Indiana Jones: Myth, Reality And 21st Century Archaeology

In Madagascar today, and in the recent past, the dead are understood to inhabit the world alongside the living. Accounts of the 19th century tell of people possessed by the dead, of ghosts roaming abroad, and of the care that must be taken around them. How can archaeologists and anthropologists provide space in historical narrative for entities that we might consider to be imaginary or nonexistent? How do we acknowledge the agency of the dead for people in the past? For Columbia University’s Dr. Zoë Crossland, this means attending to the material signs of the dead – whether tombs and standing stones, or the patterns of inhabitation that people left behind in the landscape. Archaeology is often called the discipline of things, but Dr. Crossland argues that our work is semiotic in nature – that is, it is primarily concerned with material signs, and with the interpretation of those signs. Archaeology is a fascinating discipline for the way in which it pulls together empirical data with the enlivening inter