With the Fall of a Tree, Archaeology Returns to Liberia
Following a devastating Civil War, archaeologists are helping Liberia rewrite a more inclusive history and forge a more diverse future. ✽ In 2019, in the aftermath of a…
Tag: heritage
Piecing Together History From a Roman Mosaic
The 2020 discovery of an ancient villa in Britain uncovered the most important Roman mosaic found in the last century. An archaeologist explains how the mosaic offers an…
Rock Drawings
A Tohono O’odham poet and linguist reflects on the stories and wisdom ancestors communicated—how people survived, how they dispersed and differentiated, how they remember. “Rock Drawings” …
A Tree’s Tongue
A Nigerian poet-anthropologist witnesses the powerful rising up of ancestors through the revival of a tree in the Igbo village of Ogbodu. “A Tree’s Tongue” is part of…
How Gravestones Shaped as Sheep United the Caucasus
An archaeologist fascinated by a centurieslong memorial practice in Georgia considers how these unique gravestones reflect shared values and traditions—yet are sometimes destroyed in nationalist cultu…
A Major Museum’s Attempt to Center Native American Voices
Chicago’s Field Museum recently unveiled their new Native North America Hall, redesigned with input from Native collaborators. But does it go far enough to address past harms? ✽…
The Dangers of Ancient Apocalypse’s Pseudoscience
Reviewing Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, an anthropologist explains how its host Graham Hancock devalues both archaeology and Indigenous heritage. This article was originally published at The Conversa…
How a Song Bridged Diné and Ndebele Worlds
An anthropologist recounts a magical moment of songwriting collaboration between Diné (Navajo) and Ndebele artists gathered for the WOMAD Festival in South Africa. ✽ In October, I traveled…
A Somali Archaeologist Is Championing Heritage in the Horn of Africa
An interview with Sada Mire dives into the difficulties and rewards of preserving history and letting local perspectives guide heritage management in Somalia and Somaliland. ✽ Somalia and…
Heritage Forensics Is Tackling Devastating New Forms of Cultural Erasure
In the Caucasus, researchers are using aerospace technology to expose the clandestine obliteration of Armenian cultural heritage. These new methods of archaeology will prove necessary in the global…
“You hurt our monuments, you hurt our heroes, you go to jail for ten years”: Contested histories at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021
Minutes before Trump told his supporters to march on the US Capitol and to “fight like hell,” he reminded them of a “little law” against attacking national monuments:…
The vital afterlife of Chernobyl cemeteries
Every year, after Easter, hundreds of families from all over Ukraine gather in the Chernobyl Zone of Alienation. People converge toward the now-deserted area to perform rites called…
Perimeter Protection: The Resiliency of Plantation Infrastructures in the South Carolina Lowcountry
Editorial Note: This post is part of our series highlighting the work of the Anthropology and Environment Society’s 2021 Roy A. Rappaport Prize Finalists. We asked them to outline the…
Heritage Out of Control: Musealising (Hi)stories of Migration
Since the early 2000s, coinciding with the 40th anniversary of the recruitment agreement between Austria and Turkey in 1964, there have been increasing initiatives in Vienna that involve municipal…
Heritage out of control: Is Libation a Prayer?
Religion as Heritage in Ghana In 2009, Ghana celebrated its 52nd birthday as an independent country with the usual pomp and circumstance. The parade was held at the…
Heritage out of Control: Present Gods, Absent Nation
The sun had already set when the night-long live broadcast of a kohoḿbā kankāriya ritual in a Sri Lankan town begins. A larger-than-life image of the leading national…
Heritage out of Control: When Heritage Turns to Rubble
In December 2017, Toungouma was stolen, the famed stone said to render justice in the Département of Dogondoutchi, Niger. When it was found a few days later, the…
Heritage out of Control: Inheriting Love – Sensing in The Museum of Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (1207-1273)
“Muslims go to Mecca once, if they are not unnecessarily wealthy (laughing), but people of all kinds come to visit Mevlana [‘s musealized tomb] every year. Why? Because…
Heritage out of Control: RecycDisturbing Heritage
Disturbing Heritage The past is present through its lasting material forms, in open and hidden ways, marked and unmarked. Whether cherished, taken for granted or dismissed and left…
Negative heritage and de-normalizing necropolitics
Upon entering the Orthodox Christian cemetery in Siret, a town on the Romanian-Ukrainian border, we were met with neatly kept marvel gravestones, occasionally adorned with plastic flowers and…
Heritage out of Control: Human bones as inherited waste of Europe
Central and Eastern Europe – known as “Bloodlands”, the area where Nazi and Stalin’s atrocities met, leaving behind many sites marked by mass killings – provide an obvious…
Heritage Out of Control – (B)Lasting Bombs
On January 30, 2021, more than 8000 inhabitants of Göttingen, Germany, had to evacuate their homes. Four suspected WWII bombs had been detected underground, and in order to…
Heritage out of Control: Don’t trash my holocaust
It was an ordinary, unseasonably cool, summer day in a sleepy town just forty minutes outside of Berlin. Oranienburg once was home to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, one of…
Heritage out of Control: Today’s utopia tomorrow’s waste?
Exploring how beliefs and spiritual dimensions of inequality turn today’s realities of waste into future heritage and (invisible) monuments Cite this article as: Fouad Asfour. January, 2022. ‘Herita…