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PhD Students Amy Connolly and Maia Wilson Present at Â鶹Æƽâ°æ Graduate Research Symposium
On February 26th, PhD students Amy Connolly and Maia Wilson presented at the 2026 Â鶹Æƽâ°æ Graduate Research Symposium. Connolly and Wilson participated in a panel titled “Family Matters”, reflecting the community-engaged and descendant-driven nature of their work.
Amy Connolly, whose research interests include household archaeology, Irish island communities, and abandonment, gave a presentation titled “‘And Bless Each Door that Opens Wide to Stranger as to Kin’: Persistence on Two Irish Islands.” Her presentation centered on the ongoing relationships that former inhabitants and descendants of two abandoned Irish islands in south Connemara, Co. Galway—Inis Oírc and Inis Bearachain—maintain through return to ancestral landscapes. The methodology of her research, as she highlighted in her presentation, is community- and descendant-engaged, as she works closely with former residents of the islands and their descendants to document how the islands persist as sites of remembrance and ongoing connection. Moreover, she highlighted in her presentation her own background as an Irish islander, reflecting on her positionality as both a scholar and a member of the community with which she works. In her words, “I feel deeply fortunate to be able to work with my local community and to bring some visibility to the islands that I call home. It is an Irish-speaking region that has largely remained on the margins of archaeological inquiry. Working alongside community members whose knowledge, memories, and perspectives are central to this research is something I do not take lightly. I am excited to see where this project goes!
Maia Wilson, whose research centers on Black Feminist and family-based archaeologies, gave a presentation titled “Finding Greentown: Mixed Method Care-Based Approach to Family Centered Archaeology in Brunswick County, Virginia.” The presentation highlighted her research project, which uses a variety of methods—archival research, non-invasive archaeology, mapping, ethnography and autoethnography—to explore her family’s history and heritage in Greentown, Virginia. Through researching her Black and Saponi-Occoneechee Travis family’s historic burial grounds and homesteads, in her words, “my relatives and I co-discover and co-narrate our family’s story of persistence through oppressive systems from 1820 to 2026.” Her project embraces community- and descendant-engagement, underscored by her positionality as a “descendant researcher” and her commitment to the co-production of knowledge with family members. This project thereby works to promote, in her words, an “anthropology of care”, examining how care practices in the past served as “vital everyday strategies, studied materially, that illuminate Black family survival” and demonstrating how family-based archaeology can likewise be “a space for community care today.” Speaking to the importance of this family-based methodology in archaeology, she expressed that “I at all times feel deep gratitude that the discipline I am so invested in I now have the opportunity and permission from my family to use in service of their hopes and wishes for our futures in Greentown. It also comes with a responsibility of the highest order, which is exciting and scary. For me, family is everywhere and I'm never doing this alone."
