For this week's email, we've pulled together some things to read, watch, and listen to around the theme of statues, monuments, and the politics of memory.
This recent post by Claire Baxter, who studies Conflict Archaeology, calls for the importance of context in the installation and removal of monuments: Statues aren’t our history. They’re our archaeology
Don't miss the panel discussion As the Statues Fall: A Conversation about Monuments and the Power of Memory, a webinar hosted by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and SAPIENS in collaboration with the Society of Black Archaeologists and the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies.
Here are two podcasts that discuss aspects of this theme. One is hot off the press from earlier this month and one was recorded in 2017:
- Recording History in the Making from the CRM Podcast
- Should All of History be Saved? from the Women in Archaeology Podcast
Exploring ancient practices of destruction, here's a lecture last December given by Edward Bleiberg, Senior Curator of Egyptian, Classical, and Ancient Near Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum: Breaking the Noses on Egyptian Statues
You can read more about politics and symbolic destruction of statues and other objects in the ancient world and into modern times in this post: The Long History of Damnatio Memoriae and the Destruction of Monuments