Name: Munro Lecture - 'Contemporary Archaeology as Tool for Knowing Difficult, Recent Pasts'
Start: 2025-10-23T17:15:00+01:00
End: 2025-10-23T18:30:00+01:00
Location: Teviot Lecture Theatre, Old Medical School - Doorway 5, Teviot Place, EH8 9AG

Munro Lecture - 'Contemporary Archaeology as Tool for Knowing Difficult, Recent Pasts'

The next Munro Lecture will be delivered by Professor Laura McAtackney, Department of Archaeology and Deputy Director of the Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork, Ireland.
This paper will argue that while the sub-discipline of Contemporary Archaeology is not widely used, taught or understood on the island of Ireland, it has great potential as a means of accessing difficult and contested recent pasts. It has the capacity to bring together texts, material culture, structures, landscapes and memory critically assess not only what happened in the past but how it may continue to shape the present. This paper will use examples from (post)-conflict Northern Ireland and an island still grappling with institutional abuse, to show that contemporary archaeological approaches are important due to their ability to centre lived experience and emphasize bottom-up epistemologies that also underline social justice imperatives.