FREE lecture on HK Archaeology
Primary tabs
From Geomancy to Geophysics:Designing research into Hong Kong’s historic landscape
An anthropological talk by Mick Atha
Wednesday, 30 May, 2012. 7:00 p.m.Hong Kong Museum of History
Lecture Hall, Ground Floor, 100 Chatham Road, Tsim Sha Tsui
All Are Welcome! (Space is, however, limited to 139 seats)
The Lecture is conducted in English.
The historian W.G. Hoskins famously wrote that the landscape was “the richest historical document we possess” (Hoskins 1955). Hong Kong’s abandoned agricultural terraces and rice paddies, depopulated villages and fung shui features reflect the lives, labour and beliefs of countless generations of farmers who designed, constructed and managed the NT landscape. While beneath that historic landscape surface, archaeologists have found a succession of buried landscapes stretching right back into prehistory.
This talk explores how the rich multi-period landscape of Hong Kong came into being – a story of balance and conflict between human agency and natural processes. The kinds of landscape research ongoing in other parts of the world and the (so far) limited attempts to investigate and understand the cultural landscape of the SAR will be then examined. The talk will then be rounded off with a vision for future interdisciplinary research into Hong Kong’s unique historic landscape which, in true Hong Kong fashion, involves a combination of Western-style landscape archaeology in concert with Chinese understandings of landscape.
Mick is a HKSAR licensed archaeologist, researcher and part-time university lecturer with interests in Hong Kong’s early historical archaeology, geophysical survey and interdisciplinary landscape research
FOLLOWING THE TALK, YOU ARE INVITED TO A SELF-PAYING DINNER WITH THE SPEAKER.
THE HONG KONG ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY and the museum of History
