Getting to Know Your Ancestors

A philosophical inquiry workshop on connecting through deep time

Getting to know your ancestors - featured image

_{Photograph of a reconstruction by Gabriel Vinas and Ryan M. Campbell at pithecus.org. Please support their work.}

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This workshop investigates a range of metaphysical, epistemological and phenomenological questions relating our understanding of the deep past.

Part 1 concerns paleoanthropological reconstruction. It includes a series of purpose-made videos (see clips 1, 2, 3) about hominin reconstruction, featuring biological anthropologist Ryan Campbell and sculptor Gabriel Vinas. These clips raise questions such as:

Can a reconstructed face ever truly capture the person? What is the true essence of a person?
Is it worth going to the effort and cost of accurately reconstructing the faces and bodies of our ancestors? How do these reconstruction efforts affect our collective understanding of the past? Do they help us better understand, or do they merely romanticise the lives of our ancestors?
Is the creative element of conveying emotions, personality and a lifelike quality important to the project of reconstructing our ancestors?
Collaborators Ryan Campbell and Gabriel Vinas are “trying to tell the story of the past, and trying to do that as accurately as possible.” Sometimes they purposefully leave elements out of their models – things like hair, and ears, which can’t be known with scientific accuracy. Is it better to make a hairless, earless model because the fossil record doesn’t tell us about hair texture, length and style, and ear shape; or is it better to include these features, even if it means taking a guess, or making things up? Is there a place for speculation in these reconstruction efforts?
Are scientific and non-scientific processes equally useful in the quest for understanding, or is one kind of approach better?
Ryan Campbell says ‘There has to be a strong pushback to …misinformation.” Was it irresponsible of the Creation Museum to suggest that the Australopithecus ‘Lucy’ could have looked like any of those faces in their museum display (even the light-skinned human-looking one)?

Part 2 concerns experiential archaeology. It includes a small-group activity concerning what can be known about the past, and with what degree of certainty. This part of the workshop also includes a video clip about Sagnlandet Lejre (‘Land of Legends’), an open-air archeological museum in Denmark in which 10,000 years of Danish history are brought to life. We investigate questions including:

Can experiential archaeology (by contrast with experimental archaeology) offer us a genuine phenomenological understanding of what it was like to live in the past?
Given that identities, beliefs and symbolic meanings don’t leave clear traces in the archaeological record, how might archeologists of the distant future interpret the remnants of our 21st century society?

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The following workshop materials are shared under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike) for all original material. (Materials from other sources are clearly credited in the runsheet.)

Runsheet – Getting to Know Your Ancestors (100 mins)
Slideshow (PDF copy): Getting to Know Your Ancestors (video clips not included – to view video clips, use hyperlinks indicated on the runsheet)
Activity cards to print and cut (multiple copies required; please order as shown on the runsheet)

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This work is available free of charge, so that those who can’t afford it can still access it, and so that nobody has to pay before discovering it’s not what they are really seeking. But if you find it valuable and you’d like to contribute whatever easily affordable amount you feel it is worth, please leave a donation via Paypal below.