Theme:
4. Persisting with Change: Theory and Archaeological Scrutiny
Session format:
Regular session
Title:
The Archaeology of Ancient Borderscapes: Multiple Approaches, New Paradigms
Content:
The session proposed solicits papers interrogating the concepts of geopolitical, socio-cultural, natural, symbolic, and spiritual boundaries in the ancient world. Often, even the most defined borders are fuzzier and more complex than they first appear. We propose to approach this complexity through the concept of “borderscapes”: the political, cultural, physical, mental, intellectual, and/or spiritual geographies where boundaries are located and where the tangible and intangible practices of boundary-making and boundary-maintenance occur. “Borderscapes” emphasize how boundaries are actively shaped in specific places, though these places need not exist in the physical realm.
The discussion of geopolitical borderscapes will be a focus. From a methodological standpoint, the session taps into recent scholarship on frontier zone history, historiography, anthropology, and archaeo-ethnology from a multidisciplinary and comparative perspective. For too long, borderlands have been approached as spaces (physical and/or discursive) of imperial or state appropriation, violence, and exploitation or as pockets of resistance and defiance of said attempts at people and resource control. Moving forward from such a dichotomy, the session makes a case for reconceptualizing borderlands as spaces of transformation, affecting patterns of community building and state formation (or breakup) within and beyond the frontier itself. Recent scholarship, especially the Imperial Turn, has stressed entanglement, mediation, appropriation, and reassembling of material culture are defining features of borderlands and the processes contributing to creating, reshaping, and even causing their demises. They ought, therefore, to be understood and investigated as critical areas of innovation, capable of affecting both the space of the frontier itself and the wider world(s) entangled with them.
The spectrum for this session is intentionally broad since boundaries have taken so many different forms in the past, and all have changed dynamically over time and across space. Papers exploring ancient borderscapes from any theoretical or empirical perspective are welcome.
Keywords:
Borderscape, Border, Community, Agency, Identity, Metaphysical space
Session associated with MERC:
no
Session associated with CIfA:
no
Session associated with SAfA:
yes
Session associated with CAA:
no
Session associated with DGUF:
no
Session associated with other:
Main organiser:
Maria Carmela Gatto (Poland) 1,2
Co-organisers:
Serena Nicolini (Italy) 3
Marco Ferrario (Germany) 4,5
Affiliations:
1. Polish Academy of Sciences
2. University of Leicester
3. Alma Mater Studiorum Università di Bologna
4. University of Augsburg
5. Università di Trento
THIS SESSION CAN NOT BE SELECTED AT THIS MOMENT