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Thursday, September 26, 2019, 2:30 - 4:30 pm
Margaret Conkey, Professor Emerita, Department of Anthropology
Hosted at Belmont Village Albany
1100 San Pablo Ave., Albany, CA 94706
Registration
In this talk, I will discuss how we have moved from the former ideas about prehistoric art that had situated an “origin” in southwestern Europe with the well-known cave art to recognizing that the practice of making images was part of the human experience in multiple locations around the globe at comparably “early” dates: Egypt, Indonesia, Australia, South Africa are indeed far beyond the caves of France and Spain. Along with this global manifestation, there has been the globalization of research about these early image-making practices. It has been argued that specialists from many countries, also beyond France and Spain, have developed new ways of seeing-and-thinking-about these images from the Pleistocene (geological) period. This has led to a proliferation of new methods, insights, and avenues of research about the contexts of production, interpretation and preservation of images that were made tens of thousands of years ago. How have these developments influenced how we think about our humanity and challenged many of our taken-for-granted ideas about the actors and actions of prehistoric peoples?
Margaret W. Conkey is the Class of 1960 Professor Emerita of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley where she has taught since 1987. Prior academic appointments were at Binghamton University and the San Jose State University. She received her BA from Mt. Holyoke College, and her MA and PhD from the University of Chicago. She has received two honorary doctorate degrees, one from Mt Holyoke College and another from Bowdoin College. Her fields of research include on-going survey and excavation of Upper Paleolithic sites in the French Midi-Pyrénées and her scholarship has taken up issues of prehistoric social geography, the production and interpretation of prehistoric (especially Paleolithic) arts and visual culture, and the feminist practice of archaeology, including pioneering work on archaeology and the study of gender.
She has served as President of the Archaeology Division and of the Association for Feminist Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, as well as President of the Society for American Archaeology. She has twice chaired the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley as well as serving as the Director of the Berkeley Archaeological Research Facility. Her recent campus awards include multiple teaching awards, the Berkeley Academic Senate Faculty Service Award, the Chancellor’s Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence, and she has chaired numerous Academic Senate committees. Most recently, she chaired the Chancellor’s Task Force on Academics and Athletics and continues to co-chair the Gender, Equity and Diversity subcommittee of the University Athletic Board. Her most recent awards include the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for American Archaeology, the 2017 Huxley Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of the United Kingdom, and the McGimsey-Davis Award from the Register of Professional Archaeologists for her career commitments to equity, diversity, ethics and professionalism in and for archaeology.
She lives in North Berkeley and has two daughters and three grandchildren.