The repatriation of cultural artefacts and the rewriting of inaccurate histories have been demanded by communities who wish to dismantle biased and inaccurate representations of peoples and cultures. Both colonised and coloniser states have been forced to reexamine the figures they put on a pedestal, some literally, as in the case of the toppled statue of enslaver Edward Colston1.

At the same time that revisionists are questioning the information we do have, elsewhere we continue to discover more about how our society came to be. New discoveries from previous civilizations can shed light on the human condition but often we find that humans have been repeating the same practices for hundreds of thousands of years. For example, mark making has been happening for at least 45,500 years2, and sharing pictures of your cat is nothing new3.

Susan Sontag wrote ‘All memory is individual, unreproducible - it dies with each person.’ It is this individual perspective on events of the past, the idiosyncrasies of personal experience, which make our understanding of human history so dynamic and intriguing. It is through these accounts that traditions live on, or that forgotten ideologies and methodologies are rediscovered. When considered in the context of the present, these discoveries have the potential to guide us in building a better future.

This theme gathers together students who are looking backwards in order to move forward.

1. Tom Wall, The Guardian, 14 June 2020, The day Bristol dumped its hated slave trader in the docks and a nation began to search its soul
2. The Hindu, 14 January 2021, World’s oldest known cave painting found in Indonesia
3. BBC, 20 October 2020, Nazca Lines: Huge cat geoglyph discovered in Peru
4. Susan Sontag, New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, Regarding the pain of others