Finds Stories: Addressing Mobility through Object and People Biographies
From 27-29 August the AAIA Athens Office hosted the inaugural face to face meeting for the Erasmus+ Project: Finds Stories: Addressing Mobility through Object and People Biographies took place in Athens, hosted by The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens (AAIA).
This two-day event included a reception to welcome all the participants of the project, presentations made by each of the collaborating institutions and individual researchers, as well as workshops to address the different aspects of the project, including fieldwork design and implementation.
For a detailed background on the Finds Stories project, please watch our public talk by Dr. Konstantinos Trimmis (University of Bristol), which was recorded on 16 March, 2021:
Participants in our inaugural face to face workshop included: Dr. Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory (AAIA), Ms. Konstantina Kalogirou (Cardiff Metropolitan University), Dr. Konstantinos Trimmis (University of Bristol), Dr. Ivan Drnić (Archaeological Museum in Zagreb), Ms. Eleftheria Theodoroudi (The YMCA Basketball Museum-Thessalonike), Dr. Christina Marini (AAIA), Christianne Fernée (University of Bristol), Professor Katharine Robson Brown (University of Bristol via Zoom) and Konstanza Kapsalis (freelance filmmaker). You can view the full programme for the workshop here.
Data collection for the project has already begun with fieldwork underway in Samarina (near Grevena in West Macedonia, Greece) recording objects of the local transhumance population, in Croatia with excavations at Lastovo, and on Kythera recoding objects of various diaspora communities on the island.
It was wonderful to have an opportunity to meet our colleagues and partners face to face after a year in which so many of our interactions were virtual. We learned so much from each other over these two days and we are very excited about the directions our collaborations are taking.
Ivan Drnić (Senior Curator at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb) presenting on the excavations in Lastovo. 
Konstantina Kalogirou (Lecturer at School of Education and Social Policy at University of Bristol) presenting on how to transform the recordings of Finds objects into educational resources. 
Ivan Drnić (Senior Curator at the Archaeological Museum in Zagreb) presenting on the excavations in Lastovo. 
Christina Marinis (AAIA Erasmus Fellow) presenting on the recording methodology of objects for the Finds Stories project. 
Eleftheria Theodoroudi (curator of The YMCA Basketball Museum-Thessalonike) presenting on the 100 years history of the YMCA in Greece.
The next meeting will take place in Bristol in November, with further workshops focusing on analysis and interpretation of the collected data.