A Report from CHAT | Hope

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending the CHAT | Hope conference in Innsbruck, Austria. CHAT is the Contemporary and Historical Archaeology and Theory group and we hold an annual conference, usually in Europe. This year’s conference was hosted by the the University of Innsbruck and papers focused on the theme of hope. These conferences attract a wide range of papers from those focused chronologically on the Medieval and Early Modern period to more conventional historical and contemporary archaeology. There were many highlights, but a few will stick with me. First, Angela Puccini and Sefryn Penrose gave a brilliant paper on swimming pools as hopeful spaces. Much of the hopefulness in pools is that they somehow will continue to function (and be affordable to the communities who build them) and create a sustainable space for fitness, socializing, relaxing, training, and enjoying water. They saw pools as hopeful because they sought to keep the almost immediate and inevitable…

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