Conference Agenda

This paper explores how descendant communities sustain meaningful relationships with place through return journeys to two abandoned Irish islands—Inis Oírc and Inis Bearachain, in south Connemara, Co. Galway, Ireland. These islands are part of an archipelago known as Ceantar na nOileán, where the Irish language is predominantly spoken. Drawing on archaeological fieldwork and oral histories with former residents and descendants, I examine how objects left behind by former residents continue to anchor familial and spiritual ties. These return visits reflect enduring connections to place and work to challenge conventional narratives of abandonment. By tracing the material and oral histories of these homes, I situate the islands within a broader landscape of movement where objects and return visits serve as markers of continuity. Rather than sites of abandonment, these islands persist and are continually shaped by those who return, remember, and reconnect.

Louisiana’s Great River Road, often dubbed “Cancer Alley” for its dense petrochemical corridor and carcinogenic emissions, is also a landscape shaped by the deep legacies of plantation slavery. Sites like Evergreen Plantation in Edgard, LA, illustrate how archaeology can reveal the enduring traces of bondage, resistance, and labor that underpin this region’s social and environmental struggles. Yet working with local and descendant communities shows that plantation histories and presents are never straightforward; they are deeply contested, emotionally charged, and woven through multiple, sometimes conflicting, narratives. This paper examines how archaeologists navigate the complex politics of memory, pollution, and heritage, asking what it means to tell truthful yet inclusive stories about plantations and their ongoing impact in the shadow of industrial exploitation and plantation tourism.

Cultural heritage has few friends in times of war. In many ways the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is focused on memory politics, with the broader Russian aim of erasing Ukrainian culture, history and heritage. Working as part of a collaborative international team of archaeologists, journalists, and filmmakers, between 2023-2025 we have conducted interviews, filmed and documented the targeting of cultural heritage in multiple areas of Ukraine. This presentation provides a first-hand accounts from Kyiv, Lviv, Lukashivka, Viazivka and Chernihiv, illustrating the destruction on the ground, the human stories associated with war, and discusses the importance of understanding and assessing the destruction of Ukrainian cultural heritage, both material and immaterial.

The Rural Livelihoods of the Ionian Coast (RLIC) team combines archaeological, ethnographic, historical, environmental, and critical heritage approaches to explore how members of Bova and Bova Marina build sustainable futures for themselves by revitalizing and innovating traditional rural lifeways, foodways practices, and cultural heritage. Since 2015 we have collaborated with local landowners and farmers to document about 400 structures on more than 30 properties to explore revitalization efforts to valorize material and immaterial heritage and expertise to build a future for their communities. We offer our expertise, research tools, and findings to support community members to craft and lead a good life today and into the future by investigating what lifeways from their past can help them to flourish tomorrow, despite substantial climate change, depopulation as young people move to cities, endemic criminal networks, regional and global economic uncertainties, and increasing bureaucratic red tape and obstacles.

Hope and agency shape guide heritage conservation archaeology in the United States. This presentation summarizes heritage conservation efforts at a historic property on Hospitals Gade in Fredericksted on the island of St. Croix, U.S.V.I. Heavily damaged in Hurricanes Irma and Maria in 2017, this home, which has been owned by Black Crucians for over 150 years, became the focus of ongoing archaeological and architectural conservation efforts that culminated in the house’s rehabilitation by 2025. Black women conceptualized and executed the entire project, leading other Black scholars, architects, and craftspeople towards a goal that many did not believe was possible. This one project captures a story of hope, vision, and execution in the face of adversity, which are core principles of every Black archaeologist that I’ve ever met.

In the Amache Community Archaeology Project (formerly the DU Amache Project), storytelling is a co-creative practice that informs archaeological interpretation and community engagement. Collaborating with Japanese American survivors and descendants of incarceration during World War II, we integrate oral histories, interviews, conversations, and field notes with material remains—artifacts, botanical data, archives—to build a multi-modal archaeological imagination rooted in lived experience. Scholarly papers, dissertations and theses, experimental films and drawings are some of the many forms this practice takes.

Storytelling at Amache is not merely a means of explaining findings, but a vital method of producing them. This approach centers emotion, memory, and place as essential to understanding and honoring complex heritage. It challenges extractive models of archaeology by emphasizing dialogue, relationality, and shared authority in the production of knowledge. This paper reflects on practical methodological and ethical dimensions of this work, highlighting how storytelling is a fundamental element of research practice.

Conversations about reproductive justice, access, and care have been ongoing in Wisconsin since long before statehood and have been amplified by the 2022 US Supreme Court decision Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Archival research on pregnancy concealment, infant abandonment, and infanticide was combined with material culture evidence of primary disposal practices contained within burials of non-adults from the Milwaukee County Poor Farm Cemetery 2 (1882 – 1925). A reframing of the cemetery as a secondary mortuary space challenges us to think differently about body management; in so doing, we can disentangle common heteronormative narratives about infanticide, mortuary treatment, and the criminalization of women. Through Story Mapping (ESRI’s ArcGIS Story Map Application), we extend the borders of Cemetery 2 into the community from which it was formed, demonstrating the breadth of the issue of abandonment and infanticide and the contribution these cases made to the composition of the cemetery community.