The Archaeology of Seasonality, 17. - 18.10.2019, Kopenhagen

Grunddaten zu diesem Projekt

Beschreibung

Seasonality is a crucial topic of study when addressing the ways in which past societies organised themselves over the year. However, seasonality remains a neglected aspect of human-nature relationships. Many activities would in past societies only have taken place at certain times of the year, mainly reflecting changing agricultural patterns and the activities undertaken when fields could not be cultivated and animals could not graze. It is assumed that indoor activities to a larger degree would have taken place in the winter than in the summer, for example, and that certain activities might even have been kept for the winter periods, such as indoor repair of houses and textile production and the like. Studying seasonality offers the opportunity to understand the temporal dimension of human activities over the year, and it opens up new perspectives on space and spatial practices in the ancient world. Studies of seasonality through archaeological and historical evidence are rarely undertaken. Firstly because archaeological evidence often does not provide possibilities for studying such details, since contexts often have been disturbed over time and seasonality cannot be studied in disturbed contexts. However, often undisturbed contexts are not approached with seasonality in mind. Such undisturbed contexts, which are often products of natural disasters such as earthquakes or landslides or, on the other hand, of man-spurred catastrophes such as wars and fires and therefore sudden abandonment, are usually analysed in order to understand the overall contexts and situations, but not the time of year at which these might have taken place. The contexts are usually only taken as a terminus post quem or ad quem, which they present to the archaeologist or historian, but not in an absolute “high-definition” perspective, which they, however, also offer, namely the possibility to get closer to the exact time of year in which the event took place. Although rare, some archaeological situations present us with evidence that allows us insight into the exact day and year of an event. This is the case at Jerash in Jordan where the earthquake of 18th January 749 CE, which shook parts of the Southern Levant, also left Jerash devastated, and some parts were never touched again after the earthquake. Since 2011, the Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project has worked in the Northwest Quarter of Jerash, which has yielded evidence of domestic constructions that were spoiled on 18th January in the morning and never revisited until they were excavated during campaigns in 2014, 2015 and 2016. These excavations and their results have given us the impulse to host this conference and together with colleagues explore in more detail the full potential of how to study seasonality in archaeological evidence through a methodological framework which is yet to be fully developed. We therefore invite a set of scholars who in one way or the other have concerned themselves with issues of seasonality to present papers, which are intended for publication in a collective volume on the Archaeology of Seasonality. The aim of the conference is to lay open and discuss evidence that give indications for seasonality and the full range of activities, which may be traced in such evidence. The intention is to discuss the potential and challenges that such evidence presents us with and how we may optimise both what we can get out of such evidence and the methods that we use to investigate it. We invite papers that, on the one hand, work from evidence where the date and time of year is set already through the archaeological context, like the ones in Jerash, but we are also interested in learning about archaeological situations in which aspects of seasonality have only come to the forefront through the archaeological work undertaken. Papers of 8,000-10,000 words will be pre-circulated three weeks in advance of the conference in order to allow ample time at the conference for discussion of the archaeological evidence and methods applied. Each presenter will give a summary of the paper in 15 minutes, and thereafter 30 minutes are dedicated to discussion of the paper. The contributions will be published in the peer-reviewed series “Studies in Classical Archaeology” edited by Achim Lichtenberger and Rubina Raja. The conference will take place on 17th and 18th October 2019, and speakers are obliged to stay for the duration of the conference, since the discussion forum is a crucial part of the conference. We will cover economy travel (reimbursed after the event) as well as three nights of accommodation (booked and paid by us in advance). Furthermore, we will cater for speakers during the conference, and we will host a conference dinner on the evening of 17th October.