The Past Has a Future!

Description

Scales of fragmentation is an unique interdisciplinary project developed in collaboration between the Freie Universität Berlin, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, and the University of Warsaw, co-founded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Narodowe Centrum Nauki. It attempts at understanding the changes in human diet, nutrition, health and subsistence strategies during the transition from Roman Antiquity into the early Middle Ages. It takes as its focus the Eastern Mediterranean (the core lands of the Later Roman Empire) in the period between ca. 300-800 CE. Our main hypothesis – which we will test using the state-of-the-art methods of archaeological science – is that as the Late Roman world system fragmented in the course of Late Antiquity, subsistence strategies were becoming increasingly based on local environmental resources, with important consequences for human nutrition. Diets were becoming more diverse, while at the same time sites with strong connection to the remnant Roman state of the early Middle Ages (Byzantium) maintained at least some elements of their Late Roman subsistence strategies.

International collaboration is crucial to the success of this project. We will work not only across national, but also disciplinary borders. Building on mutual strengths, together we have a chance of making a major contribution to the study of Antiquity and the Middle Ages, demonstrating the potential of combined humanistic-scientific approaches. The session organised as a part of the The Past Has a Future! conference will be a good opportunity to gather the collaborators of the project and to discuss the potential of specific regional sources that may be used in developing the synthetic view of the economic and social processes that were triggered by the fall of the Roman Empire. We welcome contributions that cover any kind of evidence (fieldwork archaeology, bioarchaeology, history, natural sciences) related to the human populations living in the Eastern Mediterranean, Southern and South-Eastern Europe and the Near East between 300–800 CE.

Period	22 Mar 2021
Event type	Conference
Location	Warsaw, PolandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International