ASU professor emphasizes the humanity in archaeology

As the founder of the Archaeology of the Human Experience (AHE), Arizona State University professor Michelle Hegmon is working to bring out the human element in a discipline that often neglects the personal in favor of the big picture.

Pulitzer Prize winner Mike Toner looks at AHE and Hegmon’s role in shaping this paradigm in the fall 2014 edition of American Archaeology.

Though Hegmon acknowledges that we cannot know what ancient peoples truly felt, she urges archaeologists to recognize the human reality of their subjects and use available data to build context for their lives, major travails and daily experiences.

“We can see the effects of conflict and disease in bones, but we don’t ask what it was like for the people who experienced it,” says Hegmon, faculty in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences’ School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

She believes that a more accurate view of the past can be achieved by considering what was entailed in being an ancient person facing a challenge of grand proportions, like warfare or climate change, or even the minutiae of everyday life, such as spending hours grinding corn into meal.

Hegmon’s approach is gaining recognition and traction. The November 2014 issue of the Society for American Archaeology’s Archaeological Record was devoted to AHE research articles, as is the forthcoming book, "The Archaeology of the Human Experience."