Mobility, Creativity, and Social Change in the Ancient Aegean
Friday, March 25th, 20223:00pm -4:30pm — Pacific Time (PT)Location: Place of Many Trees (formerly Liu Multipurpose Room), Liu Institute for Global Issues, University of British Columbia, 6476 NW Marine Drive, V6T 1Z2. For directions and parking, see here.Free & open to the public. To register, fill out the RSVP form below.
This event is co-sponsored by Centre for Migration Studies’ Mobilities Group and UBC Department of Central, Near Eastern and Religious Studies.
[Abstract]
Was human mobility in the ancient world a cause of social change? Certainly, some of the most tumultuous changes in the ancient Aegean have been attributed to large-scale, structured population movements (think of the Mycenaean ‘conquest’ of Crete, or the Minoan colonisation of the Aegean). However, current trends in archaeological scholarship take us away from such macro-scale interpretations towards the micro-scale. But with this shift have we lost track of some of the causal links between mobility and social change? Here I argue for an approach to mobility and social change that navigates between these two scales, between structure and agency; it is a meso-scale approach that focusses on communities of practice and the degree to which they are mobile at different scales. If we look at particular practices of production and consumption—from the sanctuary to the archive, and the workshop to the feast—we recognise their physical, conceptual, and spatial localization, and may even gain some understanding of their infrastructural and institutional settings. With creativity fundamental to many of these practices as they unfold and develop locally, can we also turn a creativity lens on the mobility (or immobility) of such practices? Here I use this framework to address the relative mobility of communities of practice across the Bronze Age Aegean.
[Bio]
Dr. Carl Knappett specializes in the Aegean Bronze Age, and Minoan Crete in particular. His main focus currently is the east Cretan site of Palaikastro, where he directs a new excavation project. He continue his research on pottery from a number of other Aegean sites, such as Knossos, Malia, Myrtos Pyrgos, Akrotiri, and Miletus. This multi-sited approach has led him into various kinds of network analysis for investigating regional interactions. His work on pottery relates to an interest in material culture generally, and the methodological and theoretical challenges involved in its study.
