Craft and Production in the European Iron Age
CONFERENCE with a regional focus on Britain, Central Europe and the Mediterranean
25th – 27th September, 2015. Magdalene College and the McDonald Institute, Cambridge
Arrival information
The conference will take place in Cripps Court, Magdalene College. The full address is: Cripps Court, Magdalene College, 1-3 Chesterton Road, Cambridge CB4 3AD.
On arrival, please go to the Porters Lodge in Cripps Court. This is the location of the registration desk, as well as the point of picking up your keys if you booked accommodation.
Call for Papers
Craft and production sustained many of the lives of the Iron Age. This conference seeks to bring together some of the leading scholars of craft and production within Iron Age Europe to understand this important socially embedded infrastructure of the first millennium BC.
An important strategy is to involve not only traditionally conceived studies of craft but also underlying resource procurement, management and use, and connecting social systems. The conference seeks to understand the diversity of crafts and agricultural production by bringing together specialists of both the Mediterranean and more temperate zones of Europe. Textile production will form one major subject, since it links agriculture to craft, mediated by social context. Iron production is a further crucial sector where the conference seeks to understand the rapid changes in our understanding of one major technological change with many consequences over the course of the first millennium BC. Natural resources, such as wood and water, are a sometimes forgotten essential for many crafts, and their availability determines production scale and organisation, and the conference will seek to redress this potential gap in our knowledge. In addition to these major subjects, the conference aims to encourage contributions on other crafts, including bronze and gold working, pottery, enamel and glass.
Another key intention will be to address the diversity and connectedness of economic systems and social arrangements between the Mediterranean and temperate Europe. By gathering key regional specialists, we wish to investigate how people and technologies moved across these areas in different ways and with different outcomes at the local scale.
We encourage contributions which investigate the relations between craft production and society, within their local environment. Papers with a focus on cross-regional connections and comparisons are particularly welcomed, notably from Britain, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. As in previous years, we warmly encourage the interaction of senior academics with early career scholars. We particularly welcome the continued engagement with scholars who have attended the previous four conferences in the series.
The main goals of the conference are:
- To facilitate dialogue between European scholars working on craft and production and disseminate the latest interpretative thinking;
- To take a comparative approach to craft and production;
- To understand the social context of production taking into account anthropological reasoning with themes such as the biography of material forms, entanglement and chaîne opératoire;
- To consider European Iron Age archaeology as a pre-Roman European archaeology overcoming the Mediterranean/non-Mediterranean divide;
- To look at the major transformations of craft and production, their social and environmental implications over the long first millennium BC;
Contributors are invited to present papers on craft and production by presenting both new data and innovative views on theoretical approaches. Suggested materials for craft and production include, but are not limited to:
- Natural resources needed for various crafts such as water, wood and fuel
- Agriculture
- Pottery
- Textiles
- Iron production and working
- Bronze and gold working
- Other important crafts including coral, leather, wood, enamel and glass
- Other important production including salt
Participants
The following are amongst those expected to give papers, act as discussants or give posters at the conference (alphabetical order by surname):
Valeria Acconcia (Rome), Sophia Adams (Bristol), Marta Alberti (Newcastle), Luca Alessandri (Groningen), Marco Amadei (Sassari), Laura Ambrosini (Rome), Silvia Amicone (London), Zosia Archibald (Liverpool), Marco Arizza (Rome), Barbara Armbruster (Toulouse), Peter Attema (Groningen), Justine Bayley (Harmondsworth), Sandor Berecki (Targu Mures), Claudio Bulla (Sassari), Letizia Ceccarelli (Cambridge), Helen Chittock (Southampton), Cathy Costin (Northridge, California), Alexandra Coucouzeli (Cambridge), Szabolcs Czifra (Budapest), Mary Davis (Cardiff), Maria Anna De Lucia (Rome), Bela Dimova (Cambridge), Cynthia Degiorgio (Valetta), Anna DePalmas (Sassari), Georgia Di Lorenzo (Naples), Ilaria Di Sabatino (Rome), Mariana Egri (Cluj-Napoca), Manuel Fernández-Götz (Edinburgh), Girolamo Fiorentino (Lecce), Ana Franjić (UCL), Federica Galiffa (Rome), Diana Gergova (Sofia), Melanie Giles (Manchester), Margarita Gleba (Cambridge), Karina Grömer (Vienna), Teresa Huntsman (Harvard), Erzsebet Jerem (Budapest), Jody Joy (Cambridge), Lise Bender Jørgensen (Trondheim), Maria Kostoglou (Manchester), Sasa Kovacevic (Zagreb), Kerstin Kowarik (Vienna), Katherine Kreindler (Stanford), Michal Krueger (Poznan), Meredith Laing (Leicester), Romina Laurito (Copenhagen/Rome), Kathryn Lomas (Durham and London), Vincent Megaw (Adelaide), Christian Metta (Milano), Claudio Negrini (Vienna), Nuccia Negroni Catacchio (Milano), Marta Mazzoli (Mainz), Eoin O'Donoghue (Galway), Antony Pace (Valletta), Elisa Perego (London), Phil Perkins (Open University), Alessandra Piergrossi (Rome), Hrvoje Potrebica (Zagreb), Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Vienna), Hans Reschreiter (Vienna), Barbara Roggio (Rome), Marco Romeo (Newcastle), Ilenia Rossetti (Milan), Daniela Rossi (Rome), Fabio Rossi (Valentano), Aurel Rustoiu (Cluj-Napoca) Elena Sánchez (Granada), José Sastre Blanco (Baixo Sabor-ACE), Rafael Scopacasa (Exeter/Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil), Niall Sharples (Cardiff), Gerd Stegmaier (Tubingen), Helen Stocks-Morgan (Oxford), Simon Stoddart (Cambridge), Jacopo Tabolli (Dublin), Asja Tonc (Zagreb), Angela Trentacoste (Sheffield), Leo Webley (Bristol), Caroline Wells (Sussex), Peter Wells (Minnesota), Rachel Wilkinson (Leicester).
Timetable
- Paper Abstract Deadline: 1 May 2015 (Closed)
- Posters - Deadline 1 July 2015 (Closed)
- Please download the poster template: here
- Programme
- Abstracts
- Student bursaries. You are asked to apply directly and briefly to Simon Stoddart giving your age, status, need and intellectual interests. (Closed)
- Publication details will be here.
Location and travel information
The Conference will take place in Cripps Building at Magdalene College. The entrance is by foot or bicycle from Chesterton Lane. You will be asked to check in just inside this entrance to the left opposite the Porters Lodge. This is also the location of accommodation within Magdalene.
If you are arriving past midnight, please go to the Porters Lodge in the main body of the College in Magdalene Street, where there is a 24 hour Porters Lodge (indicated by the black bowler hat on the map). Messages will be relayed to the conference organisers during the conference on 01223 332100 from this Porters Lodge.
A wine reception will be held on the Friday evening at 6.00 pm.
The (pre-booked) conference dinner at 7.30 on Saturday evening will be in the main body of the college here.
