Session: #454

Content:

Rapidly changing climate, growing inequalities, migration, and social changes pose a great challenge to social sciences and humanities. They are facing a question of their role and contribution in the modern world. Among them, archaeology and history seem to be especially entitled to provide insights into the modern-day problems because they study human development in long-term perspectives and the reasons behind social, economic, and environmental changes. Archaeology and history can evaluate past processes in their context and can overcome simplistic present-past analogies. They can provide such a context to other disciplines which use historical data, like environmental and life sciences, climatology, or sociology.
This session intends to create an opportunity for a meeting and discussion concentrated around a central theme: has applied archaeology a viable potential for future? This central question leads us to a variety of important issues, like:
1) What does archaeology as a discipline need to be successfully applied?
2) Is there a viable network of specialists able to guide archaeology this way?
3) Archaeological data in other disciplines – ensuring their availability (and standardisation?), ensuring their correct interpretation.
4) Environmental and conservation issues – what people did in the past (human impact), how they dealt with the world (landscape / nature management).
5) How can archaeology contribute to present social issues like migration or racism?
6) How to correctly use historical parallels and how to deal with problems of ahistoricism (lack of correct context).
We invite to discuss and to be involved people from various fields of archaeology to share their view on applied archaeology. We believe it can create great potential for networking, sharing ideas and experiences, and looking for opportunities for future cooperation.

Session: #454

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