[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review.]
Chelsea Gardner’s and Sabrina Higgins’s Ancient Pasts for Modern Audiences is an impressive collection of essays concerning Mediterranean-specific public outreach, community-engaged research, public-facing projects, research accessibility, and critiques therein. Divided into three sections: “Museums,” “Teaching/Learning,” and “Public Projects, Local and Global,” the book aims to cover as much ground as possible related to public audiences of Mediterranean pasts through fifteen well-curated chapters.
While public practice in archaeology, history, and the humanities more broadly is not new or novel, Mediterranean-specific public practice is much less frequently discussed. In their introduction, Higgins and Gardner discuss the necessity of pushing back against narratives of ancient Mediterranean studies that perpetuate exclusivity, colonialism, racism, and elitism. In keeping with the editors’ concern with accessibility, the volume is open access. The authors are primarily concerned with the broad concept of ancient Mediterranean studies as their subject of critique, though many chapters discuss the role of classical studies specifically as a starting point for thinking through access along with public-facing programming and scholarship.
The first section, “Museums,” offers a hard-hitting criticism of museums’ relationship with Mediterranean and classical subject matter, as well as giving voice to identitarian concerns regarding representation in museum studies. Chapter 1 (by Frances Gallart Marqués) begins with a discussion of marble copies of ancient classical and Mediterranean statuary in South American museums and the role of western cultural narratives in the Global South. It describes the relationship of classical subject matter and museum copies at elite institutions as symbolic of colonial and class-based oppression. Couched in recent calls for social change and public protests in Chile, the chapter discusses how museums can reimagine these collections to better serve their public. Chapter 2 moves to a discussion of African artifacts in modern museums by Annissa Malvoisin, who provides a primer on the systematic exclusion of Black African cultural objects from Mediterranean displays. Malvoisin also discusses the way Egyptian and Western North African material culture is often separated from its African contexts and included in Mediterranean displays to better fit with whitewashed narratives of the region.
Continuing with issues of representation, Chapters 3 through 5 turn to the issues of Indigenous epistemologies and colonialism in the museum environment. In Chapter 3, Heba Abd el-Gawad discusses Egyptian Indigeneity and rematriation, describing colonial dynamics from the positionality of a MENA scholar from a region that has been historically exploited by western academics. Abd el-Gawad asks what we mean by “public” knowledge production when the descendant stakeholders are often not part of the conversation. They conclude by challenging each reader to ask, “Am I complicit?” (p.69).
This is immediately followed by Kendall Lovely’s impressive Chapter 4, which applies the concepts of Indigeneity and Indigenous archaeology as potential epistemological structures for undoing the colonial grip of the discipline’s historiography. Lovely’s chapter moves through decolonial flashpoints, challenging performative acknowledgements of disciplinary colonialism and cautioning scholars to critically consider Indigenous epistemologies before adopting them haphazardly. Lovely discusses how classics has historically operated as an “extractive outsider” (p.74) and warns that we must be careful to avoid new forms of intellectual colonialism. Ashton Rodgers’ Chapter 5 continues this conversation with the concept of “dense provenancing,” explored in connection with the Bay View Collection of Egyptian antiquities at the Kelsey Museum. Using provenance studies, they seek to understand objects within a collection not simply as cultural “property” or the legacies of individual collectors, but also as “densities,” as discussed in Critical Indigenous Studies, that showcase the intersection of collections, collectors, and colonial dispossession of Indigenous groups (pp.100-101).
The second section of the book, “Teaching/Learning”, focuses on Mediterranean archaeology and classics in various classroom settings, and also emphasizes the need to teach public practice and share effective methods for doing so. These chapters largely serve as a “how-to” guide for creating publicly oriented curricula. Chapter 6 by Christine Johnson et al. starts with a discussion of their Peopling the Past project, the host of the original colloquium, and a program which has seen a great deal of success in creating inclusive, approachable pedagogical materials for a broader audience outside of archaeological academia. This chapter describes their logic and process, emphasizing the importance of accessible media, specifically podcasts, videos, and blogs.
Chapter 7 by Nadhira Hill, presents an excellent discussion of BIPOC experiences in academia, including the creation of their blog, “Notes from the Apotheke,” which discusses this topic in detail. In its opening pages, the chapter does a good job of discussing critical race theory and its applications to the discipline. Like Lovely’s chapter, Hill’s is a call for reflection, discussing the insidious performances of inclusion seen at many academic institutions, but also noting potentially effective pathways forward for inclusive practices by and for BIPOC scholars. While still providing a “how-to” to some extent, Hill’s chapter features a more focused discussion of systemic inequality than the other chapters in this section.
The rest of section two focuses on pedagogical techniques to promote inclusive classroom spaces for public archaeology. Chapter 8 by Melissa Funke et al. describes the Lux Project of the University of Winnipeg, which carries out secondary school classroom outreach, using undergraduate student volunteers to connect young local public-school students to university teaching collections. This program echoes other recent publications on public pedagogy[1], and the chapter lays out useful information for starting a similar program. The authors describe the importance of direct interaction with teachers in specifically public schools, an often-overlooked aspect of school-based public outreach. This chapter also deals explicitly with the tricky theoretical concept of a “public” for the first time in the volume, using a definition from the discipline of Public History. A lengthier discussion of this concept, as well as the related idea of “audience,” may have been warranted earlier on in the volume.
Chapters 9 and 10 turn to university-level pedagogical practices that promote conversations about public practice, but do not directly engage with publics. Chapter 9, by Christine Johnston et al., offers an excellent resource for those teaching both museum studies and Mediterranean archaeology classes. They discuss the role of copies in teaching Mediterranean archaeology’s colonial past and begin asking questions about the privilege associated with accessing original or “real” artifacts, or indeed any Mediterranean archaeology to begin with. They offer a set of modules that can be implemented within a university-level course to discuss the role of copies and digital interventions in the museum world, complete with a useful appendix of assigned reading materials and lesson plans. Chapter 10 then considers a model for involving undergraduate students in publicly minded research, this time from a digital perspective, with the Antioch Recovery Project based at Johns Hopkins University. This chapter, by Ella Gonzalez et al., is framed as a data curation and recovery case study concerning the scattered mosaics of Antioch. It provides a description of getting undergraduates involved in provenance research as well as introducing them to public digital spaces.
The final section, “Public Projects, Local and Global,” works through the politics of public data and audience, especially in university settings. Chelsea Gardner and Victoria Austen begin the section in Chapter 11 by focusing on modelling undergraduate classroom exercises that promote engagement with Wikipedia. They go into detail regarding conflicting opinions of Wikipedia in higher education, noting the problems of data instability and crowd-sourced editing, as well as concerns raised by subject popularity, representation, and quality control. In keeping with the section title, this chapter focuses on empowering students to be critical public scholars and to create public scholarship that addresses the systemic lacunae in popular resources such as Wikipedia.
In Chapter 12, Francesco Ripanti et al. discuss their own community-based engagement around multiple archaeological projects in the Xeros River valley in Cyprus. It is worth noting that this is the only chapter concerned with a program that is set in the Mediterranean and involves interacting with a local public. The authors describe their efforts to produce signage, cultural heritage itineraries, and “Archaeology Days” for school children and community members, as well as collaborations with visual artists. They provide an excellent assortment of techniques the archaeological practitioner may use in engaging with local communities on the ground in the Mediterranean.
Chapters 13 and 14 weigh the benefits and concerns of digital-only public initiatives that crowd-source their data to create access. In chapter 13, Gino Canlas et al. discuss the Database of Religious History, which seeks to collect information about religiously significant sites around the world. The authors frame the database as a publicly accessible resource by scholars for the public as well as other scholars who may be at low-privilege institutions without adequate access to primary materials, both limited in their ability to travel or otherwise engage with often rare reference materials.
In Chapter 14, Sabrina C. Higgins et al. offer an exceptional indictment of higher-education’s march toward neoliberalism through the commodification of academic products and the use of student labor, including its use in public projects. The authors provide a self-critical analysis of their original “Digital Mary Project,” as well as a roadmap to how they intend to make it open, accessible, and equitable in the future. Their discussion of Techno-Utopianism is important to consider in the push for digital access and open data. The authors note that this philosophy’s ideal of frictionless data-sharing glosses over the political and ethical nature of data collection, resulting in unfair labor practices and the use of data without consent (p.293). This chapter bravely points out that our projects can sometimes undermine their own public goals, and it can be beneficial to reimagine or even undo projects that do not work.
Finally, Chapter 15 turns to the production of public scholarship by practitioners outside academia and museum spaces. Podcaster Liv Albert (Let’s Talk About Myths Baby!), artist Flora Kirk (Flaroh Illustration), and content creator Megan Lewis (Digital Hammurabi) answer questions from Melissa Funke on a range of subjects. They discuss their projects’ origins, their media, their responsibility to their audiences, and how they think academics should improve their relationship with publics outside academia. While much of this volume is implicitly concerned with audience, this chapter explicitly talks about audiences from a vantage point outside the ivory tower. These three practitioners have a lot of experience and knowledge useful to those within the academy, but also to those thinking of leaving to pursue public scholarship.
This volume is packed with disciplinary critiques that push us to question the true impact of our public work and positionalities. While it is impressive in its scope, there are a few places in the text where further exploration of shared themes might have been useful. For one, as made clear by the frequent citations of Indigenous scholars[2], it is worth considering the significant influence of Indigenous archaeology and Community-Based Participatory Research (CBPR) on most of the collection’s chapters. Methodologies like CBPR challenge us to ask who really benefits from these efforts? As previously mentioned, a more concerted engagement with the terms “public” and “audience” might have been warranted to clarify how each chapter defines its public, audience, or practitioner and the intended outcomes. For further clarification of these concepts, it might be worth considering the discussions in the book through the lens of works like Michael Warner’s Publics and Counterpublics,[3] which further defines how publics are formed and consolidated. The collection might also benefit from a consideration of Susan Smulyan’s recent work, “Why Public Humanities?”[4], which points out academia’s tendency to devalue public work within our systems for appointment and tenure, creating a significant deterrent for public scholars. Finally, expanding the book to include more of the many scholars based at institutions in the Mediterranean region who are also doing publicly oriented work would have been an excellent addition. As it stands, the collection is mostly scholars who are based at Anglophone institutions outside of the Mediterranean basin.
Nevertheless, these are suggestions for expanding the discussion in the future and should not detract from what this volume offers: the start of an open critical conversation about what public practice means in Mediterranean archaeology and material culture studies. The volume encourages us to critique ourselves and our projects, to both rethink and rebuild. Ultimately, for those considering public engagement with Mediterranean-adjacent subject matter, this book should be an essential starting ground.
Authors and titles
Introduction (Sabrina C. Higgins, Chelsae A.M. Gardner)
Part 1: Museums
- I will Believe in Art When It Is Made for the People: Teaching with Greco-Roman Copies in Santiago (Frances Gallart Marqués)
- The Unwavering Divide: Collection and Display Practices of Ancient and Medieval African Collections (Annissa Malvoisin)
- Respect, Recognition, Rematriation: An Indigenous Egyptian Perspective on Meaningful Public Discourse on the Middle East and North Africa (Heba Abd el-Gawad)
- Indigenising as Anti-Classical? Locating Indigenous Classicisms in and Beyond Museum Frameworks (Kendall Lovely)
- Densities of Provenancing: Narrating the Colonial Provenance of the Bay View Collection at the Kelsey Museum (Ashton Rodgers)
Part 2: Teaching/Learning
- The Peopling the Past Project: Multivocality and Multimodality in Ancient Mediterranean Studies Teaching (Chrstine L. Johnston, Sabrina C. Higgins, Megan Daniels, Victoria Austen)
- Back to Basics: Illuminating the Hidden Curriculum and BIPOC Scholars to Promote a More Diverse and Equitable Field (Nadhira Hill)
- The Lux Project: Using Small-Scale Public Scholarship to Reach Local Audiences (Melissa Funke, Colton Van Gerwen, Kira Lang, Bourke Karras)
- Teaching the Ancient World with Reproductions: Using 3D Printed Objects in Authentic Active History Learning (Christine L. Johnston, Alan Wheeler, Alexis Nunn, Erin Escobar)
- Research-Driven Pedagogy and Public Facing Outcomes: The Antioch Recovery Project (Ella Gonzalez, Danielle Ortiz, Jennifer Stager)
Part 3: Public Projects, Local and Global
- Wiki Education, the Ancient Mediterranean Classroom, and the Production of Global Knowledge (Chelsea A.M. Gardner, Victoria Austen)
- Lasting Impressions: Archaeology and Community Engagement in the Xeros River Valley (Cyprus) (Francesco Ripanti, Giorgos Papantoniou, Athanasios Vionis, Andreas Lanitis)
- The Database of Religious History and Responsible Global Scholarship (Gine Canlas, Julian Weidmann, Andrew Danielson, Ian Randall, M. Willis Monroe)
- Reimagining the Digital Mary Project as a Counter-Practice within/against the Neoliberal University (Sabrina C. Higgins, Aurora E. Camaño, Michael R. Laurence)
- Public Humanities and the Ancient Mediterranean: A Conversation with Liv Albert of the Let’s Talk about Myths, Baby! Podcase, Flora Kirk of Flaroh Illustration, and Megan Lewis of Digital Hammurabi (Melissa Funke, Liv Albert, Flora Kirk, Megan Lewis)
Notes
[1] See Reetz, E. C. and Sperling, S. T. (eds.). 2024. A Practitioner’s Guide to Public Archaeology: Intentional Programming for Effective Outreach. New York: Rowan and Littlefield.
[2] Particularly with Atalay, S. 2012. Community-Based Archaeology: Research with, by, and for Indigenous and Local Communities. Berkeley: University of California Press.
[3] Warner, M. 2002. Publics and Counterpublics. Boston, MIT Press.
[4] Smulyan, S. 2022. “Why Public Humanities?” Daedalus, 3: 124-137.