The Archaeology–Heritage–Art (AHA) Research Network brings together artists, archaeologists, and heritage practitioners to examine how material culture shapes the contemporary world. We approach archaeology, heritage, and contemporary art not as seamlessly unified disciplines, but as sites of productive friction—where different epistemologies, empirical practices, and publics meet. AHA asks what happens when artistic research, archaeological method, and heritage practice are placed in sustained dialogue: how evidence is assembled, how archives are activated, and how landscapes and infrastructures become shared terrains of inquiry.

Over the past three decades, archaeology has increasingly engaged creative methods—from sound recording and moving image in fieldwork to performance, digital environments, and hybrid exhibitions. At the same time, many artists have drawn on excavation, archival research, and landscape study to interrogate memory, material time, and political authority.

AHA builds on this expanded terrain while insisting that archaeology is not a metaphor or aesthetic style but a method: an attentiveness to assemblages, stratigraphy, surface processes, transmission systems, and interscalar relations. Artistic practice, in turn, is treated not as illustration or outreach, but as a form of inquiry capable of reshaping how knowledge of the past is produced and how futures are imagined.

The network’s programme develops these concerns across a sustained set of conversations. In Wild Archaeologies: Historical Inquiry & Assembling the Contemporary, contributors including J. R. Carpenter, Ido Govrin, and Knut Ebeling explored experimental and poetic approaches that unsettle conventional documentary modes and expand what counts as archaeological evidence.

A workshop with Caitlin DeSilvey extended this discussion into questions of “feral heritage,” examining how material remains persist, decay, and exceed regimes of preservation and control.

These methodological questions move from landscape to mediation. In Colleen Morgan’s talk on archaeological worldbuilding, immersive and digital reconstructions were examined as speculative tools that reframe archaeological data and authorship. Screenings and discussions with Maeve Brennan, in dialogue with archaeologists and researchers, foregrounded looted objects and contested collections, demonstrating how moving image can function simultaneously as investigation, archive, and critique.

Across these events, AHA traces a continuous line of inquiry: from wild and unruly materialities, to digital and narrative worldbuilding, to the politics of archives and collection. Rather than dissolving disciplinary boundaries, the network examines how authority, evidence, temporality, and care are negotiated across them. In a context shaped by environmental transformation, extraction, and infrastructural change, AHA treats archaeology and art as complementary critical tools for engaging the material conditions of the past in the present – and contested futures.

Whilst the network remains open to diverse topics and research strands, key themes reflect the strengths of cross-disciplinary research across the Institute of Archaeology, in particular the Heritage Studies Section, and in the Slade School of Fine Art.

Previous events

The network held its inaugural event at the Institute of Archaeology on 23 May 2014. A display of artwork was exhibited in an informal setting, aiming to re-imagine the 19th Century 'Conversazione' - a relaxed forum for discussion of the arts and sciences.

The network held its 'Conversazione II' at the Institute on 12 December 2014.

The network co-organised the Institute Research Seminar series on 'Future Pasts | Present Futures: Critical Conversations on the 'Contemporary' across disciplines' (Term II, Spring 2015).

The network organised a group visit to The Museum of Innocence exhibition at Somerset House (March 2016).

The network held its 'Conversazione III: Fragments - Archaeologies in and of the architectural library' at the RIBA on 21 July 2016.

The network organised a lecture by acclaimed artist Marguerite Humeau at UCL on 19 October 2016.