{"id":434,"date":"2022-12-12T18:56:25","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T18:56:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/letterstoclio\/?p=434"},"modified":"2022-12-14T17:11:20","modified_gmt":"2022-12-14T17:11:20","slug":"archaeology-of-the-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/2022\/12\/12\/archaeology-of-the-dead\/","title":{"rendered":"Archaeology of the Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

Interviews conducted early November 2022.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Archaeology of the Dead, taught by Dr. Lynne Kvapil, was offered for the Fall 2022 semester. It focuses on the archaeological approaches to understanding death and burial, and students explore the varieties of ways humans have responded to death and the dead over time and what we can learn about the dead and the living from funerary remains. The class meets once a week, and each week generally follows the same schedule: during the week, students are assigned readings relating to the subject of the week, then they contribute their thoughts on the readings to a \u201cHot Takes\u201d discussion board before class, and in class, they discuss the readings, and lectures and group discussions build off of these ideas.<\/p>\n

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Final Project Presentations 12\/08\/2022 (Courtesy of Lynne Kvapil)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dr. K said, \u201cI teach Archaeology of the Dead, but I prefer what the class affectionately calls it\u2014Dead People Class. I had the opportunity to teach an archaeology class, which is really awesome. I\u2019m here as part of the Classics program, and I love it, there\u2019s so much I love about it, but there isn\u2019t always the opportunity for me to teach about the methods side of what I do. As an archaeologist, this is such a great opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n

When choosing the topic for her archaeology class, Dr. K was inspired by one of the first things she started along with her academic job at Butler, which was an archaeological project at the site of Ionia, a prehistoric Greek cemetery with \u201cthese crazy, amazing burials.\u201d The project focused on mortuary archaeology, so she developed the class on burials in archaeology to mirror her work with this during her time at Butler. \u201cSince I\u2019ve been here, I\u2019ve had the opportunity to take students to work at Aidonia. We just finished our fieldwork, and we\u2019re studying and thinking about how to understand the burials we excavated. It made sense to me to wrap my work processing that project and thinking about burials and the things we found with students, to think not just about prehistoric Greek burials, but more broadly about what burials are, what they do, and what they mean. The wider scholarship about how archaeologists approach mortuary situations was kind of my inspiration for what the class is about.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of what I hope students take away from this class is the methods aspect\u2014what we do with burials and their stuff and how we do it. I loved our class conversations about how we define burials. It seems like an obvious thing, but there aren\u2019t archaeologically specific things you have to look for to distinguish between burials and some other kinds of archaeological context.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are theoretical things we can take away from burials in terms of meaning, and sometimes that can be complicated, but I\u2019m proud of the class because I feel like they have done a great job working through some of these really tough things, things that even some graduate students struggle with. For example, the idea of personhood as a concept is complicated, but they rolled with it. It\u2019s fun for me to see that thinking.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Students conducting field work in Crown Hill Cemetery (Courtesy of student Danny de la Vega)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I asked several students in the class why they chose to take this class. Multiple people noted they took the class because they love Dr. K, and expressed interest in archaeology and mortuary science, as well as death and the culture surrounding death. Everyone I interviewed was very taken with the class, remarking how much they loved it despite its challenging material. Kiara Somerville, a junior software engineering and economics major with a classics minor, said, \u201cThis quickly became my favorite class of the semester and possibly one of my favorites of college in general. The subject matter is so cool and nothing that I ever would have imagined that I would enjoy or learn about. Our class discussions are also very good and weird. I also really appreciate how passionate Dr. K is about this class, and it shines through in the creativity of our assignments, which make the multiple twenty-page readings each week at least slightly bearable.\u201d Gansey Petroff, a senior classics and psychology major, said, \u201cI really love this class; the vibes are immaculate. Everyone is super collaborative during discussions which makes projects and difficult readings much more fun. I\u2019m really comfortable sharing my ideas with everyone and hearing their own.\u201d Senior Lexi Harford, an art and design major with an emphasis in art history and an anthropology minor, remarked, \u201cThis class is definitely one of my favorite classes I\u2019ve taken in my undergrad experience. I love that everyone in this class seems as interested in the class as I do and that we all have a bit of a morbid sense of humor that makes the conversations really meaningful, and most of the time, very entertaining.\u201d<\/p>\n

When I asked Dr. K what her favorite part about teaching the class is, she responded, \u201cReading the Hot Takes makes my day because they\u2019re so passionate about what we read, even if it\u2019s something we don\u2019t like. I love it and having that preface to talking about things in class is part of why I\u2019m so excited every Thursday\u2014people are already coming out in full force. It\u2019s really exciting to see what people write out, literally reading their first reactions and then sorting through those feelings in their ideas in class is super exciting and really cool and inspirational.\u201d<\/p>\n

When asked what their biggest takeaways from the class were, I received a variety of responses. Petroff remarked that archaeology is really difficult and that it\u2019s destructive by nature, and Somerville answered, \u201cThat I know nothing, and that the world really needs to treat human beings with respect.\u201d Sophomore history major Cassidy Paulk said, \u201cMy biggest takeaway from the class is that death does not have to be a scary thing. This class has given me a new perspective on death. Firstly, I now view death as another transition in a person\u2019s life. It happens to everyone, yet many people around the world feel differently about it. I have enjoyed learning about the different ideas and practices surrounding death for different people. I think that taking this class is a great decision as it gives you so many ways to widen your perspective.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dr. K channeled her creativity and passion for the subject into the final project, which is a culmination of everything that has been covered over the semester. She described, \u201cThe final project comes in two parts. The first part is to design a burial and a funeral to go along with it. It\u2019s freeform, you can make it anything you want. The second part is to fast forward in time and think about how an archaeologist would approach your burial. The goal is to think about methodology, how you\u2019d encounter it, how you would sort out your findings, how you would create meaning out of that based on what survives, and how you would ethically approach what you do with your findings. It really incorporates the big underlying themes of the class and asks everyone to be an archaeologist for this thing that they\u2019ve created. I think it\u2019ll be really interesting and I\u2019m excited to see what people come up with!\u201d<\/p>\n

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A special visit to the class by “Boaty!” (Courtesy of student Gansey Petroff)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The creativity and thoughtfulness of the class comes through with all the unique ideas for final projects. Petroff is \u201cplanning on describing a tree pod burial, which is actually how I want to be buried. It sounds super cool because you get to pick what kind of tree you want, and it would represent you in a way. Plus, it would be really hard to excavate, so I\u2019ll have fun with the archaeological description side of things.\u201d Somerville said, \u201cMy first thought was a clown funeral, but then I remembered that I\u2019m absolutely terrified of clowns, but I also keep thinking about the clown funeral from\u00a0Modern Family<\/em>\u00a0and think that doing a funeral around some random, quirky profession would be fun. Or the burial of a diehard stan of something random, like\u00a0Cats<\/em>\u00a0the movie because I can just imagine a group of future archaeologists staring at a grave and wondering why there are plastic cat ears and a Taylor Swift poster as grave gifts.\u201d Paulk wanted the final project to connect to something about the differences in practices of funerary customs for people of different genders, and Harford said, \u201cI\u2019m thinking about doing some research on how ceramic glazes are made. I\u2019m a studio art major but also love art history, so I\u2019m imagining cremated remains being incorporated into a slip or glaze that is used to recreate black figure-style pottery with a scene representing the life of the deceased. I wanted to do something far outside of the box that if an anthropologist or an archaeologist found it way in the future, they\u2019d be shocked by it!\u201d There\u2019s no doubt that every single final project is going to be incredibly unique, and a brilliant demonstration of the things learned in this class!<\/p>\n

Finally, I asked Dr. K if she is planning on teaching another archaeology class in the future and what it would be on. \u201cI hope so! I pitched a class on my specialty, the Mycenaean Greeks. I haven\u2019t gotten a chance to focus on that because I\u2019m working on another project on the Mycenaeans as a culture and about the archaeologists who have worked with them. It\u2019s a little bit niche, so I don\u2019t know if it\u2019ll go, but I figured that since I have this project coming up, it\u2019ll be important for me to focus on that. The idea of being able to bring students into the scholarly conversation that I\u2019m involved in is really rewarding for me and hopefully, it would be rewarding for them too. I have a ton of ideas, so hopefully, I\u2019ll have lots of opportunities to do something like a theory class or a straight-up methods class!\u201d Be sure to look out for more classes taught by Dr. K in the coming semesters!<\/p>\n

To wrap this up, in the words of Dr. K, \u201cClassics rules!\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Interviews conducted early November 2022. Archaeology of the Dead, taught by Dr. Lynne Kvapil, was offered for the Fall 2022 semester. It focuses on the archaeological approaches to understanding death and burial, and students explore the varieties of ways humans have responded to death and the dead over time and what we can learn about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9196478,"featured_media":440,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[308439,1],"tags":[463439,230447,311920,26,463388,11900,245911],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interviews","category-uncategorized","tag-463439","tag-anthropology","tag-archeology","tag-classes","tag-classics","tag-student","tag-student-research","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9196478"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=434"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":446,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/434\/revisions\/446"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.butler.edu\/lifeHACs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}