Arkhaios (Archeos) Film Festival

Name: Arkhaios (Archeos) Film Festival
Start: 2025-10-13T12:15:00-05:00
End: 2025-10-16T19:00:00-05:00
Location: 6050 USA Drive South, Mobile, AL, United States, Alabama 36688

Schedule

Mon, 13 Oct, 2025 at 12:15 pm to Thu, 16 Oct, 2025 at 07:00 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

6050 USA Drive South, Mobile, AL, United States, Alabama 36688 | Mobile, AL

On Mon. Oct. 13 - Thurs. Oct. 16, celebrate Alabama Archaeology Month with new archaeology documentaries at the USA Archaeology Museum.
The USA Archaeology Museum will be, for the 2nd year, one of the host sites for the 2025 Arkhaios Film Festival!
Arkhaios is a Greek word meaning "ancient" & the root word of archeo-logy, pronounced archeo-s.
Free & welcome to all! The Museum will also be open and showcases artifacts from the Gulf Coast. Learn about over 12,000 years of prehistory and history! Artifacts are contextualized using a series of life-size scenic representations depicting archaeologists at work and glimpses into the ways of life of ancient Woodland cultures, mound-building Mississippian peoples, early French settlers, and an African American family after the Civil War.
The following selected films will be shown with the USA support from the Dept. of Art & Art History, Center for Archaeological Studies, Student Anthropology Society, and the Dept. of Sociology, Anthropology, & Social Work.
National Schedule & Competition Winners: ArkhaiosFilmFest.org
USA Archaeology Museum Archaeology Film Fest Schedule
Mon. Oct. 13
12:15 PM - Chauvet Cave: The World's First Artists
Tues. Oct. 14
12:30 PM - The Stones Are Speaking
5 PM - The Rise and Fall of the Incas
Wed. Oct. 15
3 PM - Vitrum: Rome's Glass Revolution
Thurs. Oct. 16
3:45 PM - Neanderthals vs Sapiens: Two of a Kind
5 PM - Hunt for the Oldest DNA
Film Descriptions
Chauvet Cave: The World's First Artists-52 mins.
Director Alexis Favitski, Producer Fabrice Papillon, ARTE France (France)
The Gorges de l’Ardèche, in December 1994: three speleologists discover the most prominent and oldest known decorated cave in Europe. Chauvet is decorated with countless animal figures dating back 36,000 years, including breathtakingly beautiful wildlife scenes. Twenty thousand years before Lascaux, HomoSapiens had already demonstrated an astonishing artistic mastery. When admiring these works, many questions arise: how did these prehistoric women and men create such striking images? Who were they? Where did they find inspiration? How did they occupy this deep cave? What were their rituals or activities? For conservation reasons, the Chauvet cave has never been accessible to the public. Only a team of researchers is allowed to go down the cave and study it for a month each year. The filming crew will have the privilege of accompanying them on one of their missions. Specialists in cave art, digital imaging, paleontologists, acousticians, and physicists will join forces and use the latest technologies to decipher the enigmas that remain unsolved: what happened in this cave in prehistoric times?
The Stones Are Speaking – 86 mins.
Director Olive Talley, Producer Olive Talley, Olive Talley Productions LLC, (USA)
The Stones Are Speaking tell the inspiring story of how archaeologist Mike Collins, at great risk and personal sacrifice, saved 30 acres of looted land deep in the heart of Texas and revealed it as one of the most significant sites in the Americas. Collins and his team found evidence of people living in Central Texas, nearly continuously, for about 20,000 years. They also uncovered the largest number of Clovis artifacts ever found in one location in North America. The film is more than a simple story of archaeological discoveries. It's a heartfelt and timeless story of the power of one person to make a difference and how selflessness, passion and perseverance can inspire others to act for the greater good. Through extensive archival footage, photos and interviews, we connect the viewer to a charming archaeologist, Mike Collins and follow as he overcomes one obstacle after another to save this plundered site. Collins saw potential in a place that others wrote of as worthless. In the end, he and his army of volunteers open up a window into early human life in the Americas at the end of the Ice Age, in an unexpected place in Texas. The film is part biography, mystery and historical narrative, with an endearing cast of characters and an insider view of what it took to save this special place in history. We hope the film moves you, just as Mike Collins has touched the hearts and minds of countless others in his lifelong quest to add meaning to our larger shared story as humans on planet Earth.
The Rise and Fall of the Incas – 4x45 mins.
Directors Quentin Domard and Elsa Haharfi, Producer Céline Payot Lehmann, Pernel Media, (France)
The epic tale of the Inca Emperors has always been told by their worst enemies, the conquistadors. In the absence of decipherable writings for Europeans, their official history was for centuries reduced to the accounts of Spanish chroniclers who had every reason to twist reality to their advantage. Today archaeologists are challenging those accounts and raising new questions. Were the Inca really bloodthirsty warriors? Did they truly build a vast empire without the use of writing? Does the myth of gold contain a grain of truth?
Vitrum: Rome's Glass Revolution – 52 min.
Director Marcello Adamo, Producer Marcello Adamo, Filmare Entertainment and GA&A Productions,
(Italy)
In 2013, Italian engineer Guido Gay discovered an ancient shipwreck between Corsica and Italy at a depth of 360 meters. While the cargo was initially thought to be ballast stone, it soon became clear that the ship was delivering tons of glass in varying degrees of workmanship. This remarkable discovery, the second of its kind, prompts the formation of a Franco-Italian archaeological team to investigate the wreck's cargo, now known as the Capo Corso 2, onboard the Alfred Merlin. This film explores the significance of glass in Ancient Rome through the team’s deep-sea archaeological research, and how the development and dissemination of glassmaking methods changed human civilization forever.
Neanderthals vs Sapiens: Two of a Kind – 52 min.
Director Blandine Josselin, Producer Raphaelle Girotto, RMC Productions, (France)
The first fossil in the Neander Valley was found more than 150 years ago, and the disappearance ofNeanderthals – the “other humans” -- still baffles us. Each year, another astonishing hypothesis makes the news. Exceptional hunters and skilled craftsmen, Neanderthals reigned for hundreds of thousands of years in Europe. They conquered the Middle East and expanded their territory as far as Siberia. Then, 40,000 years ago, they vanished. Homo sapiens – we! – became the victors of this ruthless evolutionary race. What great difference between the two species could account for their divergent fates? Did our sapiens ancestors hasten Neanderthals’ extinction? Were Neanderthals truly inferior to us, as we have long thought? Behind these questions lies a profoundly contemporary and chilling mystery: How can an entire human species be extinguished? Recent paleogenetic and archaeological discoveries have started providing real answers. Since 2010, we have known that almost all of us carry Neanderthal DNA, showing that the two species met and even mated long before the sapiens arrived in Europe. Our relationship with our cousins was much earlier and much more complex than we’d thought. So what happened 40,000 years ago? In this documentary, we follow the trail of clues left by these two species that are so close yet so different. Fieldwork and labwork are revealing everything from declining fertility to low genetic diversity, to inbreeding, clan structure, females’ role in the survival of the species, and the development of species-specific neurons. These revelations will lead us to better understand what makes modern humans unique, because behind the Neanderthal enigma lies the fundamental question: Out of so many human species, why are we the only ones to have succeeded?
Hunt for the Oldest DNA – 82 min.
Director Niobe Thompson, Producers Handful of Films and HHMI Tangled Bank Studios, (Canada)
Hunt for the Oldest DNA tells the story of a maverick gene hunter, whose single-minded pursuit of an improbable scientific vision would tease and torment him before ending with a stunning triumph: a lost world recovered from a spoonful of dirt. Two decades ago, Eske Willerslev had a radical idea: Could DNA, the fragile chemical code of life, survive intact in frozen sediment for millennia? Fellow scientists called him crazy. But the Danish biologist set out to prove everybody wrong, and his perseverance paid off with a landmark breakthrough–with massive implications for how we understand the deep past. After many years of failure, Willerslev recovered the genetic traces of a lush forest ecosystem from before the Ice Age, more than two million years ago. The species identified from their DNA lived during the last hot epoch on Earth. Signaling a new era in DNA research, scientists can now use DNA to travel back millions of years and piece together vanished ecosystems. Today, they are poised to harvest the genetic secrets of these ancient worlds to help us adapt to our own climate future.