The Lux Project

*Although the blog has been very quiet this last year, the Lux Project hasn't. We've been in the lab looking at Egyptian funerary objects, giving public talks, visiting archives in the UK, making worksheets for school children learning at home due to COVID-19 (available here:  https://www.uwinnipeg.ca/classics/the-lux-project.html ) , and doing research from home.       Since we can't travel these days, let's hear from one of our most enthusiastic and productive volunteers, Anya Ingram, on her experience taking part in her first archaeological dig in sunny Portugal. Since Anya is a geography major, she brings a very useful set of skills to her archaeological research and demonstrates just how important it is to take an interdisciplinary approach to any research project. Her post also expresses one of my favorite things about teaching and leading a project like Lux: the excitement of discovery and of piecing together the ancient past bit by bit.  This summer from th

Happy International Women’s Day 2019! Inspired by a twitter thread on women mentors started by Dr. Sarah Bond,    ( https://twitter.com/SarahEBond/status/1103833449939550214 ), I’d like to mark International Women’s Day 2019 by reflecting on the various women of the Lux Project. To begin, we are a women-led project, with Simone Reis Obendoerfer and myself as co-directors. From the inception of the project, our focus has been access to the antiquities of the Hetherington Collection and access to opportunities for students here at U of W. Simone’s work with the project is an excellent of example of this: she’s recently finished her Curatorial Practices MA (through the Cultural Studies program at U of W) and done a great deal of essential research with the collection as she prepares for a curatorial career. She has been a model of academic excellence paired with professionalism and intellectual curiosity for our undergraduate volunteers. A majority of our volunteers happen to

The following post comes from Jazz Demetrioff, one of our volunteers, a nascent archaeologist, and a soon-to-be graduate of U of W Classics, on her first time digging last summer. Because we work with antiquities, it's key to understand the hard work of those who dig them up, document them, and study them. Jazz has already brought some of her expertise to the lab and we look forward to hearing about her future accomplishments!  Some archaeologists say that your first time in the field gives you the indication of whether you are meant to be an archaeologist or not. That first feeling of taking your trowel and scraping the context, the first find you sieve, the weather…oh yes…weather is a factor; all of these things and more can give you a taste of what archaeologists go through on a daily basis. I took my first archaeology course back in 2013, thinking it would be useful for my degree in Classics. Little did I know that I would fall in love with the idea of digging in the trench

It's been quite a week in the world of Classics and Classical Archaeology and I'm gearing up for a pair of public talks on the Lux Project, so I've been thinking quite a bit about the impetus behind the project lately.  Not-so-sunny San Diego Last weekend I, along with my colleagues Conor Whately, Michael MacKinnon, and Peter Miller, attended the annual joint meetings of the Society for Classical Studies and the Archaeological Institute of America in San Diego. This conference in particular was meant to be celebratory, as it is the sesquicentennnial (150th) anniversary of the SCS. For me personally, I had the chance to give out the Women's Classical Caucus' award for professional leadership to my very own PhD supervisor, Ruby Blondell ( https://classics.washington.edu/news/2019/01/08/uw-grad-student-and-faculty-member-win-lcc-and-wcc-prizes ). We also celebrated the excellent work of a group known as The Sportula, who give microgrants to Classics students, esp

As Simone mentioned in her recent post, the Lux Project marked quite a few milestones this summer, both for Simone and I personally (it’s my turn to congratulate Simone, who got married this August and just completed her M.A. last week), and for the project. Our goal from day one has been to bring the contents of the Hetherington Collection to a wide audience, so this summer we embarked on our first outreach task: a visit to the BEEP summer program at Margaret Park School. As most Classicists will tell you, the world of the ancient Mediterranean is deeply compelling to people of all ages, but especially to children (when most of us got the bug!). Because of this, and the fact that studies of the ancient world appear twice in the Manitoba grade-school curriculum, we want to bring the Hetherington Collection into the classroom locally. We rarely get the opportunity to see Mediterranean antiquities in Manitoba, and they’re even more inaccessible to school-aged children. As one of

Dr. Melissa Funke After an eventful summer, it is great to be back to the Lux project on a more regular basis. We are kicking off the Fall term by Congratulating Dr. Melissa Funke on her appointment as an Assistant Professor at the University of Winnipeg! The Classics Department is lucky to have you. We have also dived right in to outreach and research by meeting with the Classics Students’ Association to recruit some student volunteers and interns; the Lux project is about accessibility and education, after all. And finally, we are collaborating with the Anthropology Museum here at the University once again to create a display centred around the ancient Roman and Near Eastern Lamps in the Hetherington Collection. Since I (Simone) am an almost-graduate of the University of Winnipeg’s Curatorial Practices M.A., I have been leading the design for the display along with a mentorship (and a lot of help) from the Anthropology Museum’s curator: Val McKinley.  Mapping it Out I b