In this talk, Chesson will describe her team's efforts to make science matter by infusing archaeological research with public-facing activities that value service to the southern Calabrian communities where they work. Many rural Calabrian farming towns and villages struggle to maintain the social and economic foundations of their communities as people migrate to cities or other countries for work or higher education. Chesson and her team seek to document rural life over the past two centuries near the modern towns of Bova and Bova Marina to learn how many of these communities successfully sustained themselves for several generations, and to offer our expertise, training, and knowledge to enhance heritage preservation, food security, and efforts to build sustainable futures in the face of climate change.
This event is free and open to all. Complimentary boxed lunches will be available 30 minutes prior to the lecture while supplies last.
Nanovic Faculty Fellow Meredith Chesson is a professor of anthropology and a concurrent professor of gender studies. She focuses on the materiality of daily life in the past as an anthropological archaeologist. Chesson has directed or participated in archaeological projects in Jordan, Canada, United States, Cyprus, Israel, Ireland, and Italy. Her edited volume Social Memory, Identity and Death(2001) presents ethnographic and archaeological studies of cultural memory and mortuary practices, and she has served as co-editor for an issue of Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology. She has published in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Levant, Paleorient, and in several edited books. She currently works as publication co-editor on final reports of the Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain's excavations at Bab adh-Dhra`, Fifa, Numayra, and Khirbat Khanazir (Expedition to the Dead Sea Plain). She has held Wenner-Gren and NSF grants, and is expanding her research to Italy with the Bova Marina Archaeological Project, co-directing with John Robb, Lin Foxhall, and David Yoon (Bova Marina Archaeological Project).