Theme:
Interpreting the archaeological record: artefacts, humans and landscapes
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Emerging Nodes of Power in Iron Age Europe: the Seventh Century BC
Content:
The Seventh century BC is the time when a new, powerful and intricate communication network arises across Europe. It stretches over large areas north and south of the Alps, from the steppe to the Atlantic façade. Current archaeological research divides this space into several cultural areas which usually overlap as result of different defining criteria, terminology and cultural concepts. This also applies to the nomenclature of period itself: Hallstatt, Early Iron Age, Orientalising Period, early Scythian Period - which reflects both competing traditions of archaeological research but also, more importantly, the cultural heterogeneity of a continent in the process of appropriation, adaptation and rejection of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Models. Our aim is to go beyond these labels and their different local meanings and attempt at Europe-wide comparison.
We are looking for submissions that will concentrate on:
- places or areas that were a driving force behind newly-established or renegotiated networks
- the distributive role and/or scope of such networks in terms of people, goods, and technologies
- processes of transformation related to long distance communication on the level of individual centres/regions as well as on trans-regional scale
- relations between social structure and power of individual centres within communication networks
- the cohesive force that kept these networks running (elite ideology or ?)
This session will take a cross-continental perspective, but we would like to identify places and/or communities who were not just passive distributors but were more dynamically involved in maintaining and shaping communication in terms of form and content between individual nodes as well as in surrounding areas. The chronological focus is on emergence of ‘nodes of power’ in the seventh century BC, but this process should be contextualised within more long-term continuity, discontinuity and change.
Keywords:
Iron Age, Orientalising, network, seventh century BC
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
no
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Hrvoje Potrebica (Croatia) 1
Co-organisers:
Carola Metzner-Nebesick (Germany) 2
Louis Nebelsick (Poland) 3
Mark Pearce (United Kingdom) 4
Affiliations:
1. University of Zagreb
2. Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
3. Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University in Warsaw
4. University of Nottingham,
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