Archaeology Café 2018–2019: Making Connections

For information on our current Archaeology Café season, go here.

Tucson, Ariz. (August 30, 2018)—Tucson-based nonprofit Archaeology Southwest is pleased to announce the 2018–2019 season of its long-lived and popular program, Archaeology Café. The Archaeology Café series brings lifelong learners and humanities scholars together to explore the deep history of our local communities. This public programming has grown out of the science pub movement in which speakers engage audiences extemporaneously, without jargon, in a casual, nonacademic atmosphere.

Last year’s season focused on helping residents of Tucson and Phoenix learn more about the deep history of their local communities. The 2018–2019 season will build on this base and challenge Café-goers to look beyond their local communities’ histories and make connections between the places they call home and the broader Southwestern region. A major new feature this season will be the addition of live-feeding via Facebook, which will allow those who cannot travel to the Café venues to still participate in each program as it happens.

The Archaeology Café series will consist of eight programs, four in Tucson at The Loft Cinema, and four at Changing Hands Bookstore in Phoenix. The programs will alternate month-to-month between the two cities. We will set up a live stream for each Café via Facebook, which will make real-time participation via the Internet possible for an audience across the state and the country. During the informal question-and-answer period at the end of each Café, the live-feed viewers will be encouraged to add their questions to the conversation, making them truly part of the program. We will continue to videotape each Café to be shared later via Archaeology Southwest’s YouTube channel.

In Tucson, we plan to challenge the audience to learn more about the history and archaeology of places like Mexico, Phoenix, the Verde Valley north of Phoenix, and the Gila River Indian Community. In Phoenix, the programs are similarly designed to help Valley residents look beyond the archaeology of Phoenix and understand more of the variability of Arizona’s deep past. The program speakers have been strategically selected so that we bring respected humanities scholars who usually speak in Phoenix to the Tucson community, and vice versa.

This season is made possible by The Smith Living Trust and Arizona Humanities.

Questions? Contact Linda Pierce, 520-882-6946.