The Kaete Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) and the CEUS | Cluster for European Studies warmly invite you to attend the next Käte Hamburger Lecture at Saarland University. This series allows fellows from the centre to share their latest research perspectives on cultural practices of reparation. After the lectures, audience members will have the opportunity to engage with key topics in more detail during a public discussion session.
Irina Podgorny: Trash to Treasure: Extinction, Refuse, and the History of Prehistoric Archaeology This lecture explores how waste and food leftovers became evidence of the natural and human past, valuable collector’s items, and museum specimens. In the 19th century, the rubbish pit became a fruitful evidentiary archive – a repository for new sources for the study of the non-written past, linking the history of waste with prehistoric archaeology. In her lecture, CURE Fellow Irina Podgorny will focus on the emergence of the kitchen-midden in 19th-century Denmark as an archaeological site containing evidence of past daily life and the remains of extinct animals. She will also discuss the global expansion of this method of archaeological enquiry to recover remains of extinct species such as the North Atlantic great auk, the dodo andRodrigues solitaire – animals that became extinct before their skeletons could be collected for natural history museums. The search for their bones sheds light on the history and emergence of the very idea of historic extinction, the material remains that were used to validate that idea, and how their extraction gave a new role to both ancient and modern rubbish dumps.
The Kaete Hamburger Lectures provide deeper insight into the centre’s ongoing research, convey these ideas to the wider university community, and invite the public to engage in meaningful discussions on cultural practices of reparation.
Live Lecture Broadcast
The lecture will be broadcast live via Microsoft Teams on 19 November starting at 6:00 p.m. with the lecture starting no later than 6:15 p.m.
