September 21, 2015
Dear Attendees,
As always, we have a wide variety of top-notch colloquia on tap for the 2016 Annual Meeting in San Francisco. One session, Landscapes of Death and Remembrance, applies interdisciplinary approaches to the study of burial, commemoration and remembrance in ancient Greece; while another presents intriguing results of recent work at Gordion. There is a colloquium on methodological approaches to dress and adornment (Thoughts for Raiment) and another on Pliny’s history of ancient art.
This year, we have a couple of sessions that address the democratization of archaeological inquiry. These include Integrating Community and Education into Archaeological Research, which will consider how communities and even young students can be recruited to help recover and preserve cultural heritage; and Globalizing the Field, which is about how we might use new tools and technologies to provide greater access to museum collections, archaeological field data, and the other resources that are essential to our work.
Finally, there are several sessions that speak directly to issues and events that have received a lot of press coverage lately. Andrew Moore, the President of the AIA, has organized a colloquium titled Climate Change and Human Society: Past, Present and Future. And there are two sessions that speak to questions of protecting cultural property in areas of conflict: the colloquium New Developments in Cultural Property Protection in Conflict Zones and a workshop that is evolving rapidly in light of recent events, Evidence and Emergency Responses to Cultural Heritage Destruction in the Middle East.
Best regards,
Ellen Perry
Chair of the AIA Program for the Annual Meeting Committee
Associate Professor of Classics
College of the Holy Cross
