CAMELOT Conference - Sept. 26

 

Exploring The Road to CAMELOT!

Dear Darrell, I hope the New Year has treated you well. In preparation for CAMELOT 2026, the CAMELOT Team is preparing to send out the Call for Presentations to the general public. Before we do so, we wanted to reach out to you to invite you and DARC to CAMELOT 2026 which will be held on September 26th.  Last year you helped us bring back CAMELOT after a five year hiatus. Your booth was a highlight of our 2025 conference and many attendees have asked whether DARC would be returning to the 2026 conference. Last year’s conference included amazing research presentations and hands-on learning opportunities for over one hundred and fifty students, academics, and members of the public. We have an Experimental Archaeologist travelling from North Yorkshire, UK for our keynote lecture, and intend on having several highly esteemed colleagues in different areas of Archaeology for a round table panel. This year, the theme for CAMELOT is experiential learning. With this theme in mind, we are hoping to significantly expand the conference for its 2026 iteration, and we would love it if you could help with our goal. If you are interested in running a workshop or doing a research presentation, the Call for Presentations is linked here. https://forms.gle/hRKaUvdysc8Fj8yz8 Thanks, The CAMELOT Team

At this early date, I am considering a paper loosely titled 'Presenting the Norse'. 

This would be an update on two early papers, at ALHFAM - 1998, and the Viking Millennium Conference - 2000. Now with over 30 years since the original 'Norse Encampment' demonstration at Orangeville in 1993, there is some value in reflecting on all the experiences presenting via living history.

"Lessons from the Viking Age' - 1998

 

Give Us Your Huddled Masses (10 lines)

 

When you were 16, you couldn’t get an unskilled, part time, summer, construction job. 
It was all the Italians, or those Portuguese, although if you had paid any attention, those older men had actually come over after the World War Two, and had already been here a decade or more. 

In the early 70’s, you complained about all the ‘Boat People’ who had fled Viet Nam (and the war your country started), and all the small corner stores that they opened ‘stealing all the business’.
Although you missed the fact that whole families were working 12 to 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, managing those super fresh vegetables that you were always buying anyway.

You bitched in turn about the Mexicans, the Jamaicans, the Chinese, the Samalis, who in turn came as migrant labourers, and then struggled to bring their families, and how 'they were taking all the work'.
As if you had ever remotely imagined yourself picking fruit from dusk to dawn, outside in the sun, while living in a barracks shack on some remote farm.

You demanded your aging parents ‘get better care’ at the senior’s residence you shoved them into, that being a not at all subtle code for ‘not those Pakistanis, get a white person’.
As if you personally would wash bed pans, or change soiled bed linens, or put up with the constant dementia screaming, the reason you put your mom and dad there in the first place.

All your life you have raged about ‘them damn Immigrants, coming here and taking all the jobs’, always work that you personally never remotely considered applying for. 
Never considering that the true reason you can’t get that dream job you want (even though you are not remotely trained for it, or have any of the basic abilities it requires) …

Has always been YOU.

 

Image : 'Immigrants leaving IRELAND for New York - 1874'