To celebrate National Archaeology Week, Flinders University Archaeology would like to welcome you to their regular archaeology seminar, streamed online. This week’s seminar is presented by Professor John Schofield (University of York, and Visiting Fellow Flinders University).
This presentation relates directly to the subject of John’s current one-month Fellowship at Flinders, working with Alice Gorman on a project called Plastic Pollution of the Total Environment: Developing an Overarching Theory (or, ‘PolluTE’). Plastic pollution is an urgent problem, time-critical in terms of solutions. Developing theoretical models and approaches is an essential foundation for creating global solutions; yet, to date, theoretical foundations and approaches have often been topic- and even sometimes place-specific. An overarching theory is currently lacking. Archaeology provides a unique perspective through which to develop such foundations, helping to inform the creation of novel solutions, given that plastics are a form of material culture that now occurs universally in both stratified, marine, terrestrial and orbital contexts. To the existing scholarship on distribution and environmental impacts, archaeology adds time depth and cultural behavioural perspectives, without which a global model is incomplete. In this presentation I will outline this collaborative project (which is at a very early stage), and outline some of the work undertaken on plastics to date which we, as archaeologists, might recognise as archaeological. In short, this presentation constitutes an archaeological investigation into both the contemporary Plastic Age and the future.
About the speaker: John Schofield is Director of Studies in Cultural Heritage Management in the Archaeology Department at the University of York (UK). He also holds adjunct positions at Griffith and Flinders Universities (Australia), and is Docent in Contemporary Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at the University of Turku (Finland). John is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy, a member of the Punk Scholars Network, and a Member of the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists. He has previously served as Executive Editor of the Taylor and Francis journal World Archaeology and is currently on the Editorial Advisory Board of Australian Archaeology.
When: 3-4pm ACST (Adelaide time), Thursday 23 May 2024
Where: Online on Teams
For more information: Email Dr Mirani Litster mirani.litster@flinders.edu.au or download the flyer.
For those in Adelaide, there will be another opportunity to hear from Professor Schofield on Wednesday 5 June 2024. Find the details for that event here.