Conferences: ICAANE IX - round-up

This is a regular International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, held in Warsaw in 2011, due to be in Vienna next time, but this year in Basel, Switzerland.

After Registration at Universität Basel on afternoon of Sunday 8th June, we were off to a fast start the next day with plenary lectures followed by four and half days of several simultaneous lectures on various parts and periods of the ANE. Sometimes hard to get from one place to another in time.

As the name implies, ICAANE is mainly devoted to pre-Classical archaeology, though there were several interesting lectures on Petra and the Nabataeans. Also of interest was a (disturbing) 3-hour session on Syria. Don Boyer gave a very informative and superbly professional (as you would expect) talk on his research on the water supply of Roman Gerasa which got a good reception and useful questions and comments.

I would not normally have gone to ICAANE which seldom gives much attention to the Roman Near East. This year, however, Dr. Ueli Brunner (Department of Geography, University of Zurich) – who gave a lecture in UWA about 18 months ago on his work in Yemen, had organised a Workshop on Kites. So I gave a lecture on Kites in the Harret Khaybar of west-central Saudi Arabia. The plan is to publish all these Kites papers as a book – a quick and high-profile publication will stimulate new research.

As always, a good reason for attending is for those conversations and contacts that grease the academic research engine. People you seldom see are right there for days and there is the opportunity to talk at length.

The University and Half-Canton of Basel each laid on a very pleasant reception and Dr Brunner took the Kites group for dinner in a delightful restaurant-pub in the back streets of Kleinbasel.

The weather was HOT – c. 35 every day. But Basel is delightful – 200 years of peace and neutrality is obviously a Good Thing. A little sight-seeing took us all at times to the Rhine where a recreation was to get into the river stream with clothes in an inflated backpack and let the current drift you downstream.

The Boyers and Kennedys joined up one afternoon to take the (free) public transport 12 km east to visit the superb ruins of the Roman city of Augusta Raurica, just outside modern August. You may remember a lecture to the Roman Archaeology Group of Perth on this town by Martina Müller a few years ago. More on this site later.

-DLK

Another conference attendee's blog can be found here: http://ragwa.wordpress.com/2014/06/27/basel-switzerland-heat-wave-in-june/

Conference: 9th ICAANE Basel, Switzerland, June 9-13, 2014

The 9th biannual International Conference on the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East is coming up in June of this year. The Conference is being hosted by the University of Basel (Kollegiengebäude der Universität Basel)

You can find all the information you need on the conference website: http://9icaane.unibas.ch/

We will be presenting Kites in Saudi Arabia in the 1st session of the workshop Desert Kites - Archaeological Facts, Distribution and Function.
Abstract: Although it has long been known that Kites were to be found in Saudi Arabia, it is only very recently that the availability of high-resolution imagery on Google Earth and Bing Maps has enabled researchers to identify them far more widely and in greater numbers than previously believed. In particular, imagery for the areas around Khaybar and Al-Hiyat revealed over 200. Now the high-resolution imagery has been extended more widely and a fuller picture can be formed. The Kites are varied in size and shape but many are of a distinctive, angular form not found elsewhere in ‘Arabia’. With an increased data set, greater familiarity with the wide variety of other, probably contemporary, stone-built structures in the region, and with the geological and vegetational environment, there is an opportunity to offer a more detailed analysis and interpretation than previously done by Kennedy and Bishop.

You can download the full list of workshops complete with abstracts here: http://9icaane.unibas.ch/ICAANE2014workshopsprovisional.pdf

Publications: Settlement and Soldiers in the Roman Near East

Ashgate Publishing contacted us last year regarding publishing a compilation of David Kennedy's past papers in a 'Variorum' volume. The unifying theme of this collection is Settlement and Soldiers in the Roman Near East, and the final result is a compilation of thirteen papers originally published in different sources from 1980 through to 2006. The volume includes a Preface, Addenda and Index for the included papers, as well as all images from the original papers.

David Kennedy

Settlement and Soldiers in the Roman Near East

Variorum Collected Studies Series: CS 1032 

Ashgate Publishing

2013

ISBN: 9781409464365

http://www.ashgate.com/isbn/9781409464365
Hardback, 300 pages
66 black and white illustrations
244 x 169 mm format
Contents
Preface



From the Ashgate website:
The Roman Near East has been a source of fascination and exasperation - an immense area, a rich archaeological heritage as well as documents in several local languages, a region with a great depth of urbanisation and development … yet relatively neglected by modern researchers and difficult to work on and in. Local archaeologists are often under-funded and the Roman period viewed as an earlier phase of western colonialism.

Happily, the immense surge in archaeological and historical research on the Roman period everywhere has included the Roman Near East and there have been significant academic developments.

This collection of studies on the Roman Near East represents Professor Kennedy’s academic assessment of the region, which began with his doctoral thesis on the contribution of Syria to the Roman army. Although the thesis was never published, several articles owe their genesis to work done then or soon after and are included here (VI, VII, IX, XII). Initial visits to military sites in Syria and Jordan swiftly brought out the presence in many cases of associated civil settlements and - though often now gone, the traces of ancient field systems. Hence, the two prominent sub-themes in this collection are the Roman military and various aspects of society and settlement - settlement types, farming, logistical underpinning and communications.

Workshop - GIS and Near Eastern Archaeology

A Methodology for the Future? The role of GIS technologies within 21st century Near Eastern Archaeology

CBRL November 30^th to December 2^nd 2012 at the CBRL Institute in Amman, Jordan.

Congratulations to all the organisers of this intimate, perfectly formed workshop as it brought together a small but interested (and interesting) grouping.

An interesting group of workshop attendees - British Institute Director Carol Palmer (front far right); workshop organiser Jennie Bradbury of Durham University (front left of middle); and the author of this blog Bob Bewley (front centre) (Photograph: BI Amman Facebook page).

There were 22 people from wide range of places and backgrounds – a small group but a very useful event for two reasons. The first is the opportunity to share ideas, understand each other’s needs and work on ways of better and more useful collaboration.  For the APAAME project this will involve a closer working relationship between the MEGA-J (national online archaeological database for Jordan) and ourselves.

The second was a more general one of meeting and talking to people who one either wanted to talk to but never managed to find the time, or people one didn’t know and was glad to meet. The ‘regional’ nature of the archaeology was highlighted by the use of GIS – showing the longer terms trends when the masses of data are analysed to show the changing distribution patterns; be it in the prehistoric Roman or medieval periods.