Monday, April 21, 2008

Archaeology and Identity
It is now well accepted that archaeology and education are inextricably linked and that the past is often represented as mirrored by the dominant groups in a given society. The late Brazilian educator Paulo Freire in an interview, in 1988, with McLaren magazine warned that educators "need to use their students' cultural universe as a point of departure, enabling students to recognize themselves as possessing a specific and important cultural identity." Both education and archaeology deal thus with the manipulation of present and past to forge identities useful for people in power and archaeologists and educators have been active promoters of critical approaches.


It's an essay.