Musawwarat Graffiti Archive Team
Cornelia Kleinitz - Archive Director/Web Realisation/Content/Data Entry (2011-2015)
Cornelia Kleinitz is an Africanist Archaeologist with a special interest in rock art and graffiti, the politics of archaeology and cultural heritage, and open access initiatives in the humanities. She studied History and Archaeology at Free University Berlin, Humboldt University Berlin and University College London. In London Cornelia became interested in the archaeology of Africa and in the dynamics of rock art making and usage. Her PhD thesis, which she submitted at the Institute of Archaeology at UCL, was entitled ‘Dialogues in Stone. Past and present engagements with rock art in sub-Saharan Mali, West Africa’. Cornelia moved on to positions at the Ethnographic Museum in Leiden and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she worked on open access initiatives in the humanities. At this time she became involved in archaeological rescue work at the Fourth Nile Cataract in northern Sudan, where she documented nearly 1000 rock art sites that are now lost under the waters of the Merowe Dam reservoir. Her involvement in archaeological salvage furthered her interest in the politics and ethics of archaeology and heritage.
In 2007, after she had moved to the Department of Northeast African Archaeology and Cultural Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Cornelia began working on the graffiti of the Great Enclosure at Musawwarat es Sufra. She developed the Musawwarat Graffiti Project, which is dedicated to the documentation, study and publication of the historical graffiti at this singular site in Sudan. Her work involves on-site describing, mapping, photographing, drawing, tracing and RTI capturing graffiti, the development of a motif thesaurus and a database, database input and supervision, data analysis, the organisation of field and lab work, the writing of funding proposals and reports, and the presentation and publication of the project and its results. Since early 2011 she is also heading the development of the Musawwarat Graffiti Archive. During the year 2013 Cornelia continued the projects while being based at the Rock Art Research Institute at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. After her return to Humboldt-University, she acted as deputy director of the Archaeological Mission to Musawwarat (until August 2015).
http://wits.academia.edu/CorneliaKleinitz
http://www.archaeologie.hu-berlin.de/personal/kleinitz/
Robert Casties - Archive Technology (2011-2015)
Robert Casties develops Digital Humanities solutions as part of the IT-Group of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. He has been involved in many digital projects since the group's inception in 2002. Being both a scholar and a computer freak in one person he understands both sides and likes to create digital projects that benefit researchers, the general public and the technological state-of-the-art – like the Musawwarat Graffiti Archive. Robert has a PhD in History and Philosophy of Science, a Diploma in Physics, and has been programming computers for as long as he can think.
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/casties
Simone Rieger - Archive Development Coordination (2011)
http://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/staff/members/rieger
Amy Stafford - Archive Identity and Web Design (2011-2012)
Amy Stafford is the principal of Studio Blixa 6, an independent creative agency focusing on identity development and design for cultural game changers. Her award winning designs have been featured in publications and exhibitions in Europe and the United States. In addition to graphic design and brand strategy consulting, Amy's writing has been published widely in journals and books including The New Art Examiner, Dwell, Surface Magazine and The Freelance Design Handbook (Rotovision, 2009). She teaches at various art & design colleges and often guest lectures on the topics of brand storytelling, art & design to academic, creative and business communities. Amy is also an active advisor for several non-profit organizations. Amy developed the web design for the Musawwarat Graffiti Archive, including its logo and branding.
Jens Weschenfelder - Web Realisation/Data Entry (2011-2012)
Jens Weschenfelder studied Archaeology and Cultural History of North East Africa at Humboldt University Berlin, focusing on the archaeology of Sudan. He has participated in numerous field projects in Egypt and Sudan, often as a pottery specialist. Due to his talents as a draftsperson, Jens became part of the Musawwarat Graffiti Project in 2008. After three field seasons documenting graffiti on site at Musawwarat, Jens spent the better part of 2011 and 2012 entering data into the project database and introducing new project members to its intricacies. Jens prepared most of the vector-based drawings of the graffiti for the project database and he has been also been working on the web-presentation of the ‘Graffiti in Place Database’. Jens is now co-running the excavation of a Kerma period cemetery on the Island of Mograt in northern Sudan, preparing work on his PhD-thesis.
Stefan Schreiber - Project Assistance (2011-2012)
Stefan Schreiber studied Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology, Medieval History and Medieval German Literature and Language at Humboldt University Berlin. In 2010 he wrote his M.A. thesis on the subject of "‚Cultural appropriation’ as a strategy of the handling of things. Archaeological reflections on a cultural anthropological model". His interests are archaeological and anthropological theories, material culture studies, gender theory, culture contact situations and agency theory. Epistemologically, he argues from a constructivist point of view. Stefan's contributions to the Musawwarat Graffiti Archive include asking many difficult questions. He is now doing the same as a PhD student at the Excellence Cluster TOPOI, where he researches the topic: "Travelling Things: 'Roman Finds' in the Germania Magna in Consumptionscapes, Communities of Practice and Identity Spaces".
http://www.topoi.org/person/schreiber-stefan/
Texts: Cornelia Kleinitz & individual project members (last update: 14/04/2015)
