David Danzig

Save Ancient Studies Alliance (SASA) presents their fourth annual virtual conference. These online, livestreamed, interactive meetings are a new type of academic conference that includes all fields related to ‘Ancient Studies,’ is free and widely accessible to scholars, students, and the public, and connects the ancient and modern world to make apparent the contemporary relevance of Archaeology and Ancient Studies. Our conferences employ the framework of ‘Ancient Studies,’ the comparative, interdisciplinary study of the deep past of all societies. This year’s theme will be ‘Representations of the Past in Ancient and Modern Times.’ While the issues of reception, representation, and use of the past in modern times have been a hot topic in recent decades, this has been the case mainly in connection with Western colonialism and contemporary mass media representations. This misses the universality of this endeavor. On the contrary, our conference addresses representation and reception of pasts in the broadest cross-cultural, global, and atemporal world context, looking at how people in ancient and modern times understood their pasts. By removing the privileging of our contemporary temporal position by intertwining current and past explorations of pasts we investigate this issue as a human cultural construction in all societies.