Join us for the November sessions of Brock “Un-talks” – a series of engaging, interactive presentations and hands-on workshops led by faculty members, staff and students from Brock’s Faculty of Humanities.

Speaker: Dr. Angus Smith (Department of Classics & Archaeology)

Since the early 1990’s, Dr. Angus Smith has been participating in archaeological excavations in the Mirabello Bay of Crete in Greece. His focus has been on reconstructing the past of the ancient Minoans, a Bronze Age culture of early Greece sometimes referred to as the ‘First Civilization of Europe.’ As an archaeologist, it is necessary to reconstruct history from tangible fragments of the past, and the particular fragments that are Dr. Smith’s specialty are sherds – broken bits of ancient pottery. Most recently, Dr. Smith has been studying sherds from the Minoan town of Gournia, which is the best preserved and most completely excavated town of the Minoan world. 

Why are sherds so important for archaeologists and what can they tell us about the lives of people in the past? How do archaeologists study them, and why would someone devote their life to the study of what is essentially ancient trash? This talk will begin to answer these questions as they pertain to both the ancient Minoan civilization of Greece and to Dr. Smith.  Examples of ancient sherds from the Brock University Cypriote Museum will be brought to the library so participants can try their hand at ceramic analysis and hopefully discover their inner ‘sherd nerd’!