Experimental archaeology helps us to understand our human past, and it’s a research approach which grows every year all over the world. But how are experimental archaeologists establishing themselves in countries where the approach hasn’t been used so often? What kinds of questions are they asking and what difficulties do they need to overcome?

March’s #FinallyFriday features Shanti Pappu and João Carlos Moreno de Sousa, and they talk us through their work building up experimental archaeology programmes in India and Brazil. 

Professor Shanti Pappu is a specialist in prehistory and interfaces with palaeoenvironments, ethnoarchaeology, and public archaeology, based in Chennai, India. She, along with Dr. Kumar Akhilesh, run the Sharma Centre for Heritage Education, which conducts research in Indian archaeology and communicates the same through outreach in the form of experimental archaeology, including workshops and courses for university students, school children and local communities.

Dr. João Carlos Moreno de Sousa is a specialist in lithic technology based in the Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies of the University of São Paulo, Brazil, focusing predominantly on using experimental archaeology to investigate technologies from Paleoamerican and Paleoindian cultures. He is the founder of Arqueologia e Pré-História, which is a collection of online resources aiming to communicate archaeological research and information, and especially to promote the local archaeology and paleontology of Brazil to non-specialists and academics alike.

Join us for insights into how our guests are working to use experimental archaeology to inspire interest in local prehistory, the great benefits of partnerships around the world, and lessons on how they’ve worked to create their own research centres focusing on experimental archaeology. Our guests will be live on the EXARC Discord Server to answer your questions on Friday, 5 March at 17:00h Central European Time and we look forward to seeing you there! 

Follow this link to enter the server: https://discord.gg/MJTUwc8. Once you click, you are prompted to present yourself in 1, 2 sentences and then one of us will let you in.