Theme:
2. From Limes to regions: the archaeology of borders, connections and roads
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Archaeology of the Early Modern Colonial Limes
Content:
‘Good fences make good neighbours’, the proverb goes. Frontiers are generally understood as cultural, religious, language, and societal divides. Yet, through history, frontiers were imagined and manufactured for people to cross them. Borders did not only separate people, but did also connect them. Similar to the Roman limes, early modern boundaries put in contact what it was considered as ‘civilised world’ with the ‘savage/infidel world’. Still, people lived on, through, and against borders; and in turn, frontiers shaped people and trans-regional connections. Material culture played a crucial role in the construction of frontiers, especially in the so-called ‘Age of Exploration’ when Europeans searched for new trade routes that would fuel capitalism in their continent and, in the process, colonised large parts of the world. The materiality of borders took place in the form of walls, fortifications, religious buildings, city-plans, prisons, and cemeteries; but also in the form of body-adornment and apparel, food and crops, weapons, labour equipment and tools, and sacred objects. This session looks at those in-between objects that shaped and challenged people and frontiers alike between 1400-1800 AD by exploring African, American, Asian, European, and Pacific contexts. We welcome theoretical and methodological papers exploring the material culture of making and unmaking political, racial, sexual, and confessional boundaries in the early modern colonial world.
Keywords:
Frontiers, Early Modern World, Material Culture, In-between Objects
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:
Beatriz Marin-Aguilera (United Kingdom) 1
Co-organisers:
Sergio Escribano-Ruiz (Spain) 2
Affiliations:
1. University of Cambridge
2. Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea [University of the Basque Country]
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT