Outline

 The recently initiated Semper Ardens Advanced Grant project entitled Locally Crafted Empires (Lo-CiS) headed by Rubina Raja situates its point of departure in the region of the ancient world that pro-vides undoubtedly the richest material for this purpose: the portrait cultures of Western Asia (defined here as the region from Anatolia to Egypt and the Arabian Peninsula, and from the river Tigris to the Mediterra-nean Sea) and will survey and chart those portrait cultures across six hundred years, from 100 BCE to 500 CE. Within the project research is undertaken on a range of aspects relating to locally produced representations of individuals in all materials (stone, mosaics, paintings, wood). 

The project’s second international conference will focus on materials, materiality and knowledge in the East and will do so to discuss how science, innovation and knowledge transfer changed over time and what implication changes and continuities had on local production practices. We ask a set of wide-rang-ing questions and ask invited speakers to focus their presentations on the outline below. 

How did working people in the eastern Roman empire find wage labour? What did they need to know to control its value? When did coercive labour find them? What might archaeological evidence add to our knowledge about such questions where ancient historical sources are often vague or silent? Recent years have witnessed leaps in our knowledge of ancient technologies, scientific knowledge, botanical techniques, and industrial practices. So have our knowledge of various forms of labour organization, 

including the iterant, the unfree, or the conscripted. Within their matrices we can locate in generality the choices and the options of labourers. But what can we say about these people specifically? What can we say about their relationship with technology, environment, and the structuring of elite, local, re-gional and state organization? What can we say about the communities they formed, the structures of peer support and knowledge that they crafted, or the resources at their disposal? What can we say about the impact of gender, family structure, life paths, and occupational practice on all of these? 

With the questions posed above in mind, this conference hosted within the framework of the Locally Crafted Empires Semper Ardens Advanced Grant Project aims to assemble scholars of classical archaeology, ancient history, epigraphy and philology with expertise in labour, technology, science, and environment in the late Hellenistic East, the eastern Roman empire, and adjacent regions and to bring their expertise to bear on the choices and options of labourers and workers. To this end, we invite in-quiries into the impact of technologies on labour and its organization, the relationship between labour and environment, and workers’ responses to coercion or predatory behavior. We also seek a range of approaches, methods, and evidence that span from the textual, material, and visual to the botanical, zo-ological, and genetic. Above all, we also hope to define and foreground the experiences and work of people from various walks of life and answer questions about the relationship between materials, mate-riality and knowledge and how that relationship was negotiated and lived by people. 

We will organize sections around the following topics and themes: 

-Sites, environments, and determining factors 

-Knowledge transfer and its disruption 

-Science, technology, and labour organization 

-Time and seasonality 

-Movement and migrancy 

-Social resources, compensation, and agency 

-Structural inequality and deterrence to social mobility 

-Unfreedom, conscription, and vulnerability 

Programme 

TBA

Speakers

Caspar Meyer (Bard)

Eleni Hasaki (University of Arizona)

Elizabeth Murphy (Florida State University) 

Francesca Bologna (University of Edinburgh)

Francesca Lam-March (King’s College London)

Francois Queyrel (Ecole pratique des Hautes Etudes)

Giovanni Colzani (Aarhus Universitet/LoCiS)

Giulia Vanucci (Aarhus Universitet/LoCiS)

Ines Ferjan (Aarhus Universitet/LoCiS)

Julia Steding (Aarhus Universitet/LoCiS)

Ken Lapatin (Getty Museum) 

Nathanael Andrade (Binghamton University)

Olympia Bobou (Aarhus Universitet/LoCiS)

Rubina Raja (Aarhus Universitet/LoCiS)

Will Wootton (King’s College London)

Practical information for speakers

Dinner and Diet

A speakers’ dinner will be held 17 September, and we will of course cater for you during the conference. 

If you have any dietary restrictions (incl. allergies), please let Julia Steding (j.steding@cas.au.dk) know no later than 1 September, so that the restaurant/caterers can be notified.

Travel

NOTE: As soon as you have booked your flight, please forward your itinerary to Julia Steding (j.steding@cas.au.dk), so that the hotel booking can be finalised.

Accommodation

Scandic Weber

Vesterbrogade 11B

1620 København