The Lux Project

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 h...

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...