ACCORDIA RESEARCH INSTITUTE
Welcome to the webpage of the Accordia Research Institute
Accordia is a research institute in the University of London. It operates in association with the Institute of Archaeology, UCL and with the Institute of Classical Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London. It is dedicated to the promotion and co-ordination of research into all aspects of early Italy, from first settlement to the end of the pre-industrial period.
We organise lectures, research seminars, conferences and exhibitions on aspects of Italian archaeology and history, and publish a regular journal on the same theme; details of the 2023-2024 lecture series can be found here.
Accordia also has an extensive programme of research publications. We publish specialist volumes, seminars, conferences and excavation reports. Our policy is to encourage and support research into early Italy, especially by younger scholars, to get new work disseminated as rapidly as possible, and to improve access to recent and innovative research. We believe our books and our journal represent a valuable contribution to the development of the subject area. Accordia publishes its own Journal, the Accordia Research Papers.
We also run - or are associated with - a number of research and fieldwork projects based in Britain and in Italy.
Accordia operates on a voluntary, non-profit basis, supported by subscriptions and donations. Publications are self-financing. Everyone gives their services without payment.
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Recent Publications
Who do you think you are? Ethnicity in the Iron Age Mediterranean. 2022. Edited by Fabio Saccoccio and Elisa Vecchi
Neolithic Spaces (two volumes). 2020. Sue Hamilton and Ruth Whitehouse.
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Accordia Events 2023-2024
The full programme for this year's Accordia Lectures can be found here. This year we are continuing with in person lectures, held either at the Senate House or the Institute of Archaeology in Gordon Square. We are also pioneering a new seminar series for Early Career Researchers in conjunction with the University of Nottingham. These talks will be held over Zoom, more details of these can be found here.
Accordia Lecture
Tuesday, May 7, 17.30
Joint Lecture with the UCL Institute of Archaeology
Room 209, 31-34 Gordon Square, London WC1
A geoarchaeological approach to late prehistoric domestic contexts in northern Italy
Cristiano Nicosia, University of Padua
The ERC-funded GEODAP (Geoarchaeology of Daily Practices) project focuses on the study of domestic
structures as means to infer key social and environmental aspects of the Bronze Age. The project directly carries out archaeological excavations or collaborates with ongoing projects in Italy, the Balkans, and the Carpatho-Danubian plains. GEODAP integrates geoarchaeology, archaeobotany (pollen, phytolith, macro-remains, and charcoal studies), and organic geochemistry (biomarkers) with questions, samples, and information that arise from the excavation of domestic contexts. During the first two and a half years of the project, it appeared that this integration between field and laboratory, excavation and post-excavation, and between macroscale and microscale is absolutely key and demands appropriate methodological approaches to be implemented. In this talk, a series of examples of how different analytical techniques and different scales of observation were integrated with the process of ‘digging in the dirt’ in a series of Bronze Age sites and one Middle Neolithic site will be presented.
Accordia Early Career Talks
Tuesday, May 14, 17.30, via Zoom
Paper 1
Empty hillforts: challenging narratives on Samnite society beyond urban-centric views
Giacomo Fontana, University College London
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Paper 2
Households and settlement population in the Terramare world: a demographic approach based on the ratio between people and floor area
David Vicenzutto, University of Padua
