Transformative Voices in Archaeology
The World Archaeological Congress has been a crucial platform for advancing ethical archaeological scholarship and practice over the decades. This keynote panel invites pioneering scholars to reflect on their own contributions and the ways their work has reshaped the field of archaeology. Through personal narratives and insights, panellists will share their distinctive academic journeys, particularly in alignment with WAC’s commitment to using archaeology to advance Indigenous rights and address global inequalities.
This double panel of esteemed scholars from around the world will delve into their rich history of engagement with WAC. Their diverse expertise will provide a comprehensive and inspiring look into their contributions and experiences in the field and offer insights into the diverse challenges that face archaeologists across the globe.
These distinguished thinkers are invited to discuss their unique paths and highlight the projects in which they take the greatest pride. They are invited to candidly share the challenges they have faced, mistakes they have made, and the strategies they developed to overcome obstacles in their work. This will provide valuable lessons for students and emerging professionals.
By sharing their experiences, these scholars will highlight the importance of ethics in archaeology, including community involvement, inclusivity, and cultural sensitivity in their work. Panellists will explore how their research has contributed to advancing the discipline, and to community engagement and a more ethical archaeology. They will discuss how they have addressed historical and contemporary inequalities through archaeological practice.
This panel will encourage attendees to reflect on how the panellists’ insights and methods can be integrated into their own research and practices, fostering a more inclusive and innovative archaeological community.
Join us for an engaging discussion where transformative voices in archaeology share their personal journeys and the impact of their work. Attendees will gain a deeper appreciation for the rich history of the WAC, an understanding of the ethical imperatives driving contemporary archaeology, and inspiration to contribute to the ongoing evolution of the discipline. WAC-10 participants can use the insights they gain from these pioneering scholars to continue to push the boundaries of archaeological enquiry and practice, particularly in advancing Indigenous rights and redressing global inequalities.
The WAC Elders will be present at WAC-10 in Darwin and available to advise younger scholars.
Alice B. Kehoe (USA)
Alice B. Kehoe is an anthropological archaeologist who works primarily with North American First Nations.
She is known for her persevering efforts as a feminist and postcolonialist scholar, and has been a member of WAC since its founding in 1986.
Caleb Folorunso (Nigeria)
Caleb Adebayo Folorunso, known as Bayo, is a professor of Archaeology at the University of Ibadan, Nigeria. He earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees there in 1979 and 1981, and completed his doctorate at Université Paris I, Sorbonne in 1989. His research interests include Ethnoarchaeology, Historical Archaeology, and Cultural Resource Management. He has authored over seventy publications and serves as Editor of the Journal of Environment and Culture.
Folorunso was Vice President of the World Archaeological Congress from 2008 to 2013 and was Senior Representative for West Africa (1998-2008) on the WAC Council from 1998 to 2008. He is a life member of WAC and Clare Hall, University of Cambridge.
Eduardo Neves (Brazil)
Eduardo Neves holds a PhD in Anthropology from Indiana University. He is Professor of Archaeology at the Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of the University of São Paulo, Brazil and has almost forty years of archaeological research experience in the Amazon Basin. He has been an active member of WAC since the 1990s.
Larry J. Zimmerman (USA)
Larry J. Zimmerman is Professor emeritus at Indiana University Indianapolis. During more than a half-century as an anthropological archaeologist, he worked primarily with North American First Nations, especially as an advocate for repatriation and for Indigenous archaeology. His current research involves the use of archaeological field methods to study campsites of contemporary homeless people. Larry attended WAC 1 in 1986, then served as WAC Secretary, as Treasurer (replacement), and as Vice President. He was co-organizer of WAC’s First Inter-Congress on Archaeological Ethics and the Treatment of the Dead in 1989 and organizer of WAC’s 2011 Inter-Congress on Indigenous People and Museums.
Gabriel Cooney (Ireland)
Gabriel Cooney is emeritus professor of Celtic Archaeology, School of Archaeology, University College Dublin. He served as Chairperson of the Historic Monuments Council (Northern Ireland) from 2009-2019 and is a member of the Royal Irish Academy. He is an active member of the International Committee on Archaeological Heritage Management, ICOMOS. Gabriel was Academic Secretary for WAC-6, Dublin 2008.
Gabriel’s research interests focus on the Neolithic period, particularly the use of stone and on mortuary practices in prehistory. He is the author of Death in Irish Prehistory (Royal Irish Academy 2023).
Robin Torrence (Australia)
Robin Torrence is retired but still active as a Senior Research Fellow at the Australian Museum, Sydney. Having joined WAC as a Life Member at the first conference in 1986, she was WAC Treasurer (1995-2003) and Chair of the Scientific Committee for WAC8 (Kyoto). Her major archaeological research has been based in Greece, Russia, and especially Papua New Guinea. Her projects have focused primarily on practical and symbolic uses of stone tools, social exchange and trade, and subsistence patterns and landscape use, with a focus on risk management and tracing the impacts of natural disasters on small scale societies. Her most recent research focuses on how Indigenous groups in Papua New Guinea have used objects now commonly found in ethnographic museum collections to negotiate social relationships with European explorers, traders and government officials during the colonial period.
Anne Pyburn (USA)
Anne Pyburn is a Provost Professor of Anthropology at Indiana University. She has undertaken anthropological research in Yemen, Ghana, Togo, Burkina Faso, and Kyrgyzstan. She has done archaeology in Peru, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, the US Southwest, and Belize. She has directed the excavations of three ancient ancestral Yukatec, Q’eqchi’, and/or Mopan cities in Belize. Her research has led her to emphasize the intellectual, political, and cultural choices of ancient peoples and the loss of knowledge resulting from the imposition of anthropological categories. At present her professional energy is directed toward supporting the human rights of Indigenous Americans.
Anne Pyburn was the inaugural co-editor, with Nick Shepherd, of Archaeologies: the Journal of the World Archaeological Congress.
Des Kahotea (New Zealand)
Des Kahotea has a MA(Hons) with archaeology major from University of Auckland and PhD in Anthropology from University of Waikato. A theme on Indigenous archaeology is what first attracted him to WAC 5 in 2003. He has been a member of the WAC Indigenous Committee and was a co-organiser with Joe Watkins for WAC Inter-Congress for Indigenous Archaeology at Waipapa, Auckland 2005. This was supported by Caroline Phillips, Larry Zimmerman and Claire Smith (AO). Archaeology in Aotearoa/New Zealand is embedded in its colonial past and Western science where it has given itself the statutory and academic authority for the Māori past during the 1960s and 1970s. Since the 1980s he has been a Māori community advocate for heritage and has often found himself challenging the field of archaeology and the New Zealand Heritage statutory body in their failure in addressing custom and preservation relating to Māori heritage sites and places.
During the 1930s Auckland and Otago Museum were invited to Oruarangi Urupa (burial ground) which they looted under the misapprehension they had permission. Some 3247 items of material culture were taken, the most extensive collection in Aotearoa of a variety of stone and bone tools, adornments and implements and are held in many museums today, the majority at Auckland Museum. The landowners of the burial ground asked Des Kahotea to present this information to a gathering in September 2024. Des went to the museum to view the collection to take images for a presentation.
Makere (Margaret) Rika-Heke (Aotearoa/New Zealand)
Makere (Margaret) Rika-Heke is of Waikato Tainui descent on her mother’s side — Ngā Puhi and Ngāti Kahu ki Whaingaroa no Tahaawai on her father’s side. Makere obtained a Master of Arts (MA) in Archaeology from the University of Auckland in 2001 and is a member of the first generation of Kaihura Māori (Māori Archaeologists) that trained in the technical expertise of the discipline. She has worked in both Australia and Aotearoa (New Zealand) and has served as an Indigenous Representative for the World Archaeology Congress (WAC). She is currently Director of Māori Archaeology at Heritage New Zealand Pouhere Taonga – an autonomous Crown Agency with remit over the archaeological authority permittance process in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Randall H. McGuire (USA)
Randall H. McGuire is a SUNY Distinguished Professor emeritus, at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. He has published extensively on Marxist theory and Indigenous archaeology. His research interests include the aboriginal history of the Southwest, 19th and 20th century class relations in the United States and the archaeological study of the U.S. – Mexico border. He has worked with Elisa Villalpando of the Centro INAH, Sonora for 35 years investigating the Trincheras Tradition of northern Sonora, México. They are currently running a binational excavation project near Atíl, Sonora. Dr. McGuire has used an archaeology of the contemporary to study the materiality of the U.S. – México borde. In 2008, he began working with the humanitarian organization No More Deaths to provide aid to migrants, the border wall looming over their aid station. In 2011, the U.S. tore down the first wall and built a 30-foot barrier to replace it. As an archaeologist, the materialization and rematerialization of the border intrigued McGuire as a material process. His current research asks questions about the consequences of the material border for people’s lives. He attended and organized a session on Indigenous archaeology at the first WAC in Southampton, England and has been an active member ever since.
https://bingdev.binghamton.edu/rmcguire
Gustavo G. Politis (Argentina)
Gustavo G. Politis is Researcher at the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas Técnicas (CONICET) of Argentina and Professor at the Universidad del Centro de la Provincia de Buenos Aires. He is a specialist in the archaeology and ethnoarchaeology of South American hunter-gatherers and the peopling of the Americas. He is also interested in the theory and the political history of archaeology. From the beginning, he was deeply engaged in WAC as a Senior Representative for South America in the WAC Executive Committee between 1987 and 1994. In 2013, he gave the Peter Ucko Memorial Lecture in WAC 7, Jordan.
H. Martin Wobst (USA)
H. Martin Wobst is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst where he taught for more than forty years. Born in Germany, with an early interest in Classical Archaeology, his publications evolved from Michigan Archaeology via Processual Archarology and Postprocessual Archaeology to the Archaeology of Us and Indigenous Archaeologies. He considers himself more of a theoretician than a fieldworker. His work aims to subvert the dominant Capitalist ways of thinking about the past and present and to develop ways of thinking that help to liberate and empower the underdog, by teaching, mentoring and building community. Professor Wobst has held numerous administrative roles for WAC over 30 years. He suggested the title for Archaeologies, the journal of World Archaeological Congress, and Chaired the WAC Congress Travel Grants Committee several times.
George Okello Abungu (Kenya)
George Okello Abungu is a Cambridge-trained archaeologist and Emeritus Director-General of the National Museums of Kenya. A founding member of WAC in 1986, and together with Lorna Abungu hosts of WAC inter-Congress in Mombasa, he is a practicing archaeologist with excavations, in various parts of the world. He is also a heritage practitioner and consultant of many years. His main archaeological focus is on the development of urbanism on the East African coast. However his areas of interest have expanded to include among others the archaeology of piracy and in the last three years he has carried out excavations in mainland Mauritius and Rodrigues on the same. His commitment to community archaeology emanates from his long experience of communities exclusion from the practice and so dedicating a lot of time on heritage management “with communities” rather than “for communities”, championing both archaeological practices and heritage management that have communities at the core.
Arkadiusz Marciniak (Poland)
Arkadiusz Marciniak is Professor of Archaeology at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His expertise is in the development of early farming communities in the Old World, zooarchaeology, heritage pedagogy, and cultural heritage policies and strategies. He has been directing the excavation of the World Heritage Late Neolithic settlement of Çatalhöyük, Türkiye, since 2001. He is a member of the Academia Europaea and the Polish Academy of Sciences. He has been a WAC member since 1990 and served in different capacities, including the position of Treasurer and Council member.
Audie Huber (Umatilla Nation, USA)
Audie Huber is an employee of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation (CTUIR) and an enrolled member of the Quinault Indian Nation. He began his work at the CTUIR as a summer intern thirty years ago in 1995 in the CTUIR Cultural Resources Protection Program. In 1998, he graduated Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College though he is not a licensed attorney. He began working full-time for the CTUIR in the Department of Natural Resources as Acting Deputy Director and later the Intergovernmental Affairs Coordinator. His work is focused on the protection of treaty reserved rights and resources and works directly with federal, state, and local governments as well as private parties protecting tribal interests. He was also involved in the administrative, legal and legislative proceedings regarding the Ancient One (AKA Kennewick Man) under the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act since the discovery in 1996. Audie joined WAC in 2003 attending WAC-5 in Washington DC.
Peter R. Schmidt (USA)
Peter R. Schmidt is an anthropological archaeologist and historian who has pioneered engagement with communities and the preservation of their intangible heritage over his nearly sixty years of practice in Africa. An activist for building educational capacity in African, Schmidt has devoted years of his career to development of archaeology departments in Tanzania and Eritrea and to human rights education in Uganda, He was awarded the Peter Ucko Memorial Award at the WAC-8 meetings in Kyoto where he also delivered the Peter Ucko Memorial Lecture. Dr. Schmidt has conducted field research in Tanzania, Eritrea, Uganda, Gabon, Cameroon, and Sri Lanka, focusing on postcolonial perspectives, ethnoarchaeology, oral traditions, community and critical heritage studies, iron technology, and anthropological film:
Schmidt is Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at the University of Florida and also Extraordinary Professor of Archaeology at the University of Pretoria. He first engaged with WAC at the Mombasa Inter-Congress in 1993 and served as Scientific Advisor for the WAC-9 meetings in Prague. He maintains an active research program in Uganda where he collaborates with, and trains staff affiliated with the Uganda Museum.
Mitchell Allen (USA)
Mitchell Allen is a Research Associate at Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley. His archaeological fieldwork has spanned Israel, Afghanistan, and California. Currently, he is writing up the results of a legacy survey project, the Helmand Sistan Project, Afghanistan, on which he was a junior archaeologist in the 1970s. Allen spent 40 years as an academic publisher, including founding and running Left Coast Press, the publishing partner of WAC for a decade.