Cambridge Heritage Research Seminar

Building Human Henge

Prof. Tim Darvill
Professor of Archaeology and Director of the Centre for Archaeology and Anthropology, Bournemouth University

Seminar Room, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Downing Street, Cambridge

Human Henge was a project undertaken to explore how archaeological sites could be used to help people with their mental health well-being. It was built from two key ideas. First, that Stonehenge, and many other prehistoric and later sites like it, were originally places of healing. And second, that ancient sites can and should have a wide range of societally relevant uses in the modern world. Both ideas are explored here in order to highlight key themes that were woven together in the development of Human Henge’s cultural heritage therapy. This used the iconic sites of Stonehenge and Avebury and their surrounding landscapes as arenas within which participants could be creative while safely exploring places in unfamiliar ways. Through programmes of participant-led activities, local people living with mental health problems came together for fun and therapeutic adventures, assisted by experts, carers, support workers, and contributors from a range of different cultures. By journeying through the World Heritage Site, spending time at a selection of the monuments, thinking, talking, singing, dancing, and making music, it became possible for them to connect with the landscape, the skyscape, the archaeology, and, most importantly, to re-connect with themselves and with other participants.

Timothy Darvill is Professor of Archaeology in Bournemouth University and has research interested focused on the Neolithic of northwest Europe and archaeological resource management. He has excavated widely, including work at Stonehenge (UK), Skorba (Malta), and Billown (Isle of Man). He has published widely, including a recent edited volume entitled Historic landscapes and mental health well-being (Archaeopress, 2019).

Cambridge Heritage Research Seminar

Futures Past: The Museum of Black Civilisation in Dakar, Senegal

Dr Ferdinand de Jong

Cambridge Heritage Research Seminar

“Finally, the truth is being told”: Making Invisible Histories Visible at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture

Dr Anna-Lisa Cox

Non-Resident Fellow, Hutchin’s Center for African and African American Research, Harvard University 

Author of “The Bone and Sinew of the Land”: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and The Struggle for Equality

There has long been a popular myth that the “heartland” of America – a region known as the Midwest – was settled by white pioneers. While there is growing awareness of the First Nations who were already there, the fact that there were tens of thousands of free African-descended peoples settling hundreds of settlements on this frontier, starting right after the American Revolution, has long been denied. The history of this population continues to be actively erased from the national narrative by the current work of popular American historians, while governmental entities from the township level up to the state level in the Midwest have been burning down the homes these Black pioneers built and refusing to fund sites that bear witness to their history.

If a population of African-descended people this large and influential during the 1800s could be erased, all because they are not seen as “belonging,” what other regions and times are also being affected by the erasure of African-descended peoples? Dr. Cox will discuss the responsibilities, powers and limitations of national museums to make visible these denied populations.