Durgun Pinar (ed.). An Educator's Handbook for Teaching about the Ancient World

Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2020. — 243 p. — ISBN: 978-1-78969-761-2The world and our teaching are changing so quickly and so drastically around us in 2020. Online and open-access resources are becoming the only way students and educators can access and share information, while libraries, schools, and cultural organizations remain closed. Once campuses, schools, museums, and libraries reopen, educators will be forced to teach in entirely new or hybrid ways. The way we, as a society, see and understand the past is changing too: Historians are comparing historical pandemics like the “Black Death” to coronavirus. Archaeologists are joining in discussions about how and why we should remove racist monuments. We are once again coming to realize that the past is always present, and it is always relevant.
Those of us who study and teach about the ancient world know that ancient authors wrote about pandemics and death long before Shakespeare and Dante (for example, the Athenian and Antonine plagues).
Bioarchaeologists and paleo-pathologists can tell you that epidemics and diseases were among the factors in the collapse of the Maya and Indus
Valley civilizations. Classicists, Assyriologists, and Egyptologists know well that damnatio memoriae is a necessary and valid strategy that can inform us about oppression, conflict, and change. Archaeologists can tell you that racist monuments can be studied as ruins, as shameful things of the past that are no longer part of our present and future.