Evangelos Kyriakidis is the founding Director of the Heritage Management Organization. Trained at University College London and at Cambridge in classical archaeology, linguistics and anthropology, Evangelos has been a senior lecturer in Aegean Prehistory at the university of Kent and director of the MA in Heritage Management (KENT-AUEB), a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London and of the Archaeological Society of Athens, a Leventis Senior Research Fellow in Heritage Management at Kent, as well as a Visiting Professor in the University of Basel and at UCLA. Evangelos has research interests in Mycenaean administration, Minoan religion and iconography, as well as ritual theory. He is also interested in the history of archaeological thought and in archaeological site management and planning.
Lectures
Communities as the missing element – Techniques for community empowerment
Our public archaeology project had two complementary aims: first to inform our research on Philioremos peak sanctuary, and second to engage and empower the local community of the village of Gonies to become longterm guardians of their heritage, including this site. Here we will concern ourselves with the second aim. Our project developed a ‘community empowerment’ approach to public archaeology, whereby the local community, namely the residents of the village of Gonies, were involved as equals and given the tools to promote, protect and manage the values of their heritage as legitimate stakeholders in heritage management. Our approach combined aspects of a number of other existing approaches to public archaeology, including the ‘multiple perspectives’, the ‘education’ and the ‘critical’ approaches. However, our approach differed from all these by aiming at a more equitable distribution of power [ Smith et al. (2014 ), 5–7; see also Carman (2011 ), 490–501] between the key stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to explain our strategy as well as the activities and techniques we used with this approach.
Readings:
Kyriakidis, E. (2019). A Community Empowerment Approach to Heritage Management: From Values Assessment to Local Engagement (1st ed.). Routledge.
Local versus Outsider Vision
‘Simple seeing’ as Dretske has it, concerns us seeing of objects and things not facts about these things. Here we claim that ‘simple seeing’ as such is only a theoretical construct and, certainly after a certain age, is taking place only in very particular circumstances. If this is the case, seeing pre-supposes knowledge and seeing not a real Vision, as all senses, are directly intertwined with if not dependent on knowledge. The more you know, the more you conceive, the more you conceive, the more you look. The case to the point is local knowledge versus outsider knowledge. We look at theme to underpin the importance of ethnographic and other situated research in order to understand and, ultimately, see a richer picture in the now, in the recent as well as the distant past.
Readings:
F Dretske, ‘Simple Seeing’ 1979, in Gustafson D and B Tapscott (eds.) Body, Mind and Method 1-15
Goodwin, 1994, ‘Professional Vision’, American Anthropologist 96(3), 606-33
Workshop
Mind the Gap. The space that is missing as a predictive model for the future
An ethnographic and observational study reveals a common technique employed by several professionals including archaeological conservators and stone masons. This technique is used in order to complete a complex task such as that of building a dry rock wall or join the pieces of an archaeological artefact. A 3D mental image is employed for this task, which creates a dialectic between the material world and the mental world with interesting repercussions to scholarship.