May 10 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Friday May 10, 2024
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Online via Zoom
The Ann Walker Bell Lecture
Speaker: Dr. Anke Hein, Peter Moores Associate Professor in Chinese Archaeology, University of Oxford, England
The Neolithic painted pottery of northern China has long been a source of admiration for its high-level craftsmanship and aesthetic appeal. At first, it was mostly of interest to archaeologists researching ancient technological traditions and early East-West culture contacts; however, more recently, as archaeological tourism flourished in China, local potters in the Northwest started creating imitations of Neolithic pottery for tourists, using archaeological discoveries and research to inform their design choices. In turn, archaeologists began observing these potters to understand how ancient vessels may have been made.
In this virtual talk, Dr. Anke Hein of Oxford University will explore how this intricate interplay between past, present, and future, and between archaeologists, potters, and modern-day consumers, reminds us how the past is (re)created in the present by a variety of actors constantly posing the question: “Who owns the past?”
About the Speaker
Dr. Anke Hein
Dr. Anke Hein is Peter Moores Associate Professor in Chinese Archaeology at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests lie with inter-cultural contact and human-environment interaction, especially as reflected in ceramic technology. Geographically, she is focusing on the so-called border regions of China which have been zones of interaction since early prehistoric times. She received her PhD from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) in 2018 and has served as postdoctoral fellow at Hebrew University and at the University of Munich in the following years until joining the faculty of the School of Archaeology, University of Oxford, in January 2016. There she is also affiliated with the Oxford China Centre, St Hugh’s College, and the Compton Verney Art Gallery. She is the PI of a long-term research project on ceramic production and usage in Bronze Age Northwest China, working with the Andersson collection held at the Museum of Far Eastern Activities, Stockholm. She also conducts ethnoarchaeological research on ceramic production in Shaanxi and Gansu and she is Co-PI for a field research project on Human Response To High Altitude Environmental Change on the eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, conducted in collaboration with UC San Diego, the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Archaeology, Sichuan University, and Beijing University.