Theme:
5. All Roads Lead to Rome: Multiscalar Interactions
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
Following the River: Flowscapes as Clusters of Communication in the Ancient Mediterranean World
Content:
Considering communication routes as networks of multiscalar interaction, rivers play a crucial role in facilitating the penetration of people, goods, technologies, and ideas into the inland regions.
Regardless of river length, navigability, catchment area dimensions, and seasonal character as well as environmental changes rivers and river valleys offer optimal conditions for mobility even in challenging landscapes. Thus, rivers create flowscapes, forms of socio-natural networks, linking environmental and natural factors with the social and historical background.
By changing perspective and putting rivers at the centre of research, the inland regions not only animate themselves with a network of fluid movements, but this also opens up the possibility of considering clusters of communication at a wider range and scale, offering multiscalar interaction from the small and fragmented local landscape, to the wider Mediterranean. Rivers provide for a rhizomatic and branching penetration of the landscape, enhancing lively interactions and cultural exchanges, thus being fluid, nonlinear boundaries, and elements of social unity and integration rather than static borders.
This session approaches riverine landscapes from a diachronic perspective – from the Bronze Age to the Middle Ages – highlighting transversal and constant dynamics in different periods and environments in the Mediterranean area.
Papers are welcome that address the topic from different angles regarding:
- riverine landscapes as networks of multiscalar interactions, affecting ancient communities at the social and historical level;
- rivers as ways of exchange and transit of goods, technologies, and ideas - thus flowscape as a promoter of the economy of inland regions;
- rivers as inter- and transcultural elements, affecting the ways of integration and cooperation between different communities;
- river ways as dialectic clusters with both environmental and social implications.
Keywords:
River, flowscape, communication, environment, cluster, interaction
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:
Mariachiara Franceschini (Germany) 1
Co-organisers:
Elisa Abbondanzieri (Italy) 2
Affiliations:
1. Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Abteilung Klassische Archäologie
2. Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento di Scienze dell'Antichità
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