Conference: The Political Logic of Mediterranean Landscapes: Insights from NEH-sponsored Archaeological Research in Southern Calabria

June 28 - 30, 2018

This international conference emerges from twenty years of research by the Bova Marina Archaeological Project in southern Calabria, and specifically from our current Collaborative NEH Grant (co-PIs Chesson, Robb). We seek an arena for scholars from Europe and North America working in the Mediterranean to compare BMAPs research with their own research, to foster multi-disciplinary dialogue, and collectively to construct holistic and diachronic explanations of how people have inhabited Mediterranean landscapes throughout 8000 years of settlement. This conference will include scholars from archaeology, ethnography, history, economics, and geography to explore these two questions: (1) how have humans defined and inhabited a social landscape since establishing the first farming communities around 6000 BCE until now?
 and (2) what is the logic underlying this changing use? How are human landscapes generated not only by geography, ecological conditions and macro-politics (as theorists have argued) but also local, bottom-up forms of practical political logic?