Abby Epplett, Historian

For the second part of Appendix E, Tolkien focused on the writing systems used for Middle-earth languages. Real-world languages use a wide range of systems that can be grouped into “families”, including those descended from Egyptian hieroglyphs, such as variations on the Latin alphabet; East Asian systems based on Chinese characters; Indian and Southeast Asia systems based on the ancient Brahmi script; pre-Columbian languages from Mexico and Central America; and writing systems created by Indigenous Americans to preserve their own languages after European colonization.

On March 27, 2024 at 8:00 p.m., I attended the webinar AIA Archaeology hosted by the Toronto chapter of the Archaeological Institute of America . Kisha Supernant , the director of the Institute of Prairie and Indigenous Archaeology , professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Alberta , and a citizen of the Metis Nation of Alberta, led the talk entitled, “Finding the Children: Using Archaeology to Search for Unmarked Graves at Indian Residential School Sites in Canada”. Supernant began this work in 2018 and is dedicated to making sure her work meets the needs of the community. She opened by acknowledging that archaeology is often viewed in a colonial context, where archaeologists extract the belongings and knowledge of Indigenous descendant communities and excluded them from conversations about how their culture will be represented. Supernant collaborated with three other scholars to edit the book Archaeologies of the Heart , which advocates for a diff...