CANCELED: Lecture: “The Archaeology of Island Hunger: The Famines and National Improvement Policy, 19th-20th century Inishark, Connemara, Ireland” by Ian Kujit

• Event Date: Thursday, November 6, 2014
• Time: 5:30 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
• Cost: Free Admission

• Alert

Due to events beyond our control, this event has been canceled.

Hunger and famine have always been powerful drivers of economic and social change. Despite the recognition of hunger as a driver of change, however, researchers have yet to fully develop nuanced and detailed understandings of how the Irish famines of the 1840s and 1880s transformed small, rural communities throughout western Ireland. While the Irish famine was one of the world’s major humanitarian crises of the nineteenth to twentieth century, and the impetus for mass emigration to North America, researchers are only now starting to understand it as a local Irish social processes that resulted in the creation of 19th and 20th century national policies and the development of new institutions, such as workhouses, orphanages and poorhouses. Focusing on the island of Inishark, in this presentation Kujit explores the archaeology of the famines, and argue that national policies of land reform, with the reorganization of private property in the hands of islanders rather than remote landlords, fundamentally altered the organization of coastal Irish households and village.

This event is organized by the Central Illinois Society of the Archaeological Institute of America and hosted by the Spurlock Museum.