Archaeology as Festival

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What if academic conferences were reimagined?

This book provides a sample of the papers given at festivalCHAT, a conference qua festival convened in 2020 by the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology in Theory group. Held at the height of the COVID pandemic and hosted entirely online, festivalCHAT featured a global line up of participants who embraced the unprecedented situation by probing the limits of archaeological thinking and experimenting with new ways to present and produce archaeological knowledge. The fourteen papers presented here consider the archaeology of COVID, graffiti, the home, waysides, chain mail, and urban staircases. The coordinators of festivalCHAT frame these contributions by offering archaeological insights into how they organized the event. Two reflective chapters consider the sample presented in the volume with the critical distance of two years and historical perspectives on CHAT.

The result is a book that is as different from a conference publication as festivalCHAT was from an academic conference. The contributors urge us to think about archaeology in broad, new ways as an antidote to the exacerbated sense of isolation brought about by the pandemic and our contemporary condition.