Sarah Tarlow

(Professor Emerita of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester, UK)

“Archaeology, Life Writing and Radical Honesty”

Friday, November 7, 4:10 PM – 6:10 PM

807 Schermerhorn Hall

Register Here

Abstract

Like many people in the academic world, I have been experimenting with ways of writing that are quite different from the usual texts we produce. Doing other kinds of writing means paying attention to other aspects of how and what we communicate. In the case of memoir/ life writing, that might mean that we give up the guarantee of authenticity and authority that comes from citing extensive references and using a specialised register, and depend more on emotional and experiential points of connection, and the creative use of language to evoke whatever you want to convey.

Combining life writing with academic expertise is a rare occasion where a writer can be their full self, integrating professional and personal stories and views.

In this talk I will argue that what distinguishes the best life writing is radical honesty. Furthermore, the principles of radical honesty applied back to our academic writing and, indeed, to our other endeavours, result in more innovative, exciting, critical and transformative work. Radical honesty requires the writer to interrogate the self deeply, to evaluate assumptions, and root out platitudes and clichés, even when to do so invites criticism, ridicule, or impediments to career progression.

I will discuss and read from my own memoir, The Archaeology of Loss, which combines my expertise as an archaeologist specialising in the archaeology of death and burial, with my personal experience of being a long-term carer for my ill husband, and my responses to his decision to end his own life. Writing this book changed my perspective on myself, on archaeological writing and on what it might mean to be a public anthropologist.

Bio

Sarah Tarlow is Professor Emerita of Historical Archaeology at the University of Leicester, UK. She has published more than 10 academic books on topics including the archaeology of death, historical archaeology in Britain and Ireland, the archaeology of the body and archaeological ethics. In 2023, her memoir The Archaeology of Loss received the Royal Anthropological Institute’s Public Anthropology award.

Hasan Peker, Istanbul University

The Rise and Development of Anatolian Hieroglyphic Writing: New finds from Karkemish and Alalakh

Monday, November 17, 2025, via Zoom 12 pm noon (EST)

You can find an abstract of the Hasan Peker’s talk on the Columbia University Seminar’s website, Further information on the 2025-2026 Columbia Seminars on the Ancient Near East series will be posted there as well.

The event will take place by Zoom: to receive the Zoom link, please rsvp to gilbert@fordham.edu. For any questions, feel free to get in touch with me at gilbert@fordham.edu. The seminar rapporteur, Shannon O. White (sw3857@columbia.edu) will send a Zoom link to all email addresses on the RSVP list the day before the meeting so that you can log in. Once the meeting has started, please email the rapporteur for assistance.

Dr. Ben Alberti

(Framingham State University)

Image Predation:

In Archaic Northern New Mexico

November 21, 2025

4:30-5:30 pm (with reception to follow)

951 Schermerhorn Extension

Abstract

What the concept “image” is in archaeology affects what work images do. James Elkins has written that usage of “image” is so broad that any list of its meanings risks incoherence. Most often, the concept is not interrogated. But sometimes it is. In this talk, two issues are examined: how we think about the agency of images; and whether it matters where our concept of “image” comes from. Alfred Gell theorized images (artworks) as secondary agents, often operating as perceptual/cognitive traps. Sev Fowles and Darryl Wilkinson argue that images can be “captured” and repurposed in acts of domination. Among some Amerindian groups, the “soul” is the image of the living person able to capture or be captured. This is, perhaps, a stronger claim than Fowles or Wilkinson, as is W.J.T Mitchell’s, that images (pictures) want and need independently of their human authors.

My interest is not in theories of images, however, but in what can be said about the Archaic rock art of northern New Mexico. The art divides into two basic types, animal prints and abstract dots, lines, and squiggles. An image concept that works to understand why this is so must respond to what we know of the image setting, the coming together of human hunter-gatherers and non-human agencies. Traps, tracking, tools, movement, and forms of life inform image logics “then and there” and are fed by them. In addition to asking what images do (for us) or what they want (for themselves), a “predatory” image concept asks what labor it can do when agency is shifted away from things or people and towards the work done by the images themselves.