St Peter's College

Over the past two summers Timothy Clack and Marcus Brittain
have directed the first archaeological teams in the Lower Omo Valley, a remote part of south-western Ethiopia, to research long-term human responses to environmental change. What did they find there?

Here we present the context and nature of findings from the first season of archaeological survey and trial excavation in an area of Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley. With the exception of well-documented early hominin discoveries, the region has previously been overlooked as a wilderness absent of human inhabitation. Such an outlook has fostered various consequences for strategies of legal, research and conservation policy within the regional boundaries of Mursiland in particular. In this paper recent discoveries of megalithic circular platforms and other archaeological remains are introduced against their dynamic
local and regional placement within present-day understandings of place. Furthermore, we emphasise the value of a participative archaeology research framework in which accountability is directed towards common ground between multiple ‘‘stake-holders’’ within the design and dissemination of the research agenda. This demonstrates important possibilities for intricate understandings of wilderness and landscape linked to heritage, conservation, development and tourism.

Introduction to T. Clack and M. Brittain (eds) 2007. 'Archaeology and the Media'. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

Archaeology is more prevalent in the media today than ever before. Likewise, the media is more prevalent in archaeology than has previously been experienced. Media is both the means to mass communication and the material agency by which that communication is transmitted, transferred, or conveyed. Different media have impacted upon archaeology in different ways, and a future relationship with the media lies in an uncertain balance with the emergence of the digital era of technology. What has archaeology’s relationship with the media looked like in the past, what are the issues at stake in this relationship today, and is archaeology suitably equipped for this partnership in a future of increasingly rapid information transfers?

Questions centring on the significance, occupation and renovation of subterranean features have remained largely unasked and unanswered by archaeologists. This is cause for great concern considering the importance of ‘underground’ elements in archaeological landscapes of diverse periods. This paper examines how insights derived from ethnographic and ethnohistoric study among the Chagga of Mount Kilimanjaro, Northern Tanzania, who extensively utilized underground fastnesses in precolonial times, might be used to inform cave archaeologies. These features were used to shelter people and provisions during episodes of conflict between rival chiefdoms and patrilineages and were also ritually significant. Today these features have fallen into disuse but they retain significance in local traditions. It is posited that cave archaeologies should explicitly consider the meaningfulness of the ‘cave experience’ in their reconstructions of the past and also take advantage of such reconstructions to challenge the primacy too often afforded the ocular.

Each with over thirty years experience with the media, Brian Fagan and Francis Pryor have broadcast their message of archaeology through many different media and in their own individual ways to audiences around the world. Having written
extensively on many archaeological themes for academic and
public audiences, public archaeology in the United States and
the UK has grown and matured through their combined experience and would be much the poorer today if not for their continued passion and energy. When placed together in the
following interview (carried out via email correspondence in
the summer and early winter 2005), their views regarding current
themes from ‘archaeology and the media’ offer insightful
glimpses into the connections and distinctions between British
and American perspectives.

This chapter explores the imposition, character and history of notions of 'pristine wilderness' in parts of S. W. Ethiopia. Moreover, exploration, conservation policy and development initiatives are also considered in addition to the value of anthropological approaches to archaeology in understanding cultural heritage.

The public's fascination with archaeology has meant that archaeologists have had to deal with media more regularly than other scholarly disciplines. How archaeologists communicate their research to the public through the media and how the media view archaeologists has become an important feature in the contemporary world of academic and professional archaeologists. In this volume, a group of archaeologists, many with media backgrounds, address the wide range of questions in this intersection of fields. An array of media forms are covered including television, film, photography, the popular press, art, video games, radio and digital media with a focus on the overriding question: What are the long-term implications of the increasing exposure through and reliance upon media forms for archaeology in the contemporary world? The volume will be of interest to archaeologists and those teaching public archaeology courses.

Human evolution explains how we – as a species – have found ourselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Recent advances in the study of human evolution are helping us to understand the complicated modern world in which we live. The issues and difficulties we face today are still not fully understood- depression, obesity, the destruction of our environment. The successful survival of our species depends upon us understanding the challenges we've created for ourselves. The problems of modern living, such as aggression, crime, sexism, racism and ageism, must be examined, and we must learn from our past if we wish to change our future.

Recent archaeology of Mursiland's past takes into account its present and is concerned with the impact that archaeological dialogue has upon Mursi engagements with what we, at least, regard as archaeological sites and narrative. We contend that this allows for a tripartite investigation into cultural mixing whereby the example of a series of megalithic platforms acts as a dynamic contact zone.

No modern intervention is intended to endure indefinitely; indeed some fashion of exit is always envisioned from the outset. This commitment to an exit is normally informed by an exit strategy. Whilst strategies of closure have been scrutinised recently, not least in light of charges of defective intentions and planning, the relations between the strategies, operations and tactics of exit have not been contextualised. Focus on the local, specific and bottom-up manifestations of transitions offers significant enhances to historical, theoretical and applied understandings.

This book is an introduction not just to the issues of transition, handover and withdrawal, but to exit as a package of theoretical concepts and how these have been understood, shaped and employed in historic and contemporary perspective. Drawing on a wide range of post-1945 examples derived from a variety of regions and periods, At the End of Military Intervention provides researchers and practitioners with a source book on what forms a crucial and often overlooked element of past and present interventions.