UCL Institute of Archaeology Gordon Childe Lecture 2019

Matthew Johnson (Northwestern University) will give a lecture entitled ‘On Writing the Past Backwards’ on Thursday 12 December 2019 from 6.30pm. The Lecture will take place in the UCL Harrie Massie Lecture Theatre and will be followed by a reception in the Leventis Gallery at the Institute of Archaeology.

Abstract

I am writing a book on English landscapes in the context of the north Atlantic. It spans the 2nd millennium CE, and works backwards, from New World colonial encounters, to interactions with Scotland, Wales, and Ireland, back to medieval infrastructure and beyond. I discuss two challenges for this project. First, while there is much written on how time is socially embedded, there is little on the reversal of time. Such a theoretical gap is strange, given that working backwards, peeling off the layers, is so central to what archaeologists do. Second, identities are never essential, and are always in a state of becoming. So there is no essence to ‘Englishness’; the English re-made themselves over and over again. Time and cultural identity come together in understanding the long term, and in reconciling enduring structures with the importance of human agency. And they unavoidably speak to the populist nationalisms of recent and not-so-recent times.

Advance booking is essential, so please register via Eventbrite (link above which includes further details and a map of the venue). Any queries should be directed to Andrew Gardner - andrew.gardner@ucl.ac.uk

TAG 2019

This year's Gordon Childe Lecture is tied into the theme of the TAG 2019 conference 'Power, Knowledge and the Past', which will be held at UCL on 16-18 December 2019.

• Details of previous Gordon Childe Lectures are available here