Islands in Dialogue. A report on the three-day International Postgraduate Conference in the Prehistory and Protohistory of the Mediterranean Islands

A blog post by Mari Yamasaki.


Between November 14 and 16, the Department of Humanities of the University of Turin, in collaboration with the University of Manchester hosted the first edition of “Islands in Dialogue – International Postgraduate Conference in the Prehistory and Protohistory of Mediterranean Islands.” The beautiful city of Turin (fig. 1) and the stunning Palazzo del Rettorato (fig. 2) provided the backdrop for three days of talks – or better, of dialogues – over current issues concerning the archaeology of islands. 
 
Fig. 1: Top: view of Turin; Bottom: Palazzo Madama;
Right: Mole Antonelliana, Torino. (Photos: M. Yamasaki)

Fig. 2: Universitá degli Studi di Torino, Palazzo del Rettorato (Photo: M. Yamasaki)

Before getting to the themes of the conference, I would like to say a few words about its unorthodox organization and the emphasis that the organizers put on communication. Instead of sessions, the conference was divided into nine thematic dialogues during which three to four speakers would present their papers one after the other, without the customary individual Q&A. An “open dialogue”, during which the main themes highlighted by each speaker would be addressed, would close each session. This proved especially effective to stimulate a lively discussion with the audience and between the speakers themselves, who had to confront each other over different approaches to common themes.

Keynote speaker of the event was Helen Dawson (TOPOI, Freie Universität Berlin), with the lecture titled “Island ‘netscapes’: navigating issues of insularity.” With her talk, Helen Dawson effectively introduced some of the main themes the conference would be tackling in the following days especially in regard to analytical approaches, the applicability of certain geographical categories, and the necessity for clarity of definitions in the study of islands. Concerning a necessity for new approaches, H. Dawson advocates the shift from a categorical to a relational analysis as proposed by John Terrel: following the principle that “things exist because they are connected,” this approach redirects the attention from the individual elements in the network (islands) to the network itself.

Networks were also addressed by Panos Tzovaras (University of Southampton) through the use of GIS to record and highlight the mutual relationship between all evidences of long-distance connectivity and exchange. Another take on the complexity of seascapes was expressed by Zoran Čučović (Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté) with a case study on protohistoric Dalmatian island fortresses. The unique location of these monumental constructions prompted him to try an experiential approach to the study of landscape which imply an attention for the trajectories through time and space, moving the focus to the diverse storylines that overlap onto a given landscape.

Perception and an emic definition of insularity were the object of an interesting debate – or dialogue, as intended by the organisers of the conference. Frerich Schön (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen) illustrated how the application of an emic approach can highlight new ways of reading regional interactions in the Iron Age Sicilian Channel. Christopher Nuttal (University of Uppsala), addressing phenomenology and material engagement theory, showed how our contemporary geographical categories – such as that of islands – may lead to a misinterpretation of the data, bringing some case study of non-maritime communities from the pre- and protohistoric Aegean islands. On the same note, my own paper “Concepts of insularity and maritime identities” proposed Bronze Age Cyprus as an almost paradoxical case for non-insularity. The study brought together evidence for consumption, symbolization and connectivity to evaluate the relationship between Cypriot cultures with the sea and the mainland. At the beginning of my talk, I explicated my definitions of maritimity and insularity: as already mentioned by H. Dawson, despite their frequent use within the scholarship, a univocal understanding of these terms is still missing.

In addition to the more theoretical/methodological papers, several sessions addressed issues such as monumentality, pottery production and dispersion, and the application of archaeobotanical, isotope and radiocarbon analysis to the understanding of cultural processes with case studies from across the entire Mediterranean ranging from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age.

To conclude, “Islandia” proved to be an excellent ground to bring together a number of young researchers from a variety of backgrounds, under their common interest for island archaeology. The fruitful dialogues highlighted the necessity for such encounters, in order to progress in the research methodology and further elaborate on the consensus over key definitions.

The organisers. From left to right: G. Muti, G. Albertazzi, Prof. L. Bombardieri, A. Saggio
(Photo: M. Yamasaki)




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