There are many ways to understand a culture and its history.
One way is to study political and heroic figures, or the broad sweep of cataclysmic events.
Another is to look at everyday people and their lives—and then use discoveries and insights to illuminate a specific community’s or culture’s past, and as a lens for broad, universal themes.
Within this second mode of research and learning, Keough-Naughton Faculty Fellow Ian Kuijt, Professor of Anthropology, is leading a multifaceted and multidisciplinary effort off the west coast of Ireland called Hidden Histories: Cultural Landscapes of the Irish Coast (CLIC).
“There is a massive amount of research focused on the urban and the political,” Kuijt says, “but there are also huge swaths of Irish history and culture that are greatly understudied and thus not well understood.”
He calls the CLIC project an effort to shine a light on “hidden histories” and “soft footprints.”
Ian Kuijt