Subscribe to Newsletter
Want the latest from the Peale Center? Sign up here for our eNewsletter!
What We Can Learn from an Archaeology of the Future
February 27 at 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Free
RSVP in Advance
A public conversation with Michael Harrower, Aja Lans, and Anand Pandian of Johns Hopkins University
Archaeology relies on materials from the past to make sense of human history and even the circumstances of the present. But what would it mean to do an archaeology of the future? The question may seem paradoxical, but the reality is that the material culture of our time will far outlive contemporary civilizations and their people. Hundreds of years from now, when archaeologists of the future sift through the remnants of this time, what would they find? How would they interpret the lives of those who inhabited this time of ours, making sense of what we did and why? What would it mean to try to absorb meaningful lessons from the enormous amounts of waste we are leaving behind for the future?
Join us for a conversation on archaeology and our imagination of the past and future, anchored in a new exhibition at the Peale Museum, “The Future of Here: A Glimpse of a River Culture to Come.” The exhibition presents speculative material artifacts from a distant future beyond our fossil-fueled present, as a showcase of what people of that future time might produce, and how they might make creative use of the many things we leave behind. The objects in the exhibition are built from the waste and detritus of our time, turning things that might seem to lack any value into elements of ritual and everyday practice in a speculative future beyond the present. Like the work of archaeology more generally, the exhibition encourages visitors to think about what can be learned from the details and discards of mundane life. If try to think as archaeologists about the future, and the cultures and artifacts that might come one day, how might we look differently at our habits and practices in the present, and their implications for future peoples?
This event is a chance to take in “The Future of Here” exhibition and to think about these ideas together with two archaeologists from Johns Hopkins University, Michael Harrower and Aja Lans, along with one of the curators of the exhibition, Anand Pandian, an anthropologist at Johns Hopkins.
Michael Harrower is an archaeologist whose research concentrates on long-term histories of civilizations in Africa and Arabia. His research has concentrated on spatial, political, and ideological dynamics of water, and most recently focuses on ancient trade and discovery of archaeological sites using satellite imagery.
Aja Lans is a Black feminist and archaeologist whose research primarily focuses on the lived experiences of African descended peoples in North America. She specializes on objectification of human remains contained within university and museum collections, arguing for the repatriation of Black Ancestors who are “owned” and the preservation of Black burial grounds.
Anand Pandian is a cultural anthropologist working on a new book project on decay, waste, and the crafting of ecological futures. “The Future of Here” grows out of a course he co-taught at Johns Hopkins with artist Jordan Tierney in the fall of 2024.
This conversation is co-sponsored by the Department of Anthropology and the Undergraduate Program in Archaeology at Johns Hopkins University.
