Dept. of Archaeology

Michelle Davies will be defending her PhD proposal on Friday 7th December at 10:00am in QC-2013, entitled 'Hebronimiut: practicing memory, identity, and archaeology with a resettled community'.

Michelle's research examines The Hebron Family Archaeology Project, a multi-year project which works towards increasing current understanding of 20th century life in Hebron, a former Inuit community in northern Labrador whose residents were forcibly relocated in 1959. This project has been the focus of Michelle's PhD research at Memorial University under the supervision of Dr. Lisa Rankin and a relevant part of Michelle's mandated duties as Archaeology Assistant with the Nunatsiavut Government's Department of Culture, Recreation and Tourism. To date, Michelle has completed several rounds of community consultations and three field seasons, and has had the opportunity to discover and develop shared research goals with community members who maintain strong links to Hebron. The research design is flexible in nature, and is guided by a theoretical examination of expressions of resettlement and identity, as well as the role of social memory in the construction of the past in Hebron. Based on the expressed interests of community members, the scope of the research has shifted from household excavation to non-invasive archaeological recording methods, family-based interviews, and increasing accessibility. In Spring 2019, a final round of community consultations will determine appropriate ways of interpreting and displaying data from the project, in order to share an Inuit-driven narrative that will be relevant and accessible to present and future generations of Hebronimiut.