SPMA announces new Community Engagement award

The Society for Post-Medieval Archaeology is pleased to announce a new Community Engagement award. 

A core aim of the SPMA is the promotion of late medieval to modern archaeology and this grant is designed to support individuals, groups and societies in developing new public-facing initiatives, whether one-off events, programmes of activities, digital archaeology or other creative outputs.

Eligibility:

• Applicants need not be members of the Society
• Applicants can apply on behalf of any group, institution and organization
• Applicants can be amateur or professional archaeologists
• Post-medieval archaeology (late medieval to the present day) must be a core aspect of the proposal
• Community engagement must be a core aspect of the proposal

Priority will be given to the development of new initiatives rather than the funding of established activities.

Applications could concern, but are not limited to:

• Seed funding for community based initiatives
• The development of digital post-medieval archaeology
• The development of educational resources
• Payments for talks, lectures or workshops
• A one-off event such as a walk or open day
• Development of creative outputs in a variety of media

Applicants are encouraged to define the types of audiences which they are targeting and to describe expected outcomes and outputs including the development of skills and expertise. A timetable and itemized budget should be included. Please provide adequate detail to demonstrate justification of proposals and costs. 

We welcome proposals which seek to develop innovative forms of engagement and proposals which demonstrate the potential to engage non-traditional audiences. Please note that the Societies existing lecture bursary has now been discontinued and subsumed within this new grant.

  

Funding for up to £500 can be applied for

Please email the Prize Coordinator, Hilary Orange, for an application form.

Deadline for applications: 1^st March 2015

Decision will be made within 2 months of the closing date. 

12 days of Archaeology! A Christmas Sing Song

We are feeling very Christmassy at CUDI, so what better way to spread festive cheer than to have a little festive sing along, so all together now…

On the first day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Fortune's portrait collection of Chinese trees

On the second day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Two neolithic ditch enclosures in Bohemia

On the third day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Three ancient Jewish reliefs

On the fourth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Four middle Holocene pillar sites in West Turkana, Kenya

On the fifth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Five notes on Jerusalem in the first and second Temple Periods

On the sixth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Six apostle spoons from Finland

On the seventh day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Seven years of preserving damaged stone 

On the eighth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Eight seventeenth-century decorative paintings

On the ninth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Nine engraved sites in the Hong Kong

On the tenth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Ten Commandments for effective anthropological exhibits

On the eleventh day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Eleven post-medieval corpses

On the twelfth day of Christmas CUDI gave to me,
Twelve dirt-walled structures in Mesa Verde National Park

Jamestown: America's birthplace?



Aerial view of Jamestown Island

In light of last week's American Independence Day on 4th July, I revisited the 2006 special issue of
Post-Medieval Archaeology on the founding of England's first permanent settlement in North America, Jamestown, Virginia in 1607.

In her article 'Archaeology and the construction of America's Jamestown' Audrey Horning reviews the history of archaeological research on the site and the use of archaeology in the symbolic construction of Jamestown as 'America's Birthplace'. It is argued that the archaeological construction of Jamestown as an American icon ultimately constrains understanding of the site in terms of its broader Atlantic world context, obscuring the motivations, experiences and expectations of the Europeans who made their way to Virginia, and rendering the considerable native presence invisible. Findings from the most recent projects on the Island, placed in the context of past investigations, allow for an evaluation of the significance of Jamestown's archaeology in the twentieth-century. 

 

The following is an excerpt from the article's introduction:



Jamestown: Girl Scouts hunting for artefacts at Well 20 in 1956

"Jamestown, where England first gained a permanent if precarious toehold in the New World by depositing a fractious group of gentlemen, boys, labourers and ex-soldiers on the shores of a modest island inland from the Chesapeake Bay in 1607, is perhaps the most archaeologically investigated historic site in North America. Since the 1890s, trowels, shovels, bulldozers, and even dynamite have been employed to shift tons of Jamestown soil in search of the roots of a country. Thousands of artefacts were extracted from the earth, the crumbling remains of nearly 100 buildings exposed to curious eyes — even the river was dredged in the hunt for John Smith’s legacy. For over 100 years, the scant physical traces of this early English colonial settlement have been accorded a status and significance arguably far beyond the information provided about the lived experiences of those newcomers and natives who once trod the same muddy soil now deemed sacred."

Dr Horning goes on to conclude that:

"Jamestown is not significant because it was settled in 1607 and therefore can lay claim to being the ‘cradle of the Republic’, or the place where America began. Such a notion not only denies 10,500 years of native life, as well as the 16thcentury Spanish colonial presence in North America and earlier English colonial and commercial endeavours, but more  importantly would have seemed ludicrous to Virginia’s settlers and leaders. It is from their perspective that we must try to understand the meaning behind Jamestown’s archaeological remains. Jamestown’s archaeology can inform us more about the culture of 17th century England than it can about the origins of an elusive American identity."

>> Read the full article for free