Welcome to everyone, today we are hosting a very special event.

As part of the celebrations

for the end of the year event, the department is pleased to host a very ACE flagship seminar.
Tonight two very special guests are going to discuss about making and Breaking collective
memory, an archaeological dialogue on memorials past and present.
Join me in welcoming the discussants: Neil Price and James Osborne.
Neil Price is a distinguished professor in Scandinavian archaeology at the University of
Uppsala. His research interests fall in 2 broad categories, embracing the Viking Age in
Northern Europe and historical archaeology in the Asia pacific region. Among many others,
his recent research projects deal with the re-interpretation of the Viking phenomenon.
James Osborne is assistant professor of Anatolian Archaeology at the University of Chicago.
He specialises in Anatolia during the late 2nd millennium and the early 1st millennium BC.
He is also director of the Tayinat Lower Town Project, which is an exploration of the large
lower town settlement of the site of Tell Tayinat, located in Southern Turkey.

Neil Price showed us how often archaeology misinterpret evidence based on the artefacts
retrieved from archaeological contexts and James Osborne compared the recent iconoclasm
of confederate statues in the US with the iconoclasm that affected the statues of some Iron
Age, Syro-Anatolian rulers.
Dr. Price presentation demonstrated, through the re-analysis of a burial excavated in the 19th
century that was always thought to belong to a male warrior but actually belonging to a
female, how archaeologists often misinterpret evidence by projecting modern, western
perception onto the past societies.
What I am wondering is if there is also a danger in projecting and comparing what was
happening in the US, that is the destruction of confederate statues, with the iconoclasm
witnessed in some of the Syro-Anatolian states, and in general how all of you relate with the
often unconscious projection of modern perception and bias in the past.