Archaeology builds on the potential of expanding the capacity for memory beyond the brain into the material world and thus to extend our access to the past beyond our own lived memories, the oral accounts told to us by our elders, and the accounts recorded in books. But how does this transfer of a cognitive capacity into the outside world work?

Human memory has the capacity to reverse time and allows us to reexperience past events. Archaeology builds on the potential of expanding the capacity for memory beyond the brain into the material world and thus to extend our access to the past beyond our own lived memories, the oral accounts told to us by our elders, and the accounts recorded in books. But how does this transfer of a cognitive capacity into the outside world work? Archeology has developed a wide range of methods to probe the human past but the capacity to project memory onto the material world is not unique to archaeology and in this paper, this essay would like you to draw on your personal experience to explore how objects and places can come to be active components in memory of the past.

Please select one object or place that plays a role in your own construction of memory.

-If you are working with an object, we ask you to relate your discussion to Katina Lillios article on heirlooms and particularly her question of how heirlooms work.

-If you are writing on a place, we ask you to relate your discussion to Pierre Noras concept of Places of Memory or lieux de memoire.

You should also be able to draw a connection to some of the ideas developed in Braiding Sweetgrass on our relationship to place, but it is not required that you include this in your discussion.

This is a personal essay so you are encouraged to use a first-person voice and creative structure but please cite any sources used following APA style. Also please include two-three images to be integrated into the text, have a caption of at least fifty words, and be directly referenced in the text.

Works cited:

Nora, P. (1989). Between memory and history: Les lieux de mmoire. Representations, 26, 7-24.

Lillios, K. T. (1999). Objects of memory: the ethnography and archaeology of heirlooms. Journal of archaeological method and theory, 6(3), 235-262.

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