This project obtained a one-year extension of the funding initially granted for 2012-2014.
Presentation
The project “Beyond the Polis” already benefited from the support of the Wiener-Anspach Foundation for a two-year research program that started in October 2012. During this first program, the project focused on communal rites and feasting activities known from a selected number of geographical areas and sites in Mainland and Aegean Greece in order to understand the importance of collective practices and to define the social status of the groups who performed them. The results of the research are to be published in a collective volume in the peer-reviewed series Kernos.
The one-year extension granted to the project by the Foundation (2014-2015) will allow us to expand the study to other geographical areas. Sites both from the core (Cyclades and Thessaly) and the fringe (Northern Aegean and Western colonial Greece) of the Greek world will be considered in order to complete our conclusions and answer to important questions, especially related with mixed cultural contexts where collective rituals are often used to build a new multi-cultural identity or to strengthen the power and territory claim of distinctive social groups (Greek colonists and indigenous population). It will further take into account new types of evidence such as the organization of sacrifices or the use of distinctive commodities (through archaeobotanical remains) in ceremonial eating and drinking.
The program will continue to provide the arena of collaboration of the teams (ULB & Oxford) in all levels. It will benefit from the joined contribution of a wider network of scholars from ULB, Oxford and other Institutions, and the expertise of past and current Wiener-Anspach Fellows who already work on the subject. Workshops, seminars, fieldwork and the joined organization of a symposium are part of the project.
Promoters
Irene Lemos, Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine Studies, University of Oxford
Athéna Tsingarida, CReA-Patrimoine, ULB