Peter van Dommelen (Brown University) – Symposium Part I (February 14)
Peter is an archaeologist studying cultural interactions and colonial connections in the Ancient Mediterranean, especially in the Phoenician and Punic worlds. His research concerns topics like migration, rural households, ancient agriculture and landscapes in the (west) Mediterranean in both ancient and more recent times; they also structure long-term fieldwork and ceramic studies on the island of Sardinia (Italy). He is Director of the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University (Providence, RI) and has held visiting professorships at the universities of Valencia (Spain), the Balearics (Spain) and Cagliari (Italy). Recent publications have appeared in the Journal of Roman Archaeology, Rivista di Studi Fenici and the Annual Review of Anthropology; they also include Rural Landscapes of the Punic World (2008, co-authored with Carlos Gómez Bellard) and The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean (2014, co-edited with A. Bernard Knapp). He also serves as co-editor of the Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, and has edited three thematic issues for World Archaeology, the last one of which is about to appear (‘Rural Archaeologies,’ World Archaeology 51.2, 2019).
Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros (Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats and University of Barcelona), Symposium Part I (February 14)
Miguel Ángel is an archaeologist with a major focus on Roman and Late Antique Archaeology in the Western Mediterranean, and in pottery studies including archaeometry. One of his main interests is to investigate the transformation of the Roman world in Mediterranean islands. He works intensively in the Balearics where he co-directs the excavations at the Roman and Late Antique city of Pollentia (Alcúdia, Mallorca), and the Early Christian complex of Son Peretó (Manacor, Mallorca). He is the director of the Archaeological and Archaeometric Research Group of the University of Barcelona (ERAAUB) (Spain). He has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Cagliari (Italy), Sassari (Italy) and Brown (USA). Recent publications have appeared in Archaeometry, Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences, Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry, Geoarchaeology, Journal of Applied Geophysics, or Archeologia Classica, among other. He has recently co-edited (with C. Mas Florit), Change and Resilience. The occupation of Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity (Joukowsky Institute Publication 9, Oxbow Books, Oxford, 2019). He serves at the editorial board of Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology, Pyrenae. Journal of Western Mediterranean Prehistory and Antiquity, and Cuadernos de Prehistoria y Arqueología de la Universidad de Granada. He is co-founder the international conference Late Roman Coarse Wares, Cooking Wares and Amphorae. Archaeology and Archaeometry (LRCW). He is co-editor of the series Roman and Late Antique Mediterranean Pottery (RLAMP) (Archaeopress, Oxford), and Limina/Limites: Archaeologies, histories, islands, and borders in the Mediterranean (365-1556) (Archaeopress, Oxford).
Tamar Hodos (University of Bristol), Symposium Part II (February 27)
Tamar is an authority on the archaeology of the Mediterranean during the first half of the first millennium BCE, in which she has a particular focus on colonization and social identities. She is unusual, however, in that her research spans the traditional disciplines of Near Eastern and Classical Archaeology, for she has not only over twenty years of field experience in Turkey, but she has also published extensively on the impact of Greeks and Phoenicians in the central Mediterranean and North Africa. Her theoretical approaches, notably with postcolonial and globalization theories, have opened new areas of consideration within these disciplines, which traditionally have emphasized the cultural master-narratives of the Greeks and Phoenicians. She is currently Reader in Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Bristol, UK. Her latest book, The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age, will be published in 2020 by Cambridge University Press. She has also written Local Responses to Colonisation in the Iron Age Mediterranean (2006; Routledge), co-edited Material Culture and Social Identities in the Ancient World (2010; Cambridge), and was the lead editor for The Routledge Handbook of Globalization and Archaeology (2017; Routledge). Tamar’s visit is sponsored by a generous grant from the CEW+ Frances and Sydney Lewis Visiting Leaders Fund.
Carolina López-Ruiz (The Ohio State University), Respondent for Symposium Part II (February 27)
Carolina’s work has two branches: the comparative study of Greek and Near Eastern literatures and mythologies (her PhD area), and cultural contact between Greeks, Phoenicians, and other groups generally, with a special interest in the Phoenicians and their presence in the Iberian Peninsula. With Michael Dietler she co-edited the collection of essays Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations (University of Chicago Press, 2009), while her first monograph focused on Greek and Near Easter creation narratives (When the Gods Were Born: Greek Cosmogonies and the Near East, Harvard University Press, 2010; translated into Turkish). In her edited volume Gods, Heroes, and Monsters: A Sourcebook of Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern Myths in Translation (Oxford 2018, 2nd ed.), tailored for undergraduate education, she challenged the traditional view of the “classics” by situating Greek and Roman mythology in its broader Mediterranean context. Her second monograph, with Spanish archaeologist Sebastian Celestino, is on Tartessos: Indigenous Peoples and Phoenician Colonists in the Iberian Peninsula (Oxford University Press, 2016; now revised and about to come out in Spanish). She has co-edited The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019), with Brian Doak. Her next book on Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean will offer a critical discussion on the role of the Phoenicians during the so-called “orientalizing” period across the Mediterranean.