In Excavating Memory: Archaeology and Home (New Rivers Press, 2019), Elizabeth Mosier uses archaeology as a framework to explore personal material, including her mother’s memory loss, the layering of shared experience in creating family or community narratives, and the role that artifacts play in historical memory.
Her talk shares what she learned as a volunteer technician at the Independence National Historical Park Archaeology Lab: that heirlooms and everyday objects are material evidence, full of meaning that can help us realign the deeper truth of experience with the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and how we live.
Novelist and essayist Elizabeth Mosier descends from farmers in Indiana, where many of her family members still reside. She was a participating artist in the 2016 “Religion, Spirituality and the Arts” program led by Rabbi Sandy Sasso and co-sponsored by Butler University and the Christian Theological Seminary.
Twice named a discipline winner/fellowship finalist by the Pew Fellowships in the Arts, she has received a fiction fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and Vermont Studio Center.
Her nonfiction has been selected as notable in Best American Essays, and appears in journals and newspapers including Cleaver, Creative Nonfiction, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. She writes the “Intersections” column for the Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. More information about her can be found at http://www.ElizabethMosier.com.
Books will be available for purchase for $17, cash or check.
Amy L. Johnson
State Archaeologist, Archaeology Outreach Coordinator,
And Team Leader for Archaeology
Indiana Department of Natural Resources
Division of Historic Preservation and Archaeology
317-232-6982