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
Registration is still open. Meal and accommodation bookings are closed.
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 (see map).
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.
If you are arriving after midnight, go to the main College entrance on Magdalene Street (near the Bridge). See below for travel information.
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
- Registration is still open.
- Meal and accommodation bookings are closed.
- 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.
Here is some practical information on transport and travel:
By Train
Cambridge has excellent, fast and reliable train connections to London Kings Cross & London Liverpool Street. There are also excellent connections from Scotland & the North via Peterborough, and regional services from Birmingham & the Midlands, East Anglia & the Northwest. See the National Rail website for train times and booking.
The Train station is located about 2 km south of the city centre, and a 30 minute walk from Magdalene College, the conference venue. The local bus services from Cambridge railway station into the city centre are Citi 1, Citi 3 or Citi 7. Taxis are also available at the train station.
By Coach (long distance bus)
National Express operates coach services to Cambridge from major towns & cities throughout the U.K. The X5 cross county Stagecoach service links Oxford to Cambridge. The bus stop is located in central Cambridge, a 20 minute walk to Magdalene College.
Airport transfer
Stansted is the nearest airport to Cambridge. Train service to Cambridge takes about 30 minutes. National Express Coach (long distance bus) services take about 50 minutes.
Luton is the next nearest airport: National Express Coach (long distance bus) services take about 1h30-2 hours from Luton to central Cambridge.
Heathrow: National Express coaches take 3 hours from Heathrow to Cambridge. Another method of going from Heathrow to Cambridge is to take the London Underground direct line to Kings Cross (about 1 hour), and then the train from Kings Cross to Cambridge (trains run at quarter past and quarter to every half hour on weekdays; fastest services take 45 minutes).
Gatwick: National Express coaches take 5 hours from Gatwick to Cambridge. An alternative route is to take the Gatwick Express (or other train) into London, then the Underground to Kings Cross for the train to Cambridge.
By Car
Cambridge is about 60 miles from London on the M11 motorway. From the north, the A1 and M1 link to the A14 to Cambridge, and from the east and west, the A14 again takes you to Cambridge.
Car parking in Cambridge is very limited, however, the excellent Madingley Road Park and Ride service is 5 minutes away from the conference venue (Magdalene College) by bus, and runs past the Porters' Lodge. For more information go to Cambridge Park & Ride.
Contact details
Please send queries to craftandproduction [at] gmail.com.
Further details from the organising committee: Bela Dimova, Jody Joy, Margarita Gleba and Simon Stoddart. Please send expressions of interests to Simon Stoddart (ss16 [at] cam.ac.uk).
The organisers are grateful for support from the McDonald Institute, the Classics Faculty, Division of Archaeology, Cambridge, the ACE foundation, the Thriplow Trust and the European Research Council (for the textiles component: "Production and Consumption of Textiles in the Mediterranean from 1000 to 500 BC").
