

Joshua Fitzgerald is the 2020-24 Rubinoff Junior Research Fellow in ‘art as a source of knowledge’ (Churchill College) researching the material culture of Mexico. As a trained ethnohistorian in Nahuatl Studies, Joshua has expertise in the archaeology, art and architecture, and cultural history of Mesoamerica. In 2019, he received his PhD (History) and Museum Studies certification from the University of Oregon, and has contributed as a content specialist with several museums, including the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and the Getty Research Institute. His research has been sponsored by several foundations in the U.S., Mexico and U.K., and, in Cambridge, he has enjoyed educating about all aspects of Mesoamerican and Colonial Latin American culture, from the Spanish Conquest in video games to Nahua sacred food-art. Joshua hopes his research projects and supervisions with Cambridge students will help foster the recovery of neglected voices and perspectives from the past to better our future.

Jimena Lobo Guerrero Arenas is Senior Curator of World Archeology at the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology. She has a BA in Anthropology and History from the Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia and a MA in History from the same university. She completed her PhD at the University of Bristol and before coming to Cambridge, she was a Lecturer and Curator of Archeology at the Museum Centre of the Universidad de Caldas in Colombia. She is interested in working with material culture from historical periods in Spanish America looking at the interaction between indigenous people, Africans and Europeans. Her research spans the history and archeology of colonialism, practices of resistance, the continuity and change of pre-Columbian technological traditions, postcolonial theory, and sensory responses to the Encounter. More recently, her research has focused on the study of metallurgy in the Americas during the colonial period. She has also worked extensively on museums and cultural heritage. She is particularly interested in giving source communities a leading voice within the narratives that are created for displays and learning experiences. She is interested in research projects that address issues on the histories of collections, past technologies, provenance, the life of objects and repatriation.

Jasmine Vieri is a PhD student at the Department of Archaeology in Cambridge. Her research interests include materials science and computational analysis in archaeology, particularly in relation to examining relationships between humans, their environments, material culture, and technologies – as well as the development of sustainable approaches to re-using legacy data in archaeology to produce large-scale, cross-comparative analysis. Her PhD research, funded by the AHRC, focuses on collating and synthesising the chemical compositions of pre-Columbian gold and copper alloys, with a focus on present-day Colombia, but extending into the area encompassing the Southern Central Andes to present-day Mexico. In order to seek and explain temporal and regional patterning in metallurgical practices, her work explores the role of culture, environmental constraints/affordances, and the selection of technological performance properties in alloy selection.

Faculty advisors

• Elizabeth DeMarrais (Associate Professor in Archaeology; Senior Postgraduate Tutor, Churchill College; Director of Studies, Churchill and Murray Edwards Colleges, University of Cambridge)
• Hank Gonzalez (Assistant Professor in Caribbean History; Department of History; Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge)

For enquiries contact the Networks Programme Manager

Programme 2022 - 2023

Lent Term 2023

Theme: Sensory Overload: Soundscapes, Scents, and Visions that Criss-Crossed the Americas

Easter Term 2023

Theme: Technological knowledge, frameworks and sustainability through time in the Americas

Michaelmas Term 2022

Theme: Ecologies, environments and the eco-relationships: lessons from the Americas

Termly Themes

Easter term 2023

Theme: Technological knowledge, frameworks and sustainability through time in the Americas

This series will focus on examining the role of technology in past, present and future societies throughout the continent. The aim is to bridge together lessons from archaeology and present-day Indigenous and other local stakeholder groups in building more sustainable approaches to the adoption, use and advancement of technologies in the globalised, capitalist economies of the present day. The first seminar in Easter term will examine the ingenuity of selected pre-Hispanic technologies across the varied environments of the continent. Some of the showcased examples will highlight how technological advancement, innovation and knowledge was embedded in a non-capitalist worldview, while others will evidence human resilience and adaptation at the face of environmental degradation or processes of socio-political re-organisation. The second seminar will examine the concerns and needs of different groups relating to present-day environmental and social issues that are brought upon by the quest for raw materials (such as metals), and the building of industry for modern-day technologies. At the same time, we will ask in what ways these communities can see technological advancement benefiting themselves. The third talk will then examine sustainable technological practices of present-day populations across the Americas, some of which have continued since pre-Columbian times, as an alternative framework for the future. The fourth seminar rounds the previous discourse with dialogues relating to the first three meetings of the term. Discussants will engage critically with actionable technologies and sustainability as a core theme, and draw upon indigenous knowledge and archaeological research to ask how technological development in the Americas can occur in a more balanced manner, and take into account the interests of all involved stakeholders.

Lent term 2023

Theme: Sensory overload: soundscapes, scents, and visions that criss-crossed the Americas

For Lent Term we gather experts emphasising archaeologies of the Americas’ sensorial worlds: sound, scent, taste, sight, and touch to explore themes of human-environmental impact and agency. An opening social will launch the series and focus of the term’s mission.

The first dialogue, ‘Echoes of the Past,’ will highlight Sound Studies with research relating to in situ and object-based analysis. How can our science and interpretation of soundscapes act as a sounding board for the past, including the latest hi-tech spatial analysis to uncover lost voices and instrumentality?

‘Recovering Scents and Lingering Tastes,’ our second dialogue, churns around scent and taste research helping us rethink the past with experts in archaeologies relating to scents and flavours, residual chemistry that indicates lingering traditions, and iconographies of taste.

The third dialogue, ‘Archaeologies in Sight’ will explore visual cues and optical tools employed by experts to reveal the macro and micro aspects of human-visual traces. How do researchers interpret the observable surfaces of objects and grander landscapes that, in turn, inform today’s studies of human-environmental relationships in the Americas?

‘Articulating the Senses’, the final session of the series, draws together three experts in the crafting of archaeologies of art, opening up a conversation about the senseworlds of expression and critical material culture study. Amplifying themes and topics from our earlier dialogues, our participants and the community will also seek to round out the thematic approaches encountered and situate the enduring insights garnered from the term’s entanglements in the Americas.

Theme: Michaelmas term 2022

Theme: Present

The aim of our Michaelmas series is to think about the relationships among ecologies, belief systems and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (‘TEK’) from past, present and future human experiences. The purpose is to provide an opportunity for collaboration among invited speakers, artists and our research network audience. Key highlights will come from dialoguing about the valuable lessons we learn from studying human and non-human ecologies significant to our uncertain future. We will explore an imagined future from non-Western and traditional lifeways, reflecting on how the Indigenous communities of the Americas can help us rethink sustainability, resilience and alternative strategies to respond to political ecologies and environmental challenges. Rounding out our first series will be an art exhibition featuring reflections on the theme (please see our call-for-participants).