RadioCIAMS

RadioCIAMS is the podcast of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, and its setup is simple: one visiting scholar, with several people from Cornell asking the questions. Those questioners are students and faculty. The sign-offs thank them by name, which makes each conversation work more like a seminar than a one-on-one interview. Most episodes here begin with an acknowledgment that Cornell stands on the homelands of the Cayuga Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Several end by noting that the show is produced in collaboration with the American Anthropological Association. In between, the range is wide. Seth Estrin talks about photographing ancient sculpture in color, though he says he is no trained photographer. In the National Museum in Athens that meant visits at different times of day, and sometimes in different years, to see how the natural and artificial light had shifted. Sculpture was painted in antiquity but mostly survives as bare marble, he notes, yet color photography still catches details that black and white misses. Lynn Meskell offers a qualified defense of UNESCO. She grants that some cases fall badly short, the Great Barrier Reef among them, and that governments have manipulated both the organization and researchers' reports. Still, she argues that it has produced more conservation than would otherwise exist, and she points to Monaco as a picture of what every coastline might look like without it. Lauren McCormick works on Judean pillar figurines, the feminized figures she calls the most popular anthropomorphic art from Iron Age Judah. She is frank that studying them apart from the horse riders they outnumber four to one, and apart from the miniature furniture found with them, is not ideal, and she hopes to take a broader view. Nathan Acebo describes Indigenous community members who were against opening up a site that had already been dug many times. They wanted survey and other data collection on the land instead, and for Acebo that meant the slow, careful job of tracking down earlier excavations and asking repositories for their inventories. Ellen Morris sets the women of the Trojan War, as Euripides' plays present them, beside American captivity narratives, looking at where captives found some agency, including how quickly they adopted their captors' norms. Carl Knappett, an archaeologist from the University of Toronto, is introduced by Cornell professor Verity Platt under that year's speaker theme, the aesthetic turn in archaeology, with two chapters from his forthcoming book on Aegean Bronze Age art as the starting point. Much of this comes back to method: how an object is lit, how earlier finds are traced, and what a study leaves out. The Estrin conversation is a good place to start, since the practical work of photographing sculpture is easy to picture.