MATERIAL CONNECTIONS: MATERIALITY, COLONIALISM AND MEDITERRANEAN IDENTITIES

Over the past 150 years, field archaeology in the Mediterranean has created a unique, rich and varied resource. Based on this resource, the research proposed involves primarily the widely published material record, the extensive collections in regional museums, and the landscapes in which relevant sites and monuments are embedded. This project will investigate in an interdisciplinary, comparative manner the interlinked issues of materiality, colonialism and identity throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. Explicit emphasis is placed on the materiality of both society and culture and it is recognised that human behaviour cannot be understood fully without taking into account the role of 'things' in shaping people's life worlds. In such ways we seek to breathe new life into current theoretical and methodological approaches in Mediterranean archaeology, especially into colonial and migration studies. The principal aim is to develop new cultural and historical understandings of how factors such as co-presence, connectivity and insularity impacted on the formation of identity and subjectivity.

Because aspects of these themes are already being examined by individual researchers in different disciplines and in various European countries, a series of workshops and seminars is proposed as the most appropriate and parsimonious way to bring together and promote research on the project themes. Thus the project comprises:
- a two-day workshop in Glasgow (2-3 June 2008);
- a session at the 14th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists (Malta, 16-21 September 2008);
- a series of public lectures and informal seminars in Glasgow (autumn-winter, 2008-9).
The informal workshop and international conference session will enable the project's core members to compare, develop and present their current research. The seminars and lectures provide a forum for informal discussion, and for public presentation of current work on the project's themes by invited, established academics from a range of disciplines and countries. These seminars and lectures will involve project members as well as staff and students from Glasgow University, while the lectures will be open to the wider public.

All project participants will explore how 'things' mediated the experience of Mediterranean peoples in the past, and how these relations were shaped and informed by long-term collective memories of movement, colonisation or localisation. The areas to be studied include different island and coastal regions throughout the Mediterranean, during several periods ranging from Bronze and Iron Age Crete, Cyprus and the Balearics, to the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Iberian Peninsula in Classical and Roman times. All aspects of the project are linked thematically and will investigate specific objects or material culture categories that played a critical role in facilitating contacts or creating distance between two or more social groups. Thus they offer insights into how Mediterranean identities formed, changed and endured.

Together, landscapes, seascapes and 'things-in-motion' provide the material basis and intellectual tools for understanding better how Mediterranean peoples literally constructed a new world. By confronting unexplored ideas and crossing traditional boundaries in a conceptually distinctive manner, all interrelated aspects of this project offer new insights into issues of materiality and identity in the ancient Mediterranean.

The project outcomes include academic publications (journal article, edited book) and a dedicated website intended (1) to disseminate the research of the project members and (2) to build a network of specialists within and beyond the UK (especially in the Mediterranean). A further application to the European Research Council is intended to extend the project into a long-term programme involving a number of postgraduate and postdoctoral researchers.