Trans-Aegean migration, materiality and memory

Cambridge - 20-23 April 2023

The Stockholm ‘Bridging the Hellespont’ meeting adopted a broad chronological approach, which will be continued in the Cambridge workshop. In Stockholm, archaeologists, pre-historians and classicists explored examples of the fluidity characterising ‘East’ and ‘West’ relations, while papers on modern engagement with the region revealed a sclerosis of categories. The very helpful concept of ‘situational geography’ was expounded by Charlotta Forss, our one early modern historian. We emerged with a sense that we needed to know more about the period between ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ and, in particular, the early modern shift toward geographical conceptualisations engineered by outsiders to the Aegean region. Also, the migration of not only peoples but also material – whether raw or crafted – was a recurrent theme in the papers and discussion that linked our different disciplinary specialisations within the geographical frame.

This is the background to our Cambridge workshop title Trans-Aegean migration, materiality and memory, which we hope will continue the momentum of examining geographical and cultural betweenness, particularly through materiality, mobility and the multiple, often conflicting, classifications and constructions of the Aegean past. Like the other workshops, it is exploratory and we cast the net widely in order to bring together people who would not normally find themselves in the same scholarly discussions. This workshop focuses on the ways in which the movement of people and objects has created different structures of belonging and attachments, and the ways in which memories (however reworked, distorted, appropriated) of past voyages in and across the Greater Aegean have been used to create and explore new identities and articulate diverse heritages.