ICS Archaeology Seminar: Small and large-scale perspectives on Mediterranean food security

University of London, Institute of Classical Studies  

Archaeology Seminar, January-April 2023  

Wednesday afternoons, 5pm  

Co-convenors: Corinna Riva (UCL Institute of Archaeology), Ignasi Grau Mira (Universidad de Alicante)

Connecting scales from history to archaeology: Global Archaeology and Microhistorical Analysis

 The impact of the global turn, facilitated by so-called Big-Data analytical methods, in the social and historical sciences, cannot be overstated: this has re-invigorated multi-scalar approaches in archaeology and history, and debates on how to combine a global perspective with those approaches. Yet, the latter is proving challenging for archaeologists and historians alike, although early modern and modern historians have recently proposed to re-introduce micro-historical analysis to meet this challenge. Our recent claim (Riva & Grau Mira 2022) is that archaeologists have not yet done enough to resolve methodological problems that come with global perspectives across spatial and temporal multiple scales; uses of globalisation theory have not helped either, and one of the consequences of this has been a marginalisation of the non-classical Mediterranean in global archaeology. Ranging between Middle Eastern prehistory and Medieval European history, the invited speakers of this series have been asked to reflect on this challenge in their own respective fields and propose, through their own research, how to tackle it for a truly multi-scalar global archaeology.  

Riva C. & I. Grau Mira 2022 Global archaeology and microhistorical analysis. Connecting scales in the 1st-milennium B.C. Mediterranean, Archaeological Dialogues 29, 1-14. doi:10.1017/S1380203822000101  

Programme

• 25 January: Artur Ribeiro IN PERSON (in the Senate Room). Microhistory and the politics of small-scale archaeology  
• 1 February: Oystein LaBianca IN PERSON (in Room G35). Shaping Global History Narratives of the Southern Levant: Lessons Learned from Tall Hisban and the Madaba Plains region in Jordan  
• 22 February: Carme Belarte REMOTELY. Global archaeology and the peripheral Mediterranean civilisations: the examples of Iberians and Numidians
• 8 March: Juan Antonio Quirós REMOTELY. Medieval local societies in a multiscale dimension
• 29 March: Andrew Bevan REMOTELY. Small and large-scale perspectives on Mediterranean food security
• 5 April: Eva Mol IN PERSON (in Room G35). Pompeii, a micro-history - please note this event has been rescheduled from 1 March
• 3 May: Judit Majorossi IN PERSON (in Room G35). The Challenges of Macro- and Micro-Historical Approach in Late Medieval Urban Studies of East-Central Europe - please note this event has been rescheduled from 22 March

Further details

• ICS Events