Mediterranean Urbanisation

15–16 November 2001

The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

About the Conference

Both ancient historians and an archaeologists have become much more aware in the past few years of the extent of mobility in the early Iron Age Mediterranean, and ancient historians have been attempting fresh analysis of the nature and role of trade. This has cast Greek and Phoenician activity and settlement in the central and western Mediterranean into a quite new light. At the same time new investigations and re-evaluations of settlement in the Levant have begun to raise new possibilities about the relationship between those settlements and Greek and Phoenician settlements further west.

While urbanisation is an historical phenomenon of the utmost importance, much remains extremely unclear about the nature of early towns. Different scholars use the term 'urbanisation' to mean very different things, and, by bringing together scholars with a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and regional specialisms, this meeting will make it possible to bring the question of the definition of 'urbanisation' into the open, to air the question of the extent to which it is possible to talk of a distinctly urban cultural life, and to encourage a cross-cultural and cross-regional perspective on this central economic and political development.

The meeting will bring together archaeologists and ancient historians to examine a period for which both written and material evidence is important. It will also bring together groups of archaeologists who for a variety of historical and institutional reasons rarely exchange ideas with one another - specialists in the Aegean world, in the archaeology of Italy, and in the archaeology of Iberia.

Conference programme