Building Communities: House, Settlement and Society in the Aegean and Beyond
Starts:
17 April 2001
Ends:
21 April 2001
The conference explored a range of approaches to the built environment of the ancient Mediterranean world, with two main aims: first, to relate archaeological evidence to the wider historical context, and second, to bridge the conventional divide between prehistoric and Classical archaeology.The papers, by an array of international scholars, ranged in date from the Neolithic period to Late Antiquity, and geographically far beyond the Aegean, from Italy to North Africa, Egypt and the Black Sea. The conference proceedings were published by the British School at Athens in 2007, in the series BSA Studies.
The principal themes included:
- the theory and methodology of interpreting and analysing built space
- the relationship of the built environment to social and political structures
- the development of civic and religious space
- the identification of households in the archaeological record
- the formation and interpretation of domestic assemblages
- changing conceptions of public and private
- problems in the identification of functional areas within the house
- the archaeology of the domestic economy
- space and gender
- the function and significance of decoration in houses and palaces
- the uses of ethnoarchaeology and virtual reality for understanding architectural remains
- the effects of acculturation in the domestic sphere
- the problems of reconciling literary and archaeological evidence
The conference was part of the British Academy/AHRB-funded project Strategies, Structures and Ideologies of the Built Environment.
Conference organisers
Dr Christina Hatzimichael
Other information
Open To: Public
Sponsors
Sponsored by: British School at Athens.
Additional sponsorship: British Academy, Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies