Megan C. Hagseth, Ph.D.

Research Interests: Human-animal interactions in seafaring communities, identity, agency & habitus, marine artifact conservation, zooarchaeology, pedagogy

2022

PROW Public Access Initiative

PROW Research Group strives to increase public access to cultural heritage, removing barriers through the digitization of objects, monuments, and sites. The PROW Public Access Initiative is a project that collaborates with scholars and institutions to make 3D photogrammetric models. The resultant models are made freely available to the public under CC licenses for both VR/AR applications as well as the creation of downloadable files that are compatible with most 3D printers. Models generated through this project will be organized into study collections along with contextualizing materials geared toward college-level instructors in the social sciences. The goal of these collections is to address issues of accessiblity and provide opportunities for active learning pedagogical strategies.

Current Publicly Available Models

2021

Agency In Legacy Collections

Collaborative project that aims to document objects in legacy collections to support research into identity and agency of “invisible peoples,” driven by a holistic anthropological approach. The activities that filled the everyday lives of average people are often overlooked by the historical record. Objects such as Roman oil lamps have the potential to inform not only on the mundane or minutiae of everyday life but collectively can be extremely valuable in identifying the norms, values, and emic perspectives of groups largely omitted from primary records. The ubiquity of objects like oil lamps in the archaeological record make them ideal for statistical and dynamic analyses, which hold significant potential for identifying outlier behavior and by extension, expressions of agency and identity. The Agency in Legacy Collections project aims to document the mundane in order to create a fuller picture of everyday life in the human experience.

Read the Completed Report: tDAR Project Report

In The News: The Evansville Courier 2021

Products: Artifact analysis and reports, artifact photography and illustration, photogrammetric modelling

During the 2021 field season, Dr. Hagseth served as project artifact illustrator and assisted with artifact photography. Hagseth also led daily workshops on photogrammetric modeling that were open to University of Evansville students and faculty for professional development.