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Robert Schuyler (bottom right) interrupted Liz Quinlan (second from top left) and used a Nazi phrase and salute during the opening plenary of a virtual archaeology conference last week.
Liz Quinlan
Public use of Nazi salute rocks archaeology conference
Jan. 11, 2021 , 3:30 PM
Attendees at last week’s annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology (SHA) were shocked by a public, online altercation that included a past president of the organization using a Nazi salute and phrase during the conference’s opening plenary session.
Liz Quinlan, a doctoral student at the University of York, was thrilled to be an invited speaker at the plenary on Wednesday, 6 January. She served as the accessibility and inclusion coordinator of both the January 2020 conference, held in person in Boston, and this year’s virtual conference. As she was talking about her work, which included an LGBTQ+ guide to Boston in 2020 and a push to provide live closed captioning and transcripts of the virtual sessions this year, she was interrupted by attendee Robert Schuyler, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) and SHA president in 1982. Schuyler unmuted himself on Zoom and asked for the floor. He urged members to attend 2022’s in-person meeting in Philadelphia, then asked how the pandemic had affected SHA’s membership renewal numbers.