29 October 2025
Conference | October 29, 2025 | 10.00 - 16.00 | Gerbrandszaal, Wereldmuseum Leiden
The Research Center for Material Culture is hosting the first day of the conference Decolonizing Archaeological Epistemologies, organized by Dr. Pansee Atta. Can we propose more expansive, democratic, and liberatory practices and approaches to the past and material culture? What can counter-colonial approaches rethinking the status of the historical object in the public eye be?
The full program will follow shortly. It is already possible to register for the conference.
The opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum has been hailed as a major museological achievement, a cutting-edge and high-tech advancement with the potential to shift global discourses on the repatriation of Pharaonic antiquities. And yet, little emphasis has been placed on how such discourses entrench existing museological norms, situating categories of “antiquity”, “artifact”, “treasure”, and “discovery” through extractive, colonial frameworks.
Decolonizing Archaeological Epistemologies is a conference critically examining archaeological histories and practices, proposing instead more expansive, democratic, and liberatory approaches to the past and material culture, challenging extant museological, academic, economic, and legal systems governing the ways that material culture is collected, studied, and traded. With implications spanning beyond Egyptology to archaeology, museology, and historical disciplines more broadly, this conference proposes a counter-colonial approach that rethinks the status of the historical object in the public eye.
Sessions
Panel 1 – Beyond “treasure”; challenging artifactual ontologies and epistemologies
Panel 2 – Counter-colonial museum exhibition strategies
Panel 3 – Resisting archaeological extractivism; new approaches to field-based research
Panel 4 – Community-based archaeology in theory and practice
Panel 5 – Beyond the “thing itself”; digital and ephemeral approaches to archaeological collections
Panel 6 – Who gets the past? New discourses in restitution, return, and repair
Keynote: Beyond ‘Wonderful Things’: Reimagining Egyptology for the 21st Century
Dr. Monica Hanna, October 30, 2025, Rijksmuseum van Oudheden
Program
The detailed schedule of both conference days will follow shortly. Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date.
The conference Decolonizing Archaeological Epistemologies is supported by:
