Previous courses

2024

The Viking Phenomenon

This 5-ECTS course for PhD Fellows aims to explore the ‘Viking phenomenon’ in every sense of the term. The primary (but non-exclusive) focus will be on the start of the so-called Viking Age: why and how did it begin, why then, and are we justified in making such a division of the distant past?

Time and place: Nov. 11, 2024 9:00 AM – Nov. 15, 2024 1:00 PM, Swedish Institute at Athens

In conjunction with the research programme of the same name, this course aims to explore the ‘Viking phenomenon’ in every sense of the term. The primary (but non-exclusive) focus will be on the start of the so-called Viking Age: why and how did it begin, why then, and are we justified in making such a division of the distant past? A deep time perspective is encouraged, spanning the whole of the late Iron Age and also the breadth of what would become the Viking diaspora. We examine ideologies and world-views, ritual and mortuary behaviour, and also focus on the many facets of ‘Viking economics’, essentially the social underpinnings of ‘Viking-ness’ that include demographics, infrastructure, martial organisation, systems of enslavement, and more. Environmental issues, and the human impact on natural resources, are also relevant. Contributions making a close engagement with material culture are especially encouraged, but in general we do not wish to place restrictions on how the PhD students approach these issues in their research. A second theme of the course, and the project, relates to matters of reception and legacy, the complex entanglements of how the people of the Viking Age are viewed today by their many and varied publics, and not least how the academic community can or should relate to them. Although the course is obviously focusing on the Scandinavian late Iron Age, its themes are also relevant to researchers exploring issues of historiography and the construction of chronological markers in the study of the past, as well as deconstructions of societal change.

Background

Bildet kan inneholde: frisyre, font, plakat, kunst, illustrasjon.
In 2015, the Swedish Research Council awarded a 50m SEK grant within their Distinguished Professor programme to fund a major research project on the theme of The Viking Phenomenon. Based at Uppsala University and directed by Neil Price, together with the two co-organisers of this course, the project commenced in 2016 and will run until the end of 2025. Its primary objective is to explore the origins of what is generally known as the Viking Age, c.750-1050 CE, with a long time-depth into the preceding centuries and a comparative perspective. At the same time, the project name has a different sense, in acknowledging and deconstructing the complex legacies of the ‘Vikings’ today. Over the eight years of the project’s operations, several dozen scholars have joined us on a rolling basis for individual research endeavours, international workshops, lectures and seminars.

In June 2023, the same team was awarded a further 30m SEK from the Swedish Research Council as part of their investment in Centres of Excellence. Beginning in 2024, the Uppsala Research Centre for the World in the Viking Age (WiVA, pronounced ‘weaver’) will commence operations. The WiVA Centre will host new projects; appoint twenty International Visiting Researchers; advertise four two- and three-year early career researcher positions; run seminar series and workshops; and launch a new interdisciplinary MA programme in Viking Studies, alongside generally consolidating the university’s provision of education on the Scandinavian late Iron Age. As with the Viking Phenomenon, this will be combined with public outreach programmes. In the final two years of the Viking Phenomenon project, now unexpectedly but fortunately combined with the larger umbrella of the WiVA Centre, it makes perfect sense for us to offer a DialPast course on the project themes. As well as further integrating our work with the younger generation of upcoming scholars, we also invite them to challenge, debate, and expand upon it, taking Viking studies in new directions.

Course Work

The course will comprise both seminars and lectures. Prior to the course, each PhD Fellow will prepare a paper (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, spacing 1.5) addressing their research project in relation to the course theme and reading lists. All the papers will be pre-circulated within the group.

During the course, each paper will be allotted approximately 45 minutes, beginning with a 15-minute summary and presentation by the paper author. Another PhD Fellow, assigned beforehand, will serve as a discussant and provide comments for roughly 10 minutes. Following this, the assigned discussant will facilitate and chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes.

The participating lecturers will each deliver a keynote lecture during the course and also actively engage in discussions of the PhD Fellow's submitted papers. The PhD participants are expected to read the literature assigned to each keynote lecture, approximately 1000 pages in total. The seminar days will be thoughtfully structured to provide sufficient time for stimulating debates, networking opportunities, and a field trip to a destination pertinent to the course topic.

Course Organizers

Professor Neil Price, Dept. of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala University
Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, Dept. of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala University
Dr John Ljungkvist, Dept. of Archaeology & Ancient History, Uppsala University

Lecturers

Professor Neil Price (Uppsala University)
Dr Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson (Uppsala University)
Dr John Ljungkvist (Uppsala University)
Dr Sophie Bønding (Stockholm University)
Dr Peter Pentz (National Museum of Denmark)
Professor Anna Wessman (University of Bergen)

Deadlines

Registration deadline: 1st August 2024

Paper submission deadline: 4th October 2024

Credits

5 ECTS

Location, Travel, and Costs

This course is funded by the research project The Viking Phenomenon and organized by Dialogues with the Past (DIALPAST). The Viking Phenomenon and DIALPAST will finance and arrange accommodation, a welcome dinner, and supply lunch during the course week for all participating PhD candidates who are part of the Dialogues with the Past Network. Two and two PhD students will be accommodated in twin rooms.

The PhD candidates will have to arrange and finance travel to and within Athens as well as dinners during the course week (except for the welcome dinner). If you are in the DIALPAST network and do not have travel funding to cover these costs, please get in touch with oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Inquiries about practical matters regarding course organisation should also be sent to oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Registration

Registration deadline: 1st August 2024

Organizer

Course Coordinator: Oliver Reiersen

Writing a Successful Article

PhD workshop, 13-15 May, 2024.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: May 13, 2024 – May 15, 2024, Le Centre universitaire de Norvège à Paris (CUNP)

Academic journals are one of the most important means for scholars and researchers to share their research with the academic community. Being able to publish your research requires skills for the craft.

The aim of this workshop is to provide hands-on training in writing good articles for archaeological journals. The workshop will also familiarize the students with the important peer review process and provide training in how to review a paper for a journal and how to handle the review process as an author. Three international journal editors: Rob Witcher from Antiquity, Robin Skeates from Antiquity and formerly at the European Journal of Archae, and Liv Nilsson Stutz formerly from Archaeological Dialogues, and currently an associate editor of Bioarchaeology International and the Yearbook of the American Association of Biological Anthropology, will provide comments and present lectures on international publishing.

Course Work

Before the course starts, each PhD student is to prepare and pre-circulate a draft text for a supposed journal. Each student will also prepare a formal peer review of one other text before the workshop starts. During the workshop, each participant will present their text in a smaller group setting, and the assigned peer reviewer, lecturer, and participants will provide constructive critique and comments for improving the text. The participants will individually rewrite parts of their drafts on the second day of the workshop. On the last day, there will be a discussion and feedback on their new/revised text, followed by a roundtable discussion on the rewriting process.

Lecturers

Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Prof. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Dr. Rob Witcher (Durham University)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

The Graduate School will finance and arrange accommodation, a welcome dinner, and supply lunch during the seminar week for all participating PhD candidates who are part of the Dialogues with the Past Network.

Two and two PhD students will be accommodated in twin rooms according to gender.

The PhD candidates will have to arrange and finance travel to and within Paris as well as dinners during the course week (except for the welcome dinner). If you are in the DIALPAST network and do not have travel funding to cover these costs, please get in touch withnoliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students in the DIALPAST network to apply for participation.

Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, 9 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: 12th January, 2024. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (5 - 10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1.5): 23rd March, 2024.

Organizer

Liv Nilsson Stutz

2023

Archaeology of the Anthropocene

PhD Course, The Norwegian Institute at Athens, Greece

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Nov. 27, 2023 9:00 AM – Nov. 30, 2023 1:00 PM, The Norwegian Institute at Athens

About the course

The earth has transformed in fundamental ways over the course of human evolution. ‘Niche construction’ is a term used to describe actions an organism takes to alter its environment to meet its subsistence and reproductive needs. Often, niche-constructing activities impact other species as well, such as when beavers build dams that create pools of water that benefit fish who thrive on still water (and hurt fish who thrive on fast-moving water). Modern ecologists tend to view human niche construction as more impactful to other organisms relative to the effects brought about by other species, since the scale and scope of human settlement spans the globe and involves extensive forms of landscape clearance and pollution.

It is tempting to think that the impacts of human niche construction are unique to the post-Industrial era, but recent research has shown that measurable impacts to earth’s biosphere and atmosphere can be traced back at least 3000 years, tied to the introduction of agriculture or even occurring during the Pleistocene. However, the visibility of human impacts can be difficult to assess in the archaeological record. Since they are undoubtedly less than or overprinted by those wrought by modern industrial technology, the view of the evolution of human niche-constructing activities may be selectively biased regionally and temporally. Modern policy experts even question the relevance of such evidence to mitigating global climate change or large-scale land cover change (see discussion in Richer et al. 2019).

This seminar asks the following questions as points of departure:

Is the Anthropocene a real thing? Should it be a geologic epoch, or maybe an event as discussed in Gibbard et al. (2022)?
Is the Anthropocene concept relevant for archaeological inquiry?
Are there many anthropocenes as has been proposed by Ruddiman (2018) or are humans just another (albeit large) brick in the wall of earth’s ecology?
When and where are human impacts to earth’s biodiversity or atmospheric systems vis-à-vis niche construction measurable in the archaeological record?
Are discussions about past forms of human niche construction relevant to mitigating the impacts of global change in the 21st century?

Relevant sub-topics are:

Is disciplinary separation between palaeoecology and ecology helpful or necessary to understand biodiversity?
Is there a real divide between nature and culture (Greeves 1989)?
What tools do archaeologists have in our kits to engage meaningfully in (palaeo)ecological research? I.e., how do we study material remains in human-focused ecology?
How do notions of ‘regime change’ or ‘threshold crossing’ relate to the evolution of earth’s (human) ecology? How do we judge the scale of the impacts?
What is the role of archaeology in discussing changes to earth’s ecology, both past and present?

Lecturers

Prof David Keith Wright, University of Oslo
Assoc Prof Federica Sulas, University of Gothenburg
Prof Andrea Zerboni, University of Milan

Course work

The participating lecturers will each deliver a lecture during the course and also actively engage in discussions of the PhD Fellow's submitted papers. The seminar days will be thoughtfully structured to provide sufficient time for stimulating debates, networking opportunities, and a field trip to a destination pertinent to the course topic.

Paper submission deadline: 2nd October 2023

Credits

5 ECTS

Registration and deadlines

Registration deadline: 1st August 2023

10 participants will be accepted for the course after the deadline.

Location, Travel, and Costs

The Graduate School will finance and arrange accommodation, a welcome dinner, and supply lunch during the course week for all participating PhD candidates who are part of the Dialogues With the Past Network. Two and two PhD students will be accommodated in twin rooms.

Organizer

David Keith Wright

Writing a Successful Article

PhD workshop, May 3-5, 2023.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: May 3, 2023 – May 5, 2023, the Norwegian Institute in Rome

The aim of this workshop is to provide hands-on training in writing good articles for archaeological journals. The workshop will also familiarize the students with the important peer review process and provide training in how to review a paper for a journal and how to handle the review process as an author. Three international journal editors: Rob Witcher from Antiquity, Robin Skeates from Antiquity and formerly at the European Journal of Archaeology, and Liv Nilsson Stutz formerly from Archaeological Dialogues, and currently an associate editor of Bioarchaeology International and the Yearbook of the American Association of Biological Anthropology, will provide comments and present lectures on international publishing.

Course Work

Before the course starts, each PhD student is to prepare and pre-circulate a draft text for a supposed journal. Each student will also prepare a formal peer review of one other text before the workshop starts. During the workshop, each participant will present their text in a smaller group setting, and the assigned peer reviewer, lecturer, and participants will provide constructive critique and comments for improving the text. The participants will individually rewrite parts of their drafts on the second day of the workshop. On the last day there will be a discussion and feedback on their new/revised text, followed by a roundtable discussion on the rewriting process.

Lecturers

Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Prof. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Dr Rob Witcher (Durham University)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

The PhD candidates will have to arrange and finance travel to and within Rome as well as dinners during the course week (except for the welcome dinner). If you are in the DIALPAST network and do not have travel funding to cover these costs, please get in touch with oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, 10 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: January 6, 2023. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (5 - 10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1.5): March 23, 2023.

Organizer

Liv Nilsson Stutz

Human Environment Interaction: Adapting, Coping, Marking, Transforming

PhD Course, Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris, March 27-30, 2023.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Mar. 27, 2023 – Mar. 30, 2023, Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris

The study of human-environment interaction is crucial for dealing with the present day challenges in the age of the «anthropocene», starting with the industrial revolution, such as the expansion of cities, infrastructure, industrial parks and recreation areas. While this expansion meets «the needs» of modern societies, they reduce at the same time important natural and cultural landscapes including arable and forested environments and the coastal zone. Through such activities, past remnants of human engagement with the surroundings are uncovered, but often also destroyed. Modern industrial development thus transforms and overlays [past] life worlds of people, plants and animals, while at the same time uncovering the human long-term engagement within the same areas.

This PhD seminar seeks to explore human-environmental interaction in the past in a long-term perspective. It is directed to all PhD students who do research on natural as well as cultural environments and social space, and their interconnectedness, across time, including both foraging and farming societies – in coast and inland areas. The seminar will deal with the study of environment and/or social space from a variety of perspectives such as environmental archaeology, material culture studies or ethnoarchaeology. The PhD students will present aspects of their own research in these fields, which then will be discussed in the group, the discussions being chaired by experienced lecturers in the field of (landscape-) archaeology, ethnoarchaeology and environmental archaeology.

The aim is to discuss the notion of environment in its broadest sense. This spans from a natural science perspective to a definition of social space/cultural landscape as a world in which people exist, live and move, and which not only consists of animated and non-animated materialities, such as vegetation, fauna and surface/geology, but also of humans and human interaction with the surroundings, as well as their material manifestations.

We want to explore different ways of how people dealt with, coped with and adapted to their surroundings – economically, socially and spiritually, and how we can investigate this. We will touch on a broad range of questions on the possible reciprocities between humans and their surrounding as well as certain requirements that different environments present. Did the engagement with the same areas change over time, depending on specific requirements, socio-cultural relationships, and distinct perceptions, and if yes, how and why did they change, and what were possible triggers? To what extend can this be related to environmental change? In the long durée, can we identify continuities and long-term traditions in the use of the same areas? What types of human involvement with the environment can be disentangled by which methods? In how far is human engagement with the surroundings active or passive, spanning from adaption to (intended?) manipulation and comprehensive transformation? And, how do environmental transformations rebound on humans and in which way do they affect the perception of landscapes and social space?

These questions will also touch on the big issues such as the nature-culture dichotomy – and address the question if there is a division between culture and nature at all, and, at what stage cultural landscapes emerged. We will address different strategies of human engagement with environments between the poles of exploitation and sustainability and the “dwelling within” in Ingold's sense, and their possible socio-cultural and economic consequences.

Course Work

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture during the course, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Lecturers

Prof. Dr. Almut Schülke (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Prof. Dr. Wiebke Kirleis (Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology, University of Kiel)
Senior lecturer Grégor Marchand (CNRS/CReAAH, University of Rennes 1)
Prof. Dr. Henny Piezonka (Institute of Pre- and Protohistoric Archaeology, University of Kiel)

Credits

5 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students within the Dialogues with the Past network to apply for participation. Please fill out this application form to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, c. 10 PhD students will be admitted to the course.

For more information, please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: November 18, 2022. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1.5): February 17, 2023.

Organizer

Almut Schülke and Wiebke Kirleis

2022

The Social Context of Technology – Between Agency and Tradition

PhD Course, Lund University

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Oct. 24, 2022 – Oct. 28, 2022, Lund University

The artefactual remains that make up such a large part of the archaeological record constitute remnants from various technologies. Traditionally, archaeologists have classified technology from a morphological and typological viewpoint. However, there is more to technology than outer form and visual expression. The social aspects connected with artefact production and use as well as management of raw materials and waste involve development and maintenance of craft traditions as well as transmission and management of knowledge and skills. Recent studies exploring various theoretical perspectives have demonstrated that a focus on the social premises for technology and its contexts can generate new knowledge about prehistoric societies. The seminar will discuss the theoretical basis of this socio-technological turn in archaeology, including topics such as knowledge transmission, social organisation, agency and structure, and focus on how various technologies can be studied within this approach.

This is not to say that we envisage theoretical discussion at a level remote from the practical application of technology studies to specific artefact classes and materials. Quite the contrary – we wish to examine the different kinds of potential for understanding social contexts that relate to the specific characteristics of the artefact assemblages being studied, and the possibilities and challenges of transferring research approaches from one material to another. Further, we will explore the possibilities of integrated technological study across a range of artefact/material classes as a strategy for obtaining more comprehensive insights into social contexts.

This PhD seminar aims at providing research fellows with the opportunity to present aspects of their research related to various technologies and their social aspects and contexts, from the Stone Age to recent times, and facilitate a critical discussion about how we can capture these archaeologically.

The seminar seeks to address the social significance of technology maintenance, development and change on different temporal scales, and how this can be studied through the archaeological record. For example: How and why is technology maintained or changed? What is the influence of agents versus tradition? How is knowledge transmission affecting technological variability and development? What role can mobility, exchange and social contact play? What is the impact of environmental conditions, raw material access and control?

The seminar welcomes presentations by PhD students investigating various technologies represented in the archaeological record, exploring development at different temporal scales. It also welcomes critical discussion of methodological and theoretical challenges. We encourage participation of scholars from all periods, including contemporary archaeology.

Course Work

Lecturers

Dr Inger Marie Berg-Hansen (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Dr Valdis Bērziņš (Institute of Latvian History, University of Latvia)
Professor Per Ditlef Fredriksen (University of Oslo)
Professor Peter D. Jordan (Lund University)
Dr Gilbert B. Tostevin (University of Minnesota)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. Please fill out this application formto apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, c. 15 PhD students will be admitted to the course.

For more information, please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: June 6, 2022. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1.5): September 2, 2022.

Organizer

Inger Marie Berg-Hansen, Valdis Bērziņš and Dialogues with the Past

Bridging the Disciplinary Gap: how zooarchaeology reveals social aspects of the past

PhD Course, the Norwegian Institute in Rome, September 26-30, 2022.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Sep. 26, 2022 – Sep. 30, 2022, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Humanities and natural sciences have developed different frameworks of reference and even different technical terminologies. Reconciling the resulting scales of investigations and perspectives often pose a challenge in interdisciplinary collaboration.

The discipline of zooarchaeology investigates animal remains from archaeological sites. These can be bones, teeth and antlers, hair and fur, feathers, shells and egg shells, and hard parts of insects. Also other find categories such as animal shaped figurines, artistic illustrations, garments related to keeping domestic animals, and artefacts derived from animal originated materials provide useful information. With roots in environmental archaeology, recently the purpose of zooarchaeological studies has increasingly been in exploring human–animal relations in the past.

The traditional zooarchaeological methods (e.g. taxonomic distribution, morphometrics, taphonomy) are constantly being re-evaluated, confirmed, and elaborated. The most recent developments in zooarchaeology, including microscopic, molecular, and digital methods, offer new research possibilities to better answer questions regarding archaeology of human-animal relations.

Traditional and new zooarchaeological methods are often related to qualifying and quantifying the find material. The identification and morphometric analysis of animal remains is only the first step towards an understanding of the society that produced the assemblage. The empirical data is then used to build upon interpretations and theories, which rely on a thorough contextual analysis and cultural background.

With the emergence of the post-humanistic agenda in archaeology, humans are more seen as part of an interspecies community. For the study of human–animal communities, faunal and human remains provide the most common sources in archaeological investigations. They are, however, difficult to explain in terms of rituality, relatedness, or identity, and the state-of-the-art scientific methods are still difficult to integrate with new trends in humanities. This seminar aims to combine scientific and humanistic frames and to find bridging practices/examples for enhancing the discourse between traditional and posthumanist-directed studies of human-animal relations. For this purpose, we explore scientific approaches to the zooarchaeology of human–animal relations based on the various types of animal remains and animal-derived artefacts found in prehistoric and historical contexts. During the course, we focus on cases connected to methodological, theoretical, and multi-disciplinary research on how humans have been integrating animals into their social, ritual, and religious lives.

Course Work

The course will consist of both a seminar and lectures. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her/his research project in relation to the course theme. In the seminars, each paper will be allotted ca. 45 minutes, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. One of the other PhD students will be selected in advance as a discussant and comment for about 10 minutes, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes.

Lecturers

Eve Rannamäe, University of Tartu
Kristin Armstrong Oma, University of Stavanger
László Bartosiewicz, University of Stockholm

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, c. 15 PhD students will be admitted to the course. For more information, please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: May 16, 2022. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): August 8, 2022.

Appointment of discussants: August 22, 2022.

Organizer

Tuija Kirkinen and Dialogues with the Past

How to Succeed with Academic Applications?

Digital PhD workshop, Brussels, August 17–19, 2022.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Aug. 17, 2022 – Aug. 19, 2022, The NorCore Office in Brussels

There is a life after the PhD dissertation. This life is not necessarily straightforward in terms of a scientific career. It is a clear political and institutional expectation that researchers today acquire external funding for research projects – which are fundamental to an academic career. A PhD-position does not usually provide competence in project design and fund raising, even though this is the future for most PhDs who wish to pursue a career in research.

The aim of this workshop is to provide future researchers with skills to succeed in writing academic applications and acquiring external funding. It aims at giving PhD students increased knowledge about writing good project applications for research funds, the logic of evaluation of applications, and the key potential funding sources in Europe. The workshop is developed for PhD candidates who are in the final phase of their PhD projects.

Course Work

The workshop will consist of individual presentations, group work and visits to relevant institutions in Brussels. Before the course starts, each PhD student is to prepare and pre-circulate a fictitious project application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5). The simulated call for the workshop will be sent to the applicants after they have been accepted to the workshop.

Lecturers

Prof. Håkon Glørstad (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Dr Konstantinos Chilidis (University of Oslo)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students who are in the final phase of their PhD Project to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only), or submit your application by filling in the form at the bottom of this page. From these applications, 10 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: May 16, 2022. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of Project Application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): June 30, 2022

Organizer

Håkon Glørstad

Materiality, Memory and Emotion

PhD course, Istanbul, June 13-17, 2022.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: June 13, 2022 – June 17, 2022, The Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII)

About the course

In recent decades, materiality and material culture have become increasingly important sources of theory in a range of academic disciplines outside of archaeology, including history, cultural anthropology, and sociology. Material items are viewed as containers of collective and individual memory, as devices capable of triggering emotional, psychological, and even physiological reactions, and as tools for expressing or retaining identity and narratives. At the same time, the cross-disciplinary field of memory studies has grown out of psychology, cognitive science, history, museum and archive studies etc., and theorized and problematized the processes of memory, the creation of memory and concepts such as collective memory, bringing a deeper analysis to the creation and perception of the past in self-definition and identity processes. This scholarship has found an outlet in fields like archaeology, but also in literature, film studies, art, etc.

These different disciplinary and creative foci allow archaeology to enrich and sharpen the theoretical and methodological approaches to the material culture that always has been at the center of our discipline. In particular, these approaches allow us to reach further into the ranges of memory, emotion and affect of lived experience in the past and in the present. The concepts of memory and emotion are also useful when understanding current events surrounding commemoration, identity politics and memory laws, that all in different ways connect materiality, memory and emotion to political projects in Europe and elsewhere.

Through the analysis of material culture—from small objects such as heirlooms or everyday tools, to large structures such as monuments or built environment—the course proposes an open and explicitly cross-disciplinary perspective—to explore the connections between materiality, emotion, and memory in the lived experience of the past and present.

Course Work

The course will follow the Dialogues with the Past model and consist of lectures, workshop activities, and field trips in Istanbul that are selected to prompt cross-disciplinary and creative exploration and discussion of the topic of the course.

Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing their research project in relation to the course theme. These papers will be presented in research seminars with a short presentation, followed by a discussion structured by a designated opponent. Thematic discussion will be emphasized and scaffolded with instructions to the opponent to formulate exploratory discussion questions.

The faculty members will each give a lecture (ca. one hour), presenting different perspectives on the theme of Materiality, Memory and Emotion tying it to their own scholarship as archaeologists. The faculty will also participate in the workshops by providing feedback on the student presentations and support their work process.

In addition to the seminars and lectures, learning activities will also be scheduled outside of the classroom:

½ day excursion 1: We will make a field trip to The Museum of Innocence and use it as a laboratory to discuss the ways in which material items tell stories and encapsulate and transfer memory. To prepare for this visit, each student will read the book (The Museum of Innocence, by Orhan Pamuk) and select one chapter. At the museum we will visit the display cases relating to each of the selected chapters and the student will briefly present the contents based on their reading, and then we will all discuss the items exhibited there and how they relate to the themes of the class.
½ day excursion 2: Discovering the city through its materiality. The students (in groups of 2 or 3) will pick an area or a site (in consultation with the faculty) to visit and document through a series of photographs that focus on specific items or materiality that they discover as significant for their experience of the place. These small photo projects will be presented on the last day of the course and serve as a departure for reflection on how the course content has affected our way of seeing and processing the materiality around us.

Lecturers

Professor Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Professor Audrey Horning (The College of William and Mary)
Professor Sarah Tarlow (University of Leicester)
Associate Professor Ömür Harmanşah (University of Illinois Chicago)

Credits

7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the workshop for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network. Two and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

For more information please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: February 28, 2022. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): May 2, 2022.

Organizer

Liv Nilsson Stutz and Dialogues with the Past

Political Archaeologies / The Politics of Archaeology

PhD Course, the Norwegian Institute in Rome, April 25-29, 2022.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Apr. 25, 2022 – Apr. 29, 2022, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Academic archaeology is part of, as well as a product of, an increasingly politicized world in which researchers are expected to set the agenda as well as respond to the key issues in the societies we live in. How politics impacts and shapes archaeological studies can take a variety of forms. This can range from archaeologists taking an explicitly activist stance, through to the incorporation of specific ethical positions in how we conduct our work or simply acknowledging the need to engage with topical concerns in how we design research and envisage its outputs.

This DialPast course is designed for archaeologists who are working across a wide spectrum of issues in terms of how we conduct ‘political archaeologies’ as well as how we navigate the politics of conducting archaeology today. The course will include presentations on constructing overtly political archaeological research methodologies as well as discussing how we make your research more topical and politically nuanced in ways that may appeal to funding bodies. In this respect, the course will deal with “politics” with a big "P" and also a little "p". This course will particularly appeal to those who are interested in political engaged scholarship, but also those who wish to have a better understanding of the potential ethical implications of their research and those who wish to consider how to engage with the politics of conducting archaeologies in the present.

We invite students from a variety of archaeological and aligned disciplinary backgrounds. Course lecturers have extensive experience and in-depth expertise in working with the political in archaeology, including working with the politics of examining race, gender, class, security, conflict and ethics in the archaeological record.

Course Work

Lecturers

Professor Whitney Battle-Baptiste (University of Massachusetts Amherst)
Assistant Professor Rui Gomes Coelho (Durham University)
Dr. Sarah De Nardi (Western Sydney University)
Associate Professor Laura McAtackney (Aarhus University)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. Please fill out the application form to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, c. 15 PhD students will be admitted to the course.

For more information, please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: December 10, 2021. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 1, 2022

Organizer

Associate Professor Laura McAtackney

Writing a Successful Article

PhD workshop, March 23-25, 2022.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Mar. 23, 2022 – Mar. 25, 2022, The Norwegian Institute at Athens

The aim of this workshop is to provide hands on training in writing good articles for archaeological journals. Four international journal editors: Rob Witcher from Antiquity, Robin Skeates from the European Journal of Archaeology, Liv Nilsson Stutz from Archaeological Dialogues, and Kristian Kristiansen, formerly European Journal of Archaeology and Journal of Danish Archaeology, will provide comments and present lectures on international publishing.

Course Work

Before the course starts, each PhD student is to prepare and pre-circulate a draft text for a supposed journal. During the workshop, each participant will present their text, and the panel and participants will provide constructive critique and comments for improving the text. The participants will individually rewrite parts of their drafts on the second day of the workshop. On the last day there will be a discussion and feedback on their new/revised text, followed by a round table discussion on the rewriting process.

Lecturers

Dr Rob Witcher (Durham University)
Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Prof. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Prof. Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: December 1, 2021. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (5 - 10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): February 10, 2022

Organizer

Liv Nilsson Stutz

2021

Critical Archiving

PhD course, Paris, December 6-10, 2021.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Dec. 6, 2021 – Dec. 10, 2021, Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris

It has long been established that archives, and the databases and ontologies that underlie them, are deeply political and value-laden. These systems foster power imbalances and, to quote Hughes-Watkins (2018), are “complicit in continuing to uphold oppressive and unequal systems” via their selective approach to knowledge classification and standardisation. Within the archaeological, heritage and arts sectors, Canning (2019) and Boast and Biehl (2011) are amongst those to articulate the genesis of the problems, including our reliance on controlled vocabularies and ontologies which aim to narrow and singularise content using standards set in the colonial era, as well as a lack of opportunity to genuinely manipulate primary records, and to have those manipulations permanently layered into the metadata of the archives. We would contend that these issues are more relevant than ever in a heritage context, as a wide variety of practitioners (in the field, in the museum sector and within the academy) face the challenge of redefining the fundamental value of cultural heritage, and articulating and disseminating their research narratives to be relevant, inclusive and representative of the wider world.

In this course, we ask, how do our ‘traditional’ ontologies and epistemologies hard-bake structural fault lines (often tied to the intersection of complex gender roles or marginalised groups or socio-economic hierarchies) into the very creation of our knowledge of the past? How do we acknowledge our positionality as a discipline and allow for true diversity in the archives we construct about the past? Can digital technologies help us to do this, or are they inevitably part of the problem?

Today, digital media should give us the means to step away from pre-created ontologies to, as Srinivasan puts it, enable “users to create and share metadata according to their own local experiences and Interpretations”. Yet we still tend to strive for a single common standard that ironically obliterates the diversity of the very knowledge traditions—the local ontologies—that we wish to archive. This course aims to extend these debates around the weaknesses and possibilities of the archive (digital and analogue) by exploring emerging efforts to reconfigure archival practice.

Course Work

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture during the course, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The lectures will give a theoretical background to the topic as well as examples from various fields and areas of expertise. The aim is to foster critical awareness amongst students of the formation of the material they use in their own PhD projects and encourage them to question historical and seemingly axiomatic metadata categories. Through discussions, presentations and site visits, we are keen to engage with the concept of the archive from new, reflective and self-critical perspectives and to explore the possibilities of the digital format to expand and destabilise our understanding of what archives are and can be. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Lecturers

Dr. Åsa Berggren (Lund University and Sydsvensk arkeologi, Malmö)
Ass. Prof. Nicolo Dell’Unto (Lund University and Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Dr. James Taylor (University of York)
Dr. Sara Perry (Museum of London Archaeology)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: oliver.reiersen@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: July 2, 2021. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 11, 2021

Organizer

Dr. Sara Perry

Archaeologies of Violence, Captivity, and Coercion

PhD Course, the Norwegian Institute at Athens, October 18-22, 2021.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Oct. 18, 2021 – Oct. 22, 2021, The Norwegian Institute at Athens

Warfare and violence have played a fundamental role in shaping the development of human societies since prehistory. While deliberate attempts were made by academic archaeologists to downplay discussions of conflict during the 20th century, the last thirty years have witnessed a surge of interest in the subject. Early seminal studies of historic battlefields gave way to the rise of a more socially-oriented archaeology of conflict, which has since expanded to incorporate holistic studies of martial society and organisation, bioarchaeology, conflict landscapes, and gendered approaches to violence (among many others). These developments have taken place in parallel with the emergence of an anthropologically-informed archaeology of captivity and enslavement. In recent years, scholars working in this field have produced numerous ground-breaking studies that focus on lived experiences of violence, forced migration, and unfreedom, not only in large-scale global contexts but also among smaller-scale or non-state societies. This innovative field of research is now providing insights, for the first time, into the lives of historically-marginalised groups that have previously been described as archaeologically ‘invisible’ or ‘unseen.’

Despite the inherent associations of violence and conflict with captive-taking, enslavement, and the application of coercive power, to date there have been few opportunities for archaeologists working in these closely related fields to come together in order to discuss, explore, and share ideas within a dedicated, international setting. This PhD course will bring together students engaged in the archaeological study of these topics – in both the distant and more recent pasts – in an open and inclusive forum. Participants will be joined by a number of invited experts who are world leaders in these fields. The eclectic mix of speakers has been chosen in order showcase the breadth of theoretical and material data at our disposal, while introducing students to a range of new historical and archaeological case studies from around the globe.

Course Work

Lecturers

Dr. Ben Raffield (Uppsala University)
Professor Helle Vankilde (University of Aarhus)
Professor Catherine Cameron (University of Colorado Boulder)
Associate Professor Tiffiny Tung (Vanderbilt University)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information, please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: July 2, 2021. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): September 1, 2021

Organizer

Ben Raffield

How to Succeed with Academic Applications?

Digital PhD workshop, Brussels, August 16 - 18, 2021.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Aug. 16, 2021 – Aug. 18, 2021, Zoom

Course Work

This fictitious project application is only meant as a practice exercise in constructing applications, and does not have to be related to your own PhD topic. Feedback will be given to each individual application, but the point of this exercise is also to address the common challenges researchers have writing academic applications.

During the workshop, each student will present his/her pre-circulated research proposal (3 minutes) and receive feedback from a fellow student (10 minutes) whom also chair the following general discussion (10 minutes). On day 3 participants will be divided into three groups. Each group will be charged with the task of preparing a 10 minute presentation of a strategy for improving their project ideas. The presentation shall be based on all three sketches and present common key points for improving the three applications. The presentations will be structured as a role play where the lecturers act as an evaluation panel who assess and give feedback on the revision strategy, including quality of analysis and plans. Each group will have 10 minutes to present their project, then get a 15 minute evaluation from the panel followed by a 15 minute group discussion.

Lecturers

Prof. Håkon Glørstad (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Dr. Konstantinos Chilidis (University of Oslo)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

The workshop will be organized digitally. Admitted PhD students will receive the necessary meeting links prior to the workshop.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students who are in the final phase of their PhD Project to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, 10 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: May 16, 2021. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of Project Application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): June 30, 2021

Organizer

Håkon Glørstad

Mobility and migration, past and present

PhD Course, the Norwegian Institute at Athens, May 24-28, 2021.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: May 24, 2021 – May 28, 2021, Norwegian Institute at Athens

The topics of mobility and migrations are dominating both the current political, as well as the archaeological debates. This reflects the fact that human movements are and always have been important social phenomena shaping social realities. Historical records in Europe and the Middle East are full of events involving both mobility and migration, often clearly having changed the course of human history. Yet for decades, mobility and migrations were widely regarded as only minor factors in explaining cultural change. This situation is now about to change with the widespread application of genetics and stable isotopes, providing for the first time tools to empirically detect past phenomena of mobility and migrations.

One can therefore accord with Peter Van Dommelen in his introduction to a recent special thematic issue on mobility and migrations in the renowned journal World Archaeology (46, no. 4, 2014, 477-483), when he writes: “Even if archaeological explanations and theoretical interests have shied away from migration with the advent of the New, Processual and Post-Processual archaeologies, the reality remains that migration was in all likelihood as common, recurrent and widespread a phenomenon in the ancient and distant past as it is today and has been recorded historically in recent periods.”

In Anthropology, Sociology and social Geography, there exists a wide array of literature about mobility as a social and economic vector, including also typologies of its various forms, and this arsenal is frequently applied to general archaeological records too. The course offers a survey of its intellectual discourses and developments, and will signal recent trends and future directions. It will encourage the students to more explicitly examine the potential, and empirically detectable impact of human mobility and different forms of migration on their respective research topics. Overall, the course will be reflecting the direction of Archaeology towards an intermediate, or even integrative humanities-scientific discipline, as it is now widely seen in publications, successful grant applications and the media. The approach taken for the course will therefore essentially be multi-/crossdisciplinary, with a particular focus on the combination of the sciences (eg., genetics, isotope geochemistry, bio-anthropology, biogeochemistry), and the humanities/social sciences (eg., sociology, history, anthropology, linguistics).

The course is intended to address and conceptually link prehistoric, historical and present situations, in order to gain a better understanding of the overall phenomena. The course will take the shape of keynote lectures given by specialists in different disciplines involved in migration studies, student presentations on the basis of pre-submitted papers and discussions of these, among the students and between lecturers and students.

Course Work

Lecturers

Professor Martin Furholt (University of Oslo)
Professor Volker Heyd (University of Helsinki)
Associate Professor Synnøve Kristine Nepstad Bendixsen (University of Bergen)
Dr. Catrine Jarman (University of Bristol)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: November 6, 2020. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): April 9, 2021.

Organizer

Martin Furholt

Writing a Successful Article

Digital PhD workshop, April 26 - 28, 2021.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time: Apr. 26, 2021 – Apr. 28, 2021

Course Work

Lecturers

Dr Rob Witcher (Durham University)
Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Prof. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Prof. Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

The workshop will be organized digitally. Admitted PhD students will receive the necessary meeting links prior to the workshop.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: March 2, 2020. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (5 - 10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 26, 2021

Organizer

Kristian Kristiansen

Reproducible Quantitative Research in Archaeology: Doing Open Science Archaeology (using R)

Digital PhD workshop, March 23-26, 2021.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time: Mar. 23, 2021 – Mar. 26, 2021

This course situates itself at the confluence of two trends in archaeology. First, like many Humanities disciplines, archaeology is swept along in a data deluge towards new digital shores (Bevan, 2015). Second, a reproducibility crisis is looming with many disciplines losing credibility because results of studies cannot or only with great difficulties be reproduced (Baker, 2016). Many funders, including the ERC, are beginning to take rigorous stances on issues of Open Science, a term that effectively encapsulates the notion of methodological and empirical transparency. Not least because of archaeology’s disciplinary background and grounding in and recruitment from the Humanities, these trends amount to a double challenge: We must become better able to handle small and large data volumes – be they counts, frequencies, measurements, dates or coordinates – and we must conduct and present our research in findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR: https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/) ways.

Numerous tools have been developed in aid of reproducible research, also in fact specifically in relation to archaeology (Carlson, 2017; Marwick, 2017; Marwick et al., 2018, 2017; Marwick and Birch, 2018). Building on these efforts, this PhD course will focus on (i) the use of basic quantitative data analysis methodologies in archaeological research, and on (ii) making such research reproducible within an Open Science framework. The course will give the students the opportunity to reflect upon how they may be able to use different kinds of quantitative methods in their research project and, following Software/Data Carpentry principles, provide hands-on practical training in the R programming environment and selected quantitative methods (e.g. uni-, bi- and multivariate exploratory statistics and visualisation).

Note that this course will not cover the handling of radiocarbon or spatial data.

Course Work

The course will consist of both lectures and, mostly, workshop activities. Before the course starts, each PhD fellow must prepare a short, scholarly proposal for a data analysis relevant to their research (~5 pages, plus 10-20 references) as well as one or several data tables that include numeric (e.g. measurements on objects) and categorical (e.g. grave good counts across cemeteries, site counts per region) variables. These data tables do not need to be large but we suggest that each submitted table should include a minimum of 40 objects/sites etc. and three associated variables (measurements, counts, etc.). They do not have to be data you have personally collected, previously published datasets are welcome, but they should be directly related to your research. This standard will ensure that the PhD fellow can work with her/his own data throughout the course and that we may be able to compare challenges and results across datasets. Please note that participation without such a dataset is not possible.

During the course, we will be working in the R coding environment, through its user-friendly RStudio interface. Course work will be individually or in groups, and intensive guidance will be provided. At the end of the week, each PhD fellow will present the results of the work conducted throughout the week.

Lecturers

A/Prof. Ben Marwick (University of Washington)
Ph.D. fellow David Nicolas Matzig (Aarhus University)
Prof. (MSO) Felix Riede (Aarhus University)
Independent researcher/teacher Sophie C Schmidt (University of Cologne)
Archaeometallurgist/researcher Thomas Birch (Aarhus University)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

The workshop will be organized digitally. Admitted PhD students will receive the necessary meeting links prior to the workshop.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: October 1, 2020. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of data analysis proposal (5 pages plus 10-20 references, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): February 22, 2021

Organizer

Prof. (MSO) Felix Riede

2020

Archaeologies of Dwelling and the Built Environment

PhD course, Rome, February 24 - 28, 2020

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Feb. 24, 2020 9:00 AM – Feb. 28, 2020 5:00 PM, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Archaeology has been studying architecture as one of the key points of access to the past since the very birth of the discipline, assuming a central position in archaeological endeavours to understand the past.

Archaeology has used built environments as proxies for economic development, technical competence and social evolution. In its most iconic expression, architectural form has been seen as a token of stages in an evolutionary process of civilization, for instance interpreting round features and huts as marking an architectural precursor to rectangular buildings (e.g. Bradley 2012; Flannery 2002; Saidel 1993). Moreover, architecture has been approached as a concrete expression of power, hierarchy and social relations as a form of material culture that is closely associated with identity, order and politics (Goring-Morris and Belfer-Cohen 2013; Jamieson 2002; Parker Pearson and Richards 1994). This has also led to much work on identifying the discrete functional role of architecture, e.g. as palatial architecture, workers’ accommodation, hunting stations, summer camps, temples, mortuary architecture and fortifications.

Other approaches to architecture, however, argue that despite the stability of certain aspects of the built environment – and the longevity of ‘house types’ – ways of inhabiting architecture can vary markedly and require a profound grasp of the temporality of building and dwelling. In this perspective, the built environment is merely the exterior around a volatile and dynamic social life. This means that ephemeral activities, sentiments and atmospheres account for what the building is just as much as the physical shell. Architecture, inhabitants, materials and artefacts, and the practices taking place within a settlement or a building, emerge as indispensable parts of a larger whole, that is continuously coming into being. Douglas Bailey and Lesley McFadyen (2010) thus argue that buildings should be considered not as fixed crystallisations of ideas, but as building practices; i.e. ongoing activities of different speeds that redirect our attention from understanding architecture as a product to seeing it as process. They argue that buildings' processes can be discontinuous, episodic and disruptive, and not necessarily continuous leading up to a ‘final’ form.

This seminar aims to explore archaeological approaches to architecture understood in the widest sense of the word, including place-making, built environments, landscapes and urban spaces. The objective is to allow the participants to explore the nature of architecture and the many roles building and built environments have assumed in archaeology; as a source of archaeological information, as social catalysts, symbolic spaces and seats of negotiation of power and identity, and as unfinished form, as affective agents and producers of atmospheric co-presence of humans and non-humans.

The course invites the scrutiny of a number of questions fundamental to architecture and building, such as:

Why do human beings build?
What does it mean to dwell?
How do our interpretations of archaeological remains of architecture change if we view buildings as emergent rather than static?
How can archaeology consider the relationality between people and their built environments? In what ways can we discuss the interplay between inhabitants and architecture in archaeological structures?
How can archaeology consider affective and sensuous experiences of buildings and landscapes?

Course Work

Lecturers

Marianne Hem Eriksen, University of Oslo
Lesley McFadyen, Birkbeck University of London
Oliver Harris, University of Leicester
Tim Flohr Sørensen, University of Copenhagen

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course(in English only). From these applications, c. 15 PhD students will be admitted to the course.

For more information, please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: November 11, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): January 15, 2020

Appointment of discussants: February 3, 2020

Organizer

Marianne Hem Eriksen and Tim Flohr Sørensen

2019

Population Dynamics

PhD course, Rome, April 8 - April 12, 2019.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Apr. 8, 2019 – Apr. 12, 2019, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Demography is a fundamental factor in many of the issues archaeology address. It is an integral part of all studies of mobility patterns, settlement distribution and organization, and social and economic composition of a population. There is arguably a dynamic relationship between population size, density, distribution and composition and the social, economic and cultural questions often at the heart of archaeological research. For instance, how does a small and scattered population affect the social and cultural parameters of that society? Does a need for long distance contact to maintain a social and risk-reducing network result in a largely homogeneous culture and technology as is often argued for the pioneers in Scandinavia? What are the impacts of clustered versus evenly distributed settlement? Were the northern Bronze Age populations patrilocal communities and how did the argued influx of women affect social structure and cultural practices?

Due to methodological difficulties in establishing many demographic elements this was for some time under-communicated. The last decade has seen a renewed interest in population dynamics with an emphasis on extracting information from various types of data in order to reconstruct population fluctuations or migrations. The arrival of new methods and approaches to model a range of population patterns also encourages discussions of the pre-conditions for demographic change and variation as well as their socio-cultural impact.

This seminar will address several aspects of archaeological population dynamics:

The challenges of reconstructing early demographic patterns. Which methods are applicable and which aspects of demographic variation can we discern? While methods are continually being refined, their reliability are still debated, and not least so are the interpretations derived from the various analyses and models. The seminar will discuss the range of methods now employed to reconstruct and model a variety of demographic parameters. These include frequency models (radiocarbon dates, sites, artefacts), aDNA and isotope analyses, burial studies for age and gender composition as well as the use of ethno-historical information.
The pre-conditions for demographic change. Climate and environmental shifts loom large in many interpretations of demographic growth or decline, but there are many examples where climate appears to have had little effect, and where the background for change have to be sought in other processes and events such as diseases, new technology or new interregional relations.
The impact of demographic change and variation on economy, social structures and cultural transmission. What were the effects of boom and bust fluctuations, migrations, or new settlement and mobility patterns? These aspects have perhaps been researched in less detail, but are as crucial as the search for pre-conditions. Rather than assume that we immediately see the impact, the short-term and long-term implications of demographic change needs to be considered more thoroughly.

Course Work

Lecturers

Professor Charlotte Damm (University of Tromsø)
Professor Kerstin Lidén (Stockholm University)
Professor Ian Armit (University of Bradford)
Dr. Marc Vander Linden (University of Cambridge)

(Picture credit, from left to right: www.cas.oslo.no, www.su.se, www.bradford.ac.uk, Cambridge.academia.edu)

Registration

For more information, please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: January 7, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 11, 2019.

Appointment of discussants: March 18, 2019.

Organizer

Charlotte Damm

Past Urbanisms

PhD Course, the Norwegian Institute in Rome, May 27-31, 2019.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: May 27, 2019 – May 31, 2019, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

This course, organized within the framework of the Nordic Graduate school DialPast, focusses on a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches to urbanisms in the past in a longue durée perspective and with pivotal focus given to urban networks. The chronological span of the course covers several millennia and a variety of regions bringing in examples from northern Europe, the Mediterranean area and East Africa as well as the Far East and Mesoamerica. By comparing the archaeology of urbanism from the Maya civilizations, Eastern Africa and the ancient Mediterranean to medieval Northern Europe and the broader Indian Ocean World, and determining how – and to what extent – urban networks catalysed societal and environmental expansions and crises in the past, the course will offer theoretical and methodological perspectives to PhD students, by also introducing such perspectives through the examination of case studies. By bringing in a historiographical perspective, the impact of a variety of theoretical approaches on urbanism in the past, which have and still influence the way in which we work with urban societies in archaeology and history, will be highlighted.

Contemporary urban studies stress the capacity to harness and nurture networks of information and exchange as an essential condition of urban societies. Yet archaeology is more successful at studying the planning efforts, monumental investments and conspicuous consumption, which mark the political aspect of urbanism, than in tracing the interactions. While urbanism and urban developments often have been described in terms of developments graspable in the urban material fabric, in particular the development of layout and areas within cityscapes, the “dynamic” aspects of urban development, the network dynamics, have often been neglected in the study of past urban societies. Therefore a particular focus will be given to urban networks and urban dynamics in the course. These strings of enquiry have stood at the core of the work done within the framework of the Danish National Research Foundation’s Centre of Excellence for Urban Network Evolutions since 2015 and have offered new insight into ways in which past urbanisms may be examined. Through an interdisciplinary approach the advances within the understanding of the historical process of urban evolutions will be framed in the course and highlighted through case studies demonstrating the ability of archaeology to characterise the scale and pace of events and processes. We will explore how networks have operated as an aspect of urban societies in the past, and how high-definition archaeology is changing our ability to trace their dynamics.

By bringing in experts on a range of regions and on theoretical perspectives, the course cover a wide range of approaches and introduce the students to numerous examples and material. Furthermore fieldtrips to locations in Rome where excavations are currently taking place will give the possibility to discuss modern excavation strategies in urban contexts.

Course Work

The course will take the shape of lectures, fieldtrips, student presentations and plenum discussions. Involved lecturers will each deliver a keynote lecture and take part in the course as general discussants and motivators in theme workshops as well as guides to sites in Rome. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted ca. 45 minutes, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. This is followed with a 10 min commentary from one of the other PhD students (selected in advance), after which she or he will chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes.

Contributions may relate to urban societies from prehistory to present, and may include case studies in fieldwork practice, material culture networks and comparative analytical work.

Lecturers

Professor Michael E. Smith (Arizona State University, USA)
Professor Roland Fletcher (Sydney University, Australia)
Assistant professor Federica Sulas (Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Assistant professor Christopher Dickenson (Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark)
Assistant professor Michael Blömer (Centre for Urban Network Evolutions, Aarhus University, Denmark)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network as well as participating PhD students from the following Indian and South African institutions: North-Eastern Hills University, Nagaland University, HNB Garhwal University, Sambalpur University, Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria and University of the Witwatersrand. Two and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: February 15, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): April 29, 2019.

Appointment of discussants: May 6, 2019

Organizer

Rubina Raja and Søren Sindbæk

How to Succeed with Academic Applications?

PhD workshop, Brussels, August 21 – August 23 2019.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Aug. 21, 2019 – Aug. 23, 2019, The Research Council of Norway Brussels Office

Course Work

The workshop will consist of group work and visits to relevant institutions in Brussels. Before the course starts, each PhD student is to prepare and pre-circulate a fictitious project application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5). The simulated call for the workshop projects can be found here.

This fictitious project application is only meant as a practice exercise in constructing applications, and does not have to be related to your own PhD topic. Feedback will not be given to each individual application. The point of this exercise is rather to address the common challenges researchers have writing academic applications.

During the workshop, participants will be divided into three groups. Each group will be charged with the task of creating a joint project application based on the pre-circulated drafts. The groups will also prepare a 10 minute presentation of their project for the last day. The presentations will be structured as a roleplay where the lecturers act as an evaluation panel that assess and give feedback about the project proposals presented by the PhD students. To this end, each group will have 10 minutes to present their project, then receive a 15 minute evaluation from the panel followed by a 15 minute group discussion.

Lecturers

Prof. Håkon Glørstad (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Dr. Konstantinos Chilidis (University of Oslo)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students who are in the final phase of their PhD Project to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, 10 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: June 14, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of Project Application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): August 1, 2019.

Organizer

Håkon Glørstad

Digital Pasts and Futures of Archaeology

PhD course, Rome, September 16 - 20, 2019

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Sep. 16, 2019 – Sep. 20, 2019, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

The use of digital methods in archaeology has a decades long history. However, the digitalisation of all aspects of archaeology has increased on a large scale during the last few years. It is changing the foundations of the practice of archaeological documentation and dissemination and influences the processes of archaeological interpretation.

The aim of this course is to keep theoretical and critical engagement with the digital as our centre of attention. As the development of digital methods and applications is quick, so too must we prioritise critical concern for how, why, by whom and for what purpose digital technologies are deployed. Accordingly, the course will have a two fold focus – looking forward and looking back.

On the one hand, we will explore the future development and use of digital methods in archaeology. Our aim is to think ahead to see how digital development will critically impact future archaeological documentation, interpretation, visualisation and sensorial explorations of the past, as well as archiving and data management. The discussion will span projects of various sizes, from examples presented in students’ papers to national and international projects discussed by the course lecturers, e.g. the creation of national digital registers, the cross-European EMOTIVE project (www.emotiveproject.eu), etc.

On the other hand, we will contemplate the development of digital methods in archaeology from a historical perspective. The archaeological record and the use of legacy data depend on a proper understanding of this history. Digitisation is affecting the nature and longevity of archaeological practice. Yet its quick, often reactionary implementation and varied sustainability means that understanding of its historical development is narrow, and hence appreciation of its impact over time is limited. We hope to consider the legacy of digital practices in archaeology, and weave it into a discussion about the archiving of that legacy. Our aim is to consider the implications at both project, national and international levels, critically analysing the conditions for availability, accessibility, searchability, relevance and reuse (e.g., the FAIR data principles of findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability).

The course is supplemented by excursions to local projects and facilities to see digital applications in the field. We will also work hands-on with prototype interpretative tools designed for archaeologists to engage their audiences in critical discussion around archaeological research and data. Participants will draft their own simple digital experiences intended to foster critical reflection and historical perspective taking amongst their users.

Course Work

Lecturers

Dr. Åsa Berggren (Lund University)
Ass. Prof. Nicolo Dell’Unto (Lund University)
Dr. Sara Perry (University of York)
Dr. James Taylor (University of York)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, and supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network as well as participating PhD students from the following Indian and South African institutions: North-Eastern Hills University, Nagaland University, HNB Garhwal University, Sambalpur University, Deccan College Post Graduate and Research Institute, University of Cape Town, University of Pretoria and University of the Witwatersrand. Two and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

For more information, please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: May 20, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): August 5, 2019.

Appointment of discussants: August 14, 2019.

Organizer

Åsa Berggren

The Value of the Past: Heritage, Economics, and Sustainability

PhD Course, the Norwegian Institute at Athens, October 21-25, 2019.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Oct. 21, 2019 – Oct. 25, 2019, Norwegian Institute at Athens

Heritage resources and archaeology are increasingly being asked to provide benefits and value, including economic, to societies in Europe and globally while simultaneously being challenged by changing approaches to governance and funding. At the same time, the neoliberalist logic of contemporary politics puts cultural heritage at risk of becoming privatized and commodified. This course takes a broad approach to theorize and understand these forces, while at the same time providing the students with a literacy that will allow them to both operate in these systems and engage in a critique of them.

The course will provide students with a basic foundation in economic theory, cultural economics and sustainability concepts as well as an introduction to practical methodologies for evaluating the economic contributions of heritage resources. It subsequently invites the students to examine these models through critical inquiry building on the concepts and models learned. The course explores key themes, including strategies and issues in the use of heritage to promote economic development. We examine the sustainability of strategies and issues relating to public policy and private funding from a sustainability perspective on commercial and academic archaeology and heritage management. The questions that the course explores include:

What are the benefits of applying cultural economic theories to archaeology and heritage management, and what are the theoretical limitations and practical limitations to doing so?
What does “sustainability” mean in the context of using heritage resources for economic purposes, and what strategies and policies are necessary to construct sustainable projects?
How should archaeologists and heritage managers approach government policy-makers and private funders to support heritage projects, and how can economic analysis contribute to their success?
What does “success” and “failure” look like in these cases, what criteria are appropriate for making such judgements, and who are the relevant stakeholder?

Course Work

The course will consist of lectures, seminars, and an excursion.

Before the course starts, the students will prepare a paper for pre-circulation in which they present a case study or example based on their own work, through which they will discuss impacts of economic forces and factors, by applying the concepts learned from the assigned readings. The students are encouraged to include a reflection on the research questions (above) with regards to their specific case study. The assignment is exploratory, and the students are invited to reflect and discuss, rather than produce finished answers. Each paper will be allotted 45 minutes, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. This is followed with a 10 minute prepared commentary from another PhD students, after which an open discussion will follow. These presentations will be points of departure for both applications of learned concepts and the critique of them, allowing students with different points of view in the relationship between heritage, the economic market forces, and sustainability to meet in discussion.

The excursion will explore the impact that the current economic situation in Greece has on its cultural heritage in a broad sense.

Lecturers

Dr Paul Burtenshaw (Sustainable Preservation Initiative)
Dr Peter Gould (The American University of Rome)
Dr Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Dr Neil Silberman (University of Massachusetts)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: June 21, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): September 9, 2019.

Appointment of discussants: September 23, 2019

Organizer

Liv Nilsson Stutz

Writing a Successful Article

PhD workshop, Rome, November 12 - November 14, 2019.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Nov. 12, 2019 – Nov. 14, 2019, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Course Work

Lecturers

Dr Rob Witcher (Durham University)
Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Dr. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Linnaeus University)
Prof. Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: August 2, 2019. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (5 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 14, 2019.

Organizer

Kristian Kristiansen

Digital Data in Practice – Now and in the Future

PhD Workshop, York, December 9 - 11, 2019

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Dec. 9, 2019 – Dec. 11, 2019, University of York

The digital turn in archaeology has meant a rapid development of methods of acquisition, analysis and dissemination, a change of interpretation processes and an opportunity to develop new perspectives and new knowledge. It has also resulted in vast amounts of data and is continuing to do so at a rapid pace. In this workshop we will explore both new digital tools for analysis and dissemination as well as infrastructures for long term repository and archiving.

This workshop aims at developing the digital skills of the students with a particular focus upon critical design of digital projects and their outputs. The workshop is conceived as a continuation of the September 2019 DialPast course “Digital pasts and futures of archaeology,” although it can be attended by any student with an interest in digital archaeology and in applied digital practice. However, the critical engagement with the methods that is stressed in that course will also be a focus for this workshop.

York is the home of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), the Centre for Digital Heritage (CDH), and the Digital Creativity Labs (DC Labs), as well as a rich historical landscape that enables us to immediately apply our ideas and digital tools to local sites. Through engagement with these organisations and heritage partners in York and practical sessions, we will explore the state of the art as it relates to archiving, databases, access, sustainability, app development, web and social media development, digital curation, gaming, 3D recording and modelling, and other forms of interactive media. We will use the facilities of the CDH and ADS, as well as the local heritage landscape, to explore in hands-on fashion the future (and past) of digital archaeology. Students will develop proposals for independent digital projects, refined through design work and critical conversation with the instructors and the class. The aim is to leave the workshop with a realistic, critically-informed plan for a producing a digital resource that can be implemented by students in the future.

Course Work

The course will consist of practical design sessions and tours led by key digital institutions in York. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a written proposal for pre-circulation concerning the development of a specific digital resource or output related to their research project. The 5-page proposal (Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1.5) should provide description of (1) the purpose of the digital resource and a critical rationale for its development; (2) the intended audiences or users of the resource and how their needs are to be served by it; (3) the digital technologies to be used in the project and critical reflection on their strengths and weaknesses in relation to audience and project needs; (4) the archaeological or heritage context (i.e., the site, landscape, time period or other geographical location, event, theme or any specific context within which your project is situated).

Students will refine their proposal in York through participation in the design sessions and tours, and then will present a brief summary and plan for implementation to the class. Students will be offered critical feedback on their plans from the instructors and cohort.

Lecturers

Dr. Åsa Berggren (Lund University)
Ass. Prof. Nicolo Dell’Unto (Lund University)
Dr. James Taylor (University of York)
Dr. Sara Perry (University of York)

Credits

3 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information, please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important Dates

Application for participation: September 9, 2019.

Submission of written proposals (5 p., Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): November 11, 2019.

Organizer

Åsa Berggren (Lund University)

2018

Writing a Successful Article

PhD workshop, Rome, November 28 - November 30, 2018.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Nov. 28, 2018–Nov. 30, 2018, The Norwegian Institute in Rome

Course work

Lecturers

Dr Rob Witcher (Durham University)
Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Dr. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Emory University)
Prof. Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: August 10, 2018. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 26, 2018.

Organiser

Kristian Kristiansen

Heritage in Motion. People, Things and Materials in New Places

PhD Course, Mapungupwe National Park, South Africa November 12-17 2018

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Nov. 12, 2018–Nov. 17, 2018, Mapungupwe National Park, South Africa

Mobility, migration, movement. These are key terms within a range of disciplines; in anthropology, archaeology and various heritage and museum studies. It is long recognised that people, materials and things on the move are strong transformative agents, and more recent theorising recognises that the dense webs and connections between them are transformative too. Taking a cue from the recent ‘mobilities turn’ more broadly in the social sciences, the course will engage with various ontologies of mobility and movement. At the heart of the renewed mobility discourse is the notion that mobility is neither aberrant nor restricted to the physical movement of people. Rather, mobility is seen as an always ongoing and naturalised process that frames and shapes sociality. While keeping in mind that more traditional mobility research continue to regard human movement as the primary purview, the course attendants will be challenged to also explore the recognition that objects, ideas and knowledge are also part of mobile ontologies.

Such rethinking of mobility acknowledges the intimate connections between the human condition and the many nonhuman forces and agencies at play, thus recognising the multi-layered motions that take place in everyday lives. People arriving in new places engage in new social environs, new land-, sea- or cityscapes, new dwellings, new things and new materials. Thus, knowledge about the world and one’s world-views, face the challenge of relating to another world than the previously known, an altered material world.

Consequently, this way of thinking knowledge as challenged and transformed through mobility suggests a re-thinking of the concept of heritage. In this perspective, heritage is no longer a property, something to be held or preserved, but something that is constantly reworked in new relations and environs. In fact, we may think of heritage in motion as a way of exploring and knowing the world rather than as an objectified belonging. Heritage in motion challenges one to reflect, re-think and innovate. And, in turn, to think of heritage as constantly in motion, potentially challenges us to reconsider the ways in which we define and approach well-established terms across a range of disciplines; art, technology, and memory. Across disciplines, for researchers, museum curators and heritage practitioners, it becomes key to understand these transformative activities. Whether engaged in studies of art, technology, museum collections and exhibitions, or provenance studies of materials or objects, or whether studying deep time, the more recent past or the present, heritage in motion is set in complex, multi-layered and always-ongoing social processes.
Aim of the Course

This PhD-course aims to explore notions of heritage in the light of movement of people, objects, and knowledge. The concept of heritage tends to tie together a specific group with a locality and a shared body of material and immaterial heritage. But, how may we understand and study heritage if our premise is not based on heritage as a “natural” relation between people, land and materials, but rather on mobility, movement and encounters? How is heritage transmitted and transformed in constant interaction with other people, materials and landscapes?

The course will be set in Mapungupwe National Park in South Africa, and will focus on this setting in the coursework. By engaging with different disciplinary approaches, both in literature and discussions, the main objective is, however, to extend the discussions beyond this setting and allow participants to think about the theoretical and methodological outlook of their own work.
Course work

The participants will also engage with photographs and imagery of a range of materials, and objects selected by the course coordinators, which will challenge participants to reflect on their own work in relation to memories, materials and things in new places.

Both the reading list and course work will be sensitive to the suggested African context and location of the seminar, in Mapungupwe National Park, South Africa.

Lecturers

Michael Rowlands (University College London)
þóra pétursdóttir (University of Tromsø)
Shadreck Chirikure (University of Cape Town)
Ceri Ashley (University of Pretoria)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

PhD Students travelling from Europe need to possess a valid passport, and a valid visa for South Africa (if required by your home country).

Each student is also responsible for getting the necessary vaccines for visiting South Africa. Check which vaccines your Foreign Service and Health Directorate recommend for the area which the course will be held (Mapungupwe National Park), and make sure to take them in due time. Be aware that Mapungubwe National Park is situated in malaria risk areas.

Each student is also responsible for obtaining travel insurance in addition to health insurance while abroad. Make sure in due time that you are sufficiently covered by your insurance provider.

Please note that that the Research School will not cover these expenses and that each PhD student must bear the costs of these requirements (visas, vaccinations and Insurance(s)) themselves.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: until June 15, 2018. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 8, 2018.

Appointment of discussants: October 15, 2018.

Organisers

Peter Bjerregaard (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)

Per Ditlef Fredriksen (Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo)

Tags: Heritage, Movement, Mobility, Migration, Anthropology, Archaeology, Museums and Museology

Theorizing Collapse and Transformations: Cultural responses to crisis and shock

PhD Course, Athens and Santorini, August 20-24, 2018.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Aug. 20, 2018–Aug. 24, 2018, The Norwegian Institute in Athens

Nothing lasts forever. While many traditional models of culture change work within fundamentally gradualist mind-sets, it is becoming clear that crises and shocks happen, that past climates and environments have changes dramatically and rapidly at times, and that these events and processes can leave a material signature. Prompted by recent climatic change and associated increases in natural hazard impacts, querying the archaeological record for moments of crisis has moved centre stage. Importantly, crises often metastasize outwards from their epicentre, through migration and their impacts on economic and political-ecological networks. The aim of this PhD seminar is to provide research fellows with the opportunity to present aspects of their research related to some form of crisis, to explore human responses to crises, and to discuss how cultural factors influence the understanding of a given crisis, from prehistoric deep time to the contemporary, and, critically, how we can capture these archaeologically. Part of the seminar will take place on Santorini, a volcano whose eruption some 3,600 years ago led to the collapse of the Minoan civilisation and major geopolitical changes in the Mediterranean and beyond. Volcanic eruptions will hence serve an exemplary and analytical hinge for this seminar, but we will discuss all manner of crises. The seminar therefore welcomes presentations by PhD students exploring crises, especially but not exclusively in relation to environmental factors, but also through more theoretical approaches, such as phenomenological perspectives on crises or via theories of affect and emotion. We encourage participation of scholars from all periods, concluding contemporary archaeology.

The seminar seeks to address crises from a variety of angles: How can socio-cultural continuity and/or change be understood in relation to, say, large-scale, rapid changes in the environment or the economy? What role do perceptions of risk, fear and anxiety, for instance, play in cultural responses to a real or perceived crisis? How can central terms such as vulnerability and resilience be handled and analysed archaeologically/historically? And how are we to appreciate – conceptually and empirically – the varied and varying temporalities of collapse, given that some are the result of processes unfolding over decades or centuries, while others are immediately emergent? And, finally, as those working with ongoing crises and disaster increasingly realise the importance of cultural studies of these, can archaeology contribute to reducing vulnerability and building resilience in at-risk communities in the present?

Course work

Lecturers

Professor Shannon Lee Dawdy (University of Chicago)
Professor Jan Driessen (Université Catholique de Louvain)
Professor Neil Price (University of Uppsala)
Associate Professor Felix Riede (Aarhus University)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: until May 4, 2018. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): June 29, 2018.

Appointment of discussants: August 3, 2018.

Tags: ph.d.-kurs, cultural responses, crisis, culture change, climatic change, volcano, human responses to crisis, economic change

How to Succeed with Academic Applications?

PhD workshop, Brussels, June 20 – June 22, 2018.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: June 20, 2018–June 22, 2018, Brussels

Course work

Lecturers

Prof. Håkon Glørstad (Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo)
Dr Katharina Rebay-Salisbury (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Dr. Konstantinos Chilidis (University of Oslo)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students who are in the final phase of their PhD Project to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, 10 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: April 9, 2018. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of Project Application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): May 18, 2018

Organiser

Håkon Glørstad

World Heritage, cultural heritage and archaeology: a critical perspective

PhD Course, Norwegian Centre in Paris May 28 – June 1 2018.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: May 28, 2018–June 1, 2018, Centre Universitaire de Norvège à Paris

In this course we will look closely at the concept of World Heritage and what relation it has with cultural heritage in general and the discipline of archaeology.

In the Unesco list very different world heritage sites are assembled under the protection of the international community. Here natural sites like the rainforest of Sumatra or the African national parks meet historical sites like the Silk Road in China or the Acropolis in Athens or architectural wonders like the palace of Versailles and the Canterbury Cathedral or stunning pre-historic sites like the rock art of Alta or the Neolithic site of Catalhöyük in Turkey. When we address world heritage we also become aware that the Unesco concept has wide ramifications and that it also influences the way we think of heritage and sites that are not on the list.

We therefore wish PhD students in archeology to consider what the conceptual and analytical status is of the materials they produce – by moving the focus from local circumstances to the global perspectives inherent in the Unesco outlook on heritage sites. In doing so we shall present the principles of World Heritage Sites as a starting point for critical reflection and comparison with local cases.

The idea of the course is to take perspectives from critical heritage studies – often dealing with politically and religiously potent sites – and let that inspire our everyday archeological work. The focus is a reflective perspective on what place our everyday archaeological practices play in the larger globalized world. We highlight current debates and conflicts by focusing on current issues such as nationalism or inter-nationalism, political ideology and policy, warfare, tourism, ownership and commodification; tangible and intangible heritage; digitalization, politics of archives and politics of objectification, memory and memorialization. By exploring the ways in which cultural heritage materials are collected, ordered and governed, we aim to explore the critical tool kit available to scholars.

For instance, how can heritage be understood not simply as a ‘thing’ but a cultural, social and political process? What alternative definitions exist beyond Unesco dominant frameworks that emphasise preservationist approaches? The critique of the Unesco outlook has often concerned that it promotes heritage sites and memorials for the purpose of creating ‘official’ pasts and futures. This implies how the technologies of heritage that we engage create memory of some things and places, but exclusion and forgetting of others. Are there problems inherent in all heritage practices? How does the Unesco framework reflect current practices within cultural heritage? Which problems does it raise and which positive effects does it have?

We also ask: How do digital technologies intersect with heritage, museums and material culture? We will discuss the impacts of digital technologies on heritage experience, looking at sites, museums, visitors and scholars. A key aspect for discussion is how new technologies promise a new kind of knowing that embraces both an analytical understanding of collections through online learning and the sharing of knowledge that augments real life engagement with cultural heritage objects. As the digital era becomes part of heritage experience, we ask what will be the future of heritage.

Thereby we wish to highlight how the various technologies of heritage that we choose to engage in our work are tied up with larger structures of funding, university institutional regimes, as well as institutional and bureaucratic regimes of storage, digitalization, exhibitions and publications, media coverage and governmental policies.

By the end of the course students should be capable of thinking beyond mainstream heritage concepts, categories and texts and engage with alternative intellectual and methodological frameworks oriented towards the rethinking and reconstruction of heritage values, practices and ethics.

Examples of issues to be considered during the course (illustrated by case studies):

How does memory and forgetting attach itself to cultural heritage?
How is cultural heritage a technology for social collectivities, like for instance nation-building?
Are there tensions between local collective memories and larger, globalizing or state-building acts of memorialism?
How are local assumptions, values, hierarchies and inequalities encoded within digital heritage Projects?
In what ways can cultural heritage be a conceptual counterweight to capital, commodities and moveable property?

Course work

The reading list will have basic texts of World Culture Heritage as well as texts from cultural heritage research.The course will consist of both seminars and lectures. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted ca. 45 minutes, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. This is followed with a 10 min commentary from one of the other PhD students (selected in advance), after which she or he will chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes.

During the course we will also pay a visit to the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris: http://whc.unesco.org/en/

Lecturers

Professor Lynn Meskell, Stanford University – will discuss the role of the UNESCO for the politics of cultural heritage.
Professor Graeme Were, University of Bristol – will discuss critical heritage studies and digital technologies.
Professor Nils Anfinset, University of Bergen - will cover topics to do with heritage in conflict and in zones of war.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: until February 16, 2018. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): April 27, 2018.

Appointment of discussants: May 4, 2018.

Organiser

Professor Knut Rio, University of Bergen

Building Big? Global Scales of Monumentality – an ethno-archaeological perspective

PhD course and international workshop, Kohima in Nagaland, India 12-24 March 2018.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Mar. 12, 2018–Mar. 24, 2018, Kohima, India

As being an exceptionally diverse and broad phenomenon, monumentality in its varying shapes and meanings has been a long-standing subject of prehistoric and historic archaeological research. Prominent prehistoric forms of monumentality include examples such as the well-known henge sites in Britain (e.g. Parker Pearson 2015); monumental enclosure systems (e.g. Andersen 1977) or different types of megalithic tombs (e.g. Laporte 2016). While monumentality has always been a phenomenon occurring in various societies all over the world, non-European case studies became slowly but constantly also present in the European research community (e.g. Kim 1982; Joussaume 1985; Laporte et al. 2011). Especially the use of comparative and ethnoarchaeological approaches could and already have served to expand the range of interpretation beyond a frame of mainly European and possibly unilateral viewpoints.

During decades of research connected to monumentality, very different theoretical backgrounds and approaches came to use. In European archaeology, analyses of aspects such as the importance of the cultural memory (Assmann 1999); the role of communication routes, visibility and territorial markers (e.g. Sauzade 2014), but also the connection with social differentiation and stratification (e.g. Kristiansen 1984; Müller 2011; Artursson et al. 2016) have been of great influence. Further, factors such as an astronomic use and a strong influence of religious groups were connected to forms of monumentality (e.g. MacKie 1997).

Among these theoretical approaches, essential differences exist regarding the assessment of monumentality as a passive product of (for example) building activities, or as an active factor influenced by and vice versa influencing human behaviour and notions. Formal analyses are able to illustrate different forms of monumentality and are therefore essential. A useful extension on these analyses may include an interpretation of the specific meaning of the monuments and their (changeable) social role.

Following issues could be discussed during the course:

What does monumentality mean in different societies? How could a comparative approach useful to answer archaeological questions on reconstructing social behaviour?
Is it possible to connect the very different theoretical approaches on monumentality? How much are especially theories focussing on the organisation of labour and cooperation influenced by western-capitalist views on economy and labour organisation?
How can a comparative approach that includes ethno archaeology be useful for studies on monumentality? Where can similarities and dissimilarities be found in broad studies on this topic?

Course work

The course will take place in Nagaland together with students and lecturers from Northeast India. Naga megaliths will be one aspect of daily experience.

Workshop “Hierarchy and Balance: the role of monumentality in European and North-East Indian Landscapes”

Subsequent to the PhD-course, an international workshop will take place, focussing on a comparative perspective on monumentality and its role for the respective communities.

The proposed schedule for both the PhD-course and the international workshop is as following:

- 4 to 5 days of PhD-course work

Including presentations by the lectureres and the PhD-students. Each PhD-students` presentation will be followed by a discussion; a pre-circulating paper must be handed in by each PhD-student.

- 7 to 8 days of international workshop

The workshop will be focussing on different forms and aspects of monumentality. It will include 2 days of talks both by European and Indian archaeologists and focus on a comparative perspective. Further, 5 to 6 days of fieldtrips in and around Nagaland are part of the workshop. European and Indian PhD-students will be paired and are expected to work out a protocol on the international workshop/fieldtrips to be handed in afterwards.

Lecturers

Christian Jeunesse (University of Strasbourg)
Tilok Thakuria (North-Eastern Hill University, Tura campus, Meghalaya)
Luc Laporte (University of Rennes)
Marco Mitri (UCC, Shillong)
Johannes Mueller (University of Kiel)
Colin Richards (Orkney College. University of Highlands & Islands.)

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture, exploring different perspectives of monumentality based on their field of expertise, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Credits

Approx. 1,5 month or 10 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: September 30, 2017. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): February 12, 2018.

Appointment of discussants: February 19, 2018.

Organiser

Prof. Dr. Johannes Mueller

Tags: Monumentality, ethnoarchaeology, Archaeology, Dialogues with the Past, PhD Seminar

2017

Writing a Successful Article

PhD workshop, Rome, November 28 - November 30, 2017.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Nov. 28, 2017–Nov. 30, 2017, Det norske institutt i Roma

Course work

Lecturers

Dr Rob Witcher (Durham University)
Prof. Robin Skeates (Durham University)
Dr. Liv Nilsson Stutz (Emory University)
Prof. Kristian Kristiansen (University of Gothenburg)

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: September 11, 2017. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of draft text for a supposed journal (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): November 1, 2017.

Organiser

Kristian Kristiansen

The archaeology of burials: towards the understanding of social structures and religious practices of the past societies

PhD Course, Latvia, November 13-17, 2017.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Nov. 13, 2017–Nov. 17, 2017, Riga, Latvia

The research of burials and burial sites has a long history, perhaps even longer than the history of the discipline of archaeology. The first heritage activists, belonging to antiquarianism, paid attention to the particular features of the ancient burials sites they started to survey in early modern period. Amateur researchers made discoveries of the first recorded bog bodies in the 17th Century, early archaeologists conducted excavations in the necropolis of Mycenaeans and Celts in the 19th century, and so we could go on with a never ending list of archaeological works on burial sites. Research of burials and buried individuals has been a topical issue in archaeology since its earliest days.

Rich burial assemblages, a primary attraction in earlier centuries of archaeology, have during the last Century been placed on the research agenda and in public education alongside with pieces of bones, remains of food and ritual traits. A number of analytical methods and interpretative approaches about mortuary practices and burial assemblages have been developed over the course of time. The archaeological evidence from burials was employed by every main research tradition in the 20th century archaeology (culture-historical, processual, marxistic, so-called post-processual archaeologies), but had different meanings. Funerary traditions and treatment of the dead are also well-established themes in social anthropology, which have heavily influenced archaeological thinking since 1960s.

The burials are recognised as a valuable source for discussing an array of issues. Demographic questions, gender issues, religious rituals and beliefs, the social and political positions of the deceased, the wealth of community, networks of social relations, memory praxis, dietary habits and character of life-style are amongst the research topics that have been, and still are, based on burial material. Static correlation between the buried individual and his funerary inventory has now been replaced by a reflexive attitude; the dead don't bury themselves, therefore the treatment of the deceased tells us quite a lot about the living society.

The long research history of past human remains shows not only achievements in scientific interpretations, but also political interplay with the past. The political use of the mortuary sites and their artefactual and anthropological material has been evident in the last hundreds of years, directly linking archaeological development to the rise of 19th century nationalism, and later to European nation-states and 20th century authoritarian and totalitarian regimes. On the other hand, research of human burials now face several ethical challenges that must be considered as serious factors in conducting excavations, and in keeping and presenting the burial materials.

The course intends to take a cross-cultural approach, and is not limited to any particular prehistoric or historic period, but covers mortuary evidence from Mesolithic to Modern Era. It aims to show methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of burials from various analytical and interpretative perspectives.

Isssues to be considered during the course (illustrated by case studies):

How a burial is linked with multiple identities of the deceased
How cultural traditions and social praxis formed burial rites and commemoration
What can be told about religious views of people on the basis of burials?
How does the burial reflect the community and the individual?
What are the meanings of burial assemblages?
How was mortuary archaeology linked with political ideologies and power structures in the 19th and 20th century?
What are the ethical dilemmas for burial archaeology nowadays?

Course work

Lecturers

Professor Marie Louise Stig Sørensen (University of Cambridge, UK)
Professor Sarah Tarlow (University of Leicester, UK)
Dr Alexander Gramsch (Romano-Germanic Commission (Römisch-Germanische Kommission), Frankfurt am Main, Germany)
Dr Andris Šnē (University of Latvia, Riga)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: until September 1, 2017. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 10, 2017.

Appointment of discussants: October 20, 2017.

Organiser

Andris Šnē, University of Latvia

Tags: Archaeology of burials, Burial sites, Human remains, burial assemblages, Mortuary sites, burial rites, Dialogues with the Past, PhD Seminar, University of Latvia

Archaeology and Time

PhD Course, Iceland, June 6-10, 2017.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: June 6, 2017–June 10, 2017, Iceland

Time is one of those central concepts in archaeology that for a long time was regarded primarily as a methodological issue, that is about controlling the temporal dimension, whether through relative or absolute methods of dating (e.g. see Aitken 1990; Nash 2000). It is only in the past two decades that a substantial theoretical literature on the concept of time has emerged within archaeology, marked by a number of volumes explicitly addressing the topic which express a wide range of perspectives (Bradley 1993; Murray 1999; Karlsson 2001; Lucas 2005; Holdaway & Wandsnider 2008; Robb & Pauketat 2013).

Yet the theoretical aspects of time cannot be so easily separated from the methodological; moreover, there also exists an expanding collection of substantive studies which deal with different aspects of temporality such as biography (Marshall & Gosden 1999; Thomas 1996; Holtorf 2002; Meskell 2005), memory (Bradley 1998; Bradley 2002; Gosden 1994; van Dyke & Alcock 2003; Mills & Walker 2008; Boric 2009; Jones 2007), narrative (Conkey & Williams 1991; Moore 1995, Hodder 1993), long-term history (Hodder 1987, Harding 2005), non-linear systems (McGlade 1999) and the archaeological record (Bailey 2007; Lucas 2008; 2015). Not only is time implicated in a whole range of topics like memory, history or biography, its also frequently articulated and critiqued through oppositions or dichotomies like linear/cyclical, continuity/change, past/present etc., which some philosophers have argued to be intrinsic to any conceptualization of time, rendering it inherently paradoxical (McTaggart 1908; Ricoeur 1988).

This seminar aims to explore time from multiple angles, to revel in this diversity as a way to help us think about how deeply embedded time is in the discpline of archaeology. Its objective is to encourage the participants to think about how time is used in their own research, implicitly or explicitly, and how it frames research questions and methodology and how a more critical and reflective stance toward time might offer new insights or ways of conducting their research.

Some suggested questions and issues for the course to consider might include:

Is linear time, exemplified in chronology and periodization, essential in archaeology?
Is time scalar - and how is the long-term to be related to the quotidian?
How should we think about ‘orders of time’ (Koselleck, Hartog) in relation to archaeology?
What is change - from an archaeological perspective?
What is the relation/difference between or memory and history and what relevance does this have for archaeology?
If the archaeological record is a contemporary phenomenon as many have argued (Binford, Shanks), how does it relate to the past

Participants are invited - and encouraged - to bring their own questions and concerns to the seminar and welcomes students in any period or speciality to show how such concerns enter into their work.

Course work

Lecturers

Professor Laurent Olivier (National Museum of Archaeology in Saint-Germain-en-Laye)
Associate Professor Zoë Crossland (Columbia University)
Professor John Robb (University of Cambridge)
Professor Gavin M. Lucas (University of Iceland)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: February 6, 2017. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): May 5, 2017.

Appointment of discussants: May 15, 2017.

Organiser

Gavin Murray Lucas

Tags: Concept of time, temporality, biography, memory, narrative, Dialogues with the Past, PhD Seminar

Political Economy: Comparative Approaches from Prehistory

PhD course, The Norwegain Institute at Athens, April 7- April 11, 2017.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Apr. 7, 2017–Apr. 11, 2017, Athens

Inspired by severe crises of both our economic and political systems, the last decade has witnessed a renewed interest in political and economic anthropology and has rekindled discussions about the origin and legitimacy of our socio-economic and political systems. Established narratives about the connection between economic interaction and political organisations have been questioned in political debates, in social movements all over the world, and also in the scientific discourses. World-wide bestselling popular books and essays have used historical (Piketty 2015) and anthropological sources (D. Graeber 2001; 2014) to challenge the supposed lack of alternatives to the capitalist economic and political order and open up new spaces for ideas on economic and political organisation. What is the role here for archaeology? Prehistory provides independent cases for long-term social change that shows alternative lines of potential development for human societies as well as a rich material to explore the potential variability of different modes of economic transaction systems and political organisation that reject the naturalisation of profit maximization and self-interest that characterizes neo-liberal economic theories.

In European Archaeology, the dominant narrative has been strongly dominated by a Marxist based, top-down approach to understanding political economy (T.K. Earle 1997; T.K. Earle 2002; T. Earle & Kristiansen 2010), which was developed on a basis of a tradition, which classified modes of political organisation along a clear-cut and unidirectional scale, which strongly links population size and degree of political centralisation (Fried 1967; Service 1968). Others (Brück & Fontijn 2013; Kienlin & Zimmermann 2012) emphasise the inherently social nature of economic transactions, its embeddedness in social relations and cosmological beliefs, religious and magical thinking as emphasized by Mauss or Polanyi (Polanyi 1995; Hann 1998; Mauss & Evans-Pritchard 2011; Hahn et al. 2015). This “bottom-up”-perspective pays more attention to the specific historical contexts of economic relations. The collective action approach has been developed primarily by American scholars (Blanton & Fargher 2008; Carballo 2013). It emphasises the role of social actors and their abilities to form corporative networks within systems of power and thus seems to hold potential for a reconciliation of top-down and bottom-up perspectives on economic and political development. As a main goal of this seminar, we want to explore ways to integrate and balance top-down and bottom-up perspectives, generalising models and the study of historically situated contexts.

This workshop seeks to discuss the following issues:

Is the political economy (top-down) narrative, by essentialising modern concepts of (private) property and naturalising self-interest-driven and dominant individualistic behaviour, legitimising neoliberal doctrines? Or can it provide a toolkit to approach current debates from an archaeological perspective (T. Earle & Spriggs 2015)?
To what degree is the critique of the political economy narrative justified? Does the historical materialism of Marx provide flexibility to understand historical and social variability? Is a Marxist-based approach to political economy incompatible with notions of social and cultural embeddedness of economic relations as articulated by Polanyi?
In what ways does the substantivist approach (Mauss, Polanyi) to economy contribute to our current debates, how can a more differentiated contextualisation of central concepts like property, exchange and value contribute to the political economy model? Or can they inspire new perspectives on our current systems of politics and economy?

Course work

The course will consist of both seminars and lectures. Faculty participants will present their theoretical position as linked to the different approaches to prehistoric variability and processual change in political systems. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted ca. 45 minutes, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. This is followed with a 10 min commentary from one of the other PhD students (selected in advance), after which she or he will chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes.

Lecturers

Professor Timothy Earle (Northwestern University)
Professor Matthew Spriggs (Australian National University)
Professor David Wengrow (University College London)
Associate Professor Colin Grier (Washington State University)

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture during the course, exploring different perspectives on political economy based on their field of expertise, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, Travel and Costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: January 5, 2017. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 6, 2017.

Appointment of discussants: March 13, 2017.

Organiser

Martin Furholt (Kiel University)

Tags: Political Economy

How to Succeed with Academic Applications?

PhD workshop, Brussels, March 1 - March 3, 2017.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Mar. 1, 2017–Mar. 3, 2017, Brussels

The aim of this workshop is to provide future researchers with skills to succeed in writing academic applications and acquiring external funding. It aims at giving PhD students increased knowledge about writing good project applications for research funds, the logic of evaluation of Applications, and the key potential funding sources in Europe. The workshop is developed for PhD candidates who are in the final phase of their PhD projects. The venue is Brussels where the European Research Council is seated.

Course work

The workshop will consist of group work and visits to relevant institutions in Brussels. Before the course starts, each PhD student is to prepare and pre-circulate a draft project application for evaluation, and as a contribution to developing an application from a research group. The simulated call for the workshop projects can be found here.

During the workshop, participants will be divided into three groups. Each group will be charged with the task of creating a joint project application based on the pre-circulated drafts. The groups will also prepare a 10 minute presentation of their project for the last day. The presentations will be structured as a roleplay where the lecturers act as an evaluation panel that assess and give feedback about the project proposals presented by the PhD students. To this end, each group will have 10 minutes to present their project, then recieve a 15 minute evaluation from the panel followed by a 15 minute group discussion.

Lecturers

Prof. Håkon Glørstad
Prof. Kristian Kristiansen
Dr. Konstantinos Chilidis

Credits

3 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students who are in the final phase of their PhD Project to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, 10 PhD students will be admitted to the workshop.

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: January 4, 2017. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of Project Application draft (3 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): February 8, 2017.

Organiser

Håkon Glørstad

2016

Digital Practice Workshop: Critically Engaging with the Digital Turn in Archaeology

PhD Workshop, December 14-16, 2016.

Dialogues With the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Dec. 14, 2016–Dec. 16, 2016, LUX, Lund University

The digital development in the field of archaeology is in a rapid phase of change, as digital technology itself is developing quickly, and advanced hardware and in particular software is becoming increasingly affordable as well as accessible. Digital techniques that were only used by a privileged few only a few years ago can now be put to work in almost any archaeological project. This workshop aims at developing the digital skills of the students. It is thought to be a continuation of the course “Theorising digital archaeology: critically engaging with the digital turn in archaeology” but can be attended by any student with an interest in digital archaeology. However, the critical engagement with the methods that is stressed in the course will also be a focus for this workshop.

Course work

Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a short paper for pre-circulation (4 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5), focusing either on experiences with the implementation of a digital method to a certain archaeological material, or on future plans to use a digital method in an archaeological project. The material used in workshop will be taken from a series of case studies as well as from the student projects. If possible, the workshop may be adjusted according to the methods used in the student papers. This means that the outline of the practical workshop will depend on what kind of methods the students have used.

The workshop will give an introduction to selected methods such as 3D modelling using case studies, e.g. Uppåkra and Kämpinge, Sweden, Çatalhöyük, Turkey and Pompeii, Italy. The students will be able to work with material from the case studies to get practical experience. The students will be working both in a classroom setting with computers, as well as practical experiments in the field.

Preliminary outline

Day one:

Practical introduction and presentation of case studies (Uppåkra, Kämpinge and Çatalhöyük)

Practical workshop in groups

Day two:

Visit at the HumLab (introduction concerning immersive systems and 3D instruments for field acquisition)

Practical workshop in groups

Day three:

Outdoor activities, documentation with UAV (Drone) ad RTK GPS at the archaeological site of Uppåkra.

Presentation and discussion of group assignment

Concluding remarks

Lecturers

Dr. Åsa Berggren (Sydsvensk Arkeologi)
Associate Professor Nicolo Dell’Unto (Lund University)
Dr. James Taylor (York University)

Credits

3 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at Lund University.The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the workshop for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network. Students outside the Dialogues with the Past network will have to cover these costs themselves.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no.

Important dates

Application for participation: ~~August 15, 2016~~ August 23, 2016

Submission of working papers (4 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): November 1, 2016

Organiser

Dr. Åsa Berggren (Sydsvensk Arkeologi)

Tags: Digital Archaeology, Çatalhöyük, Pompeii, Uppåkra, Kämpinge, PhD workshop, The Digital Turn, Dialogues with the Past

Materialities of the Pressing Past: Challenges in post-medieval archaeology and the archaeology of the recent past

PhD course, University of Copenhagen, October 31 – November 4, 2016

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Oct. 31, 2016–Nov. 4, 2016, Copenhagen University

While archaeology once described a discipline that studied antiquity and the ancient past, its field of study and concerns have expanded during the past decades with the development and strengthening of research on more recent and even contemporary societies. Today archaeology is widely defined as the study of material culture, or even as ‘the discipline of things’. This does not mean that chronology and periodization do not figure in archaeological research anymore, nor does it imply that archaeology is no-longer synonymous for many – maybe most – archaeologists and laymen with the study of the ‘past’.

Nevertheless, the past is not what it used to be in archaeological research. While the past was once easily recognisable as something ‘old’ or ‘over’, something ‘distant’, archaeology has lately been subject to a proliferation of studies into a ‘contemporary past’ or a ‘recent past’. This field of archaeology still appears to retain itself as a no-man’s-land as few scholars seem to be able or willing to define a precise time horizon for whatever is considered ‘recent’. Research applying this epithet thus often embrace the entire post-Medieval period, including studies of the Renaissance, the Industrial era, Modernity and the 20th century, and even studies of ongoing events through approaches that traditionally belonged to other fields of research, such as anthropology, sociology, aesthetics, politics and cultural geography. In some respects, the entire interest in chronological orientations falls into the background. Or, as Victor Buchli and Gavin Lucas contend, ‘we no longer regard archaeology as a discipline defined by a particular time period (…) the whole issue of how recent the subject matter of archaeology should be, becomes irrelevant’ (Buchli and Lucas 2001: 3).

This seminar aims to explore the landscape of archaeological research as it transgresses conventional frameworks for a discrete ‘past’ and turns towards archaeology as the study of things, events and processes that are of archaeological relevance, regardless of their chronological age. The objective is to allow participants to explore how the past continues to ‘matter’ in the present; how it is consciously or involuntarily remembered in ever new contexts; and how this creates a friction between past and present. This urges a perspective beyond our present, thus also demanding a future-oriented perspective.

There are numerous ways in which the past can be pressing, insistent or demanding – i.e. refuse to pass – which lead to a number of questions that may be addressed at the seminar:

How does the notion of a ‘pressing’ or ‘present’ past challenge the conventional understanding of archaeology through tropes of ‘recovery’ and ‘rediscovery’?
How does a notion of a ‘present’ and ‘pressing’ past affect understandings of memory, of commemoration, and the memory politics of the heritage sphere?
What does ‘recent’ imply for archaeology, and how does the discipline deal with notions of contemporaneity?
How can notions of emergence and emergency help us approach notions of a ‘pressing’ past in the past?
How does the ‘pressing past’ challenge the fundamental separation of preservation and loss, also figuring in the heritage discourse?
If archaeology is the ‘discipline of things par excellence’, what responsibility does this imply for our work?

These are some of the questions that will be brought up in the course. They will be supplemented by the issues and challenges raised by the PhD students on the basis of their on-going projects.

The seminar especially invites participants working with post-Medieval archaeology in the broadest sense. Yet, it is also open to perspectives deriving from Prehistoric and Medieval archaeology with relevance for exploring notions of the ‘pressing past’, including all forms of heritage research.

Course work

Lecturers

Dr Alfredo González-Ruibal (Incipit, CSIS, Santiago de Compostela)
Dr Christopher Witmore (Texas Tech University)

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture during the course, exploring different perspectives on the ‘pressing past’ based on their field of expertise, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: August 1, 2016. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Abstracts of ½ page: September 1, 2016.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 1, 2016.

Appointment of discussants: October 21, 2016.

Organiser

Tim Flohr Sørensen (University of Copenhagen) and Þóra Pétursdóttir (UiT The Arctic University of Norway)

Theorising Digital Archaeology: Critically Engaging with the Digital Turn in Archaeology

PhD course, August 29-September 3, 2016.

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Aug. 29, 2016–Sep. 3, 2016, The Norwegian Institute at Athens

Digital archaeology – digital documentation methods and digital analytical tools – has been around for decades. Digital tools have become ubiquitous in archaeology and are increasingly an integral part of archaeological practice.

The digital development in the field of archaeology is in a rapid phase of change, as digital technology itself is developing quickly, and advanced hardware and in particular software is becoming increasingly affordable as well as accessible. Digital techniques that were only used by a privileged few only a few years ago, can now be put to work in almost any archaeological project. This has changed archaeological work profoundly. In essence it has changed all archaeological information processes and researchers are asking whether these changes may lead to a paradigm shift. However, there has been very little research on the consequences and implications of this gradual shift, e.g. how it affects archaeological interpretation processes.

The course will give both an introduction to the development of selected digital methods used in archaeology and a more in depth discussion of theoretical perspectives. The development of a digital archaeology will be outlined as well as its theoretical implications over time, including consideration of the state of digital archaeology today. Special focus will be placed on the implications for the archaeological interpretation process and the possibilities the methods may offer regarding a shift of perspective and added information and knowledge. One goal is to encourage students to begin thinking critically about the specific types of methods they might deploy and the potential impacts of those methods. As an example the discussion will be fleshed out by reference to Ҫatalhӧyük’s reflexive methodology and its strengths and weaknesses.

We will also discuss the development of critical GIS and GIScience, one of the most critically self-aware components of the Digital Turn, and consider various case studies and implications for archaeology. This will result in a discussion about the advantages of adopting a critical approach to applied digital technologies in archaeology, both for each student research project and for understanding the context of other people’s research within the wider discipline. The course will also include a discussion of digital visualisation practice including its reception by various audiences. We will discuss historical continuities in visual ideals and methodologies, audience expectations, the relationship between data and interpretation, and skillsets and disciplinary standards, all with the aim of encouraging students to consider for whom they are producing digital archaeology and how it is likely to be circulated and received by others. In addition, practical activities will be included. We will do hands-on activities related to thinking about digital visual practices as art, craft or science and visit a local institution or site with the intent of looking at the application of digital media in public spaces.

The main aim of the course is to make students critical and aware of the circumstances of their own digital outputs.

Course work

Lecturers

Associate Professor Nicolo Dell’Unto (Lund University)
Dr. James Taylor (York University)
Dr. Sara Perry (York University)

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture during the course, exploring different perspectives on digital archaeology based on their field of expertise, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at the Norwegian Institute at Athens.The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network. Students outside the Dialogues with the Past network will have to cover these costs themselves.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: ~~June 1~~ June 8, 2016

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): August 1, 2016

Appointment of discussants: August 8, 2016

Organiser

Dr. Åsa Berggren, Sydsvensk Arkeologi

Tags: Digital Archaeology, PhD Seminar, Ҫatalhӧyük, GIS, The Digital Turn, Dialogues with the Past

Alliance and Gift Exchange Theory Revisited

PhD course, the Norwegian Institute at Athens, May 9-13, 2016

The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology Dialogues with the Past in collaboration with The Norwegian Institute at Athens.

Time and place: May 9, 2016–May 13, 2016, the Norwegian Institute at Athens

Most prehistoric societies were organized on the basis of kinship and other bonds created between lineage groups through alliance. Alliance is normally founded upon gift exchange and inter-marriage, and has formed networks of contacts and movements of people and goods.

The body of theory connected to this area of research is basic for all scholars of prehistory. While originally coming from the subjects of sociology and social / cultural anthropology, prehistoric archaeology has adopted this theoretical framework. However, through studies of artifacts and ‘styles’ and their distribution, archaeologists can also contribute to this field of study. Prehistorians may provide case studies from virtually any prehistoric context and in this way also expand the anthropological knowledge held in common and bring greater time depth to this field of study.

Alliances, kinship and gift exchange encompasses a number of interrelated topics which will be explored in the course of the seminar. One is the classic issue of gift exchange; another is the epitome of “woman as gift”. A related topic is the “anthropology of feasting”. During Alliance and Gift Exchange Revisited, we will

Resume the classic literature of gift exchange and discuss more recent contributions.
Study the relationship between gift and gender. Generally, we will address social persons as “objects of exchange”, and related to this, how goods and material objects attached to the person form integral parts of the alliance. Lévi-Straussian alliance theory, shaped throughout the 50’s and 60’s, held that woman represents the ultimate gift, a position that was based on a large body of ethnographic material. In the seminar we will go into the criticism of this theory, but also address the question of whether parts, or rather which aspects of it, can still be defended.
Bring attention to the area of feasting, which is a central aspect of gift exchange and alliance making.

Networking and alliance-making is politics; it sets the course for smaller and larger historical changes. The theoretical tools and concepts explored in this course provide fundamental approaches to understanding the archaeological record. Thus, the ultimate goal of this seminar is to educate the doctoral students within this area as well as to inspire the use of the concepts.

PhD fellows with an interest in these research areas and perspectives are welcomed to sign up for this course. Expertise in the material analysis of ancient technologies is not a prerequisite. Participants in the course must prepare a paper for discussion.

Course work

Lecturers

Professor Michael Rowlands (Department of Anthropology, University College London)
Ass. Professor Thorgeir Kolshus (Department of Social Anthropology, University of Oslo)
Professor Jorunn Økland (Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo)
Ass. Professor Ingrid Fuglestvedt (Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo)

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at the Norwegian Institute at Athens. The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network. Two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

The Graduate School invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. Please follow this link to apply for the course (in English only). From these applications, c. 20 PhD students will be admitted to the course.

Information

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: ~~February 15, 2016~~ February 22, 2016

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): April 11, 2016

Organiser

Ass. Professor Ingrid Fuglestvedt, University of Oslo
Tags: Gift Exchange, Alliance, Kinship, Woman as Gift, PhD Seminar, Feasting, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Dialogues with the Past

The Politics of Heritage: Museums, Landscapes, Material Culture

PhD course, Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, April 4-8, 2016

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology.

Time and place: Apr. 4, 2016–Apr. 8, 2016, University of Oxford

Heritage is an idea that is concerned with the potential of the past in the present. Since the early 20th century, the political nature of archaeological and anthropological conceptions of heritage and material culture has been debated through a series of impulses – from anti-racism and anti-fascism, to Marxism, feminism, post-colonial theory, the Civil Rights movement, indigenous rights, queer theory and environmentalism.

Today, studies of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, class, the decolonization of the academy, and even climate change have brought the question of politics into the mainstream of the theory and practice of archaeology and heritage – both in Europe and around the world. And yet the field of politics and heritage is enormously diverse, ranging from ideas of immaterial, material, cultural and natural heritage to the ‘ontological politics’ of material culture. The longstanding idea of politics as nuancing our interpretations is now complemented by suggestions that our ideas about heritage are being fundamentally reshaped through politics.

This course explores the contemporary diversity of ideas and debates about the politics of heritage – in museums, at archaeological sites, excavations and landscapes, and through material culture. The course takes stock of current approaches in archaeology and related fields to questions of public engagement, of cultural ownership and repatriation, of the contributions of feminism and LGBTQ studies, of Eurocentrism and post-colonial history, of the politics of environmental change and the anthropocene, of the governance, bureaucracy and funding of Heritage, and of alternative histories of museums and fieldwork.

Doctoral students in Archaeology with an interest in the Politics of Heritage are invited to apply for the Fellowships, as are doctoral students in related disciplines – e.g. anthropology, history, cultural geography, heritage and museum studies – whose work directly engages with questions of the politics of heritage. Participants on the course must prepare a paper for discussion.

Course work

Lecturers

Professor Mark Leone (University of Maryland, College Park)
Professor Sian Jones (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures, University of Manchester)
Associate Professor Laura McAtackney (School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University)
Professor James Symonds (Department of Archaeology, University of Amsterdam)

The participating lecturers will each give a lecture during the course, exploring different perspectives on the politics on heritage based on their field of expertise, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations. The seminar days will be structured with adequate time for spin-off debates and networking opportunities in mind.

Organiser

Dan Hicks, Associate Professor and Curator, School of Archaeology and Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, with accommodation and meals provided by Lady Margaret Hall, which is an Oxford College a short walk from the Museum. Rooms are en suite and single occupation. The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students who are part of the Dialogues With the Past network. Students outside the Dialogues with the Past network will have to cover these costs themselves.

Registration

For more information please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

Important dates

Application for participation: January 22, 2016.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5):

March 7, 2016.

Appointment of discussants: March 14, 2016.

2015

Archive archaeology - Archiving and collecting the past

PhD course, Aarhus University, November 16-17, 2015

Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology in collaboration with the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University

Time and place: Nov. 16, 2015–Nov. 17, 2015, Aarhus University

“Archives should represent a prime research and heritage asset; and yet historically they have been under-resourced and underused.” (Hedley Swain, ‘Archive Archaeology’, in Oxford Handbook of Public Archaeology 2012: 352)

All archaeology ends in archives. The role of archives in the archaeological research and their importance for the interpretation of archaeological collections is often ignored. Whereas post-processual archaeology has shown how any archaeological interpretation is deeply inflicted with the subjects involved, there is still an unspoken idea of the archives containing ‘objective documents’ of past processes.

This course deals with documents and collections as crucial parts of archaeological data. Even if the topic of archives and collections not is a new one the importance of the way information is written, filtered and communicated through the archives and documents in collections is often overlooked.

In this course we want to take a critical look on collections and archives as archaeological material. The information that follows with the object is all that we have: how do we critically approach such information? How can we estimate and use varied and personal documents? How do we stay aware of the process of “filtration” which such information has also undergone?

The course will treat topics such as “organization of information”, “archival structures”, “archival archaeology – writing the history of collections and archives”, “information flows”, “structuring and connecting archives and collections” as well as “the importance of historiography”.

Through a series of guest lectures and workshops as well as presentations by the PhD students the course will offer a critical approach to archives and documentation and to the ways in which such can be handled. The course runs over two days and is structured around an introduction, several guest lectures including case study based research, student presentations and workshops in which both students and guest lecturers are involved.

Course work

Each PhD student will prepare a paper of 5-10 pages for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the workshop topic. All participants are expected to read the pre-circulated papers before the workshop. At the seminar, students will be required to orally present elements relevant to a discussion of the submitted paper (15 minutes), as well as serve as a first opponent to a fellow student’s paper (10 minutes). All students and lecturers are expected to participate in an ensuing open discussion (20 minutes) and the first opponent will chair the general discussion.

Lecturers

Associate Professor Marc-Antoine Kaeser, University of Neuchatel, Switzerland.
Museum curator Anne Haslund Hansen, The National Museum, Copenhagen, Denmark.
PhD student in Art History Theis Vallø, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark.

Organisers and teachers

Vinnie Nørskov and Rubina Raja, School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University

Credits

3 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at the School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University. The Graduate School will finance and arrange for travel and accommodation. Two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

dial-past@iakh.uio.no . From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select c. 10 PhD student participants.

Information

For more information regarding application and logistics, please contact: dial-past@iakh.uio.no

For more information on the course topic and course work, please contact :

Prof. Rubina Raja: rubina.raja@cas.au.dk
Ass. Prof. Vinnie Nørskov: klavn@cas.au.dk

Important dates

Application for participation: October 1, 2015

Submission of working papers (5-10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 16, 2015

Appointment of opponents: October 30, 2015

Theoretical Responses to Bioarchaeological Studies and Identity Issues

PhD course, Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Madrid, November 3-8, 2015

Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology, Graduate School Kiel “Human Development in Landscapes”, German Archaeological Institute Madrid

Time and place: Nov. 3, 2015–Nov. 8, 2015, Madrid

The creation of ethnicity in our modern societies follows a perception of social relations that exist at places where we live. However, racism and fascism try to construct national and ethnic boundaries linked to origins (“Herkunft”), often rooted in history. In recent political discussions, the responsibility of archaeology and history cannot be underestimated. This is even more the case as simple interpretations of aDNA and isotope data led to a Kossina-like renaissance with interpretations of “ethnic groups” in prehistoric worlds.

Nevertheless, progress in bioarchaeological studies (e.g. aDNA and isotope studies) in combination with advances in chronological dating has enabled archaeology and history to interpret a quite new set of data. Models and visions of scholars are exceptionally divergent. Whereas most of the new information would have most likely been used ten years ago to identify far distance migrations, nowadays restricted mobility is also reconstructed with the same set of data. We are confronted with contradictory interpretations.

One of the reasons for the divergent discourses is found in the lack of a general holistic approach within archaeological theory and methods in integrating the new scientific data. From the viewpoint of archaeological and anthropological theory, the main issue concentrates on questions relating to how identities of past societies can be reconstructed on different spatial scales, how does mobility contribute to a concept of identity and should a genetic pattern ever contribute to the reconstruction of identities? Group and community identities are societal products and constructions that constitute a perception of social relations.

Three main areas for discussion can be defined for the workshop:

Identities as an aspect of social and cultural perceptions through space and time;
Distinguishing different qualities of data associated with “identities” and “mobility” by archaeologists;
The theoretical integration of bioarchaeological studies in the construction of identities.

PhD fellows with an interest in these research areas are welcomed to sign up for this course. Expertise in the material analysis of ancient technologies is not a prerequisite. Participants in the course must prepare a paper for discussion.

Lecturers

Prof. Dr. Stephen Shennan (UCL London)
Prof. Dr. Ben Krause-Kyora (Kiel University)

Organiser

Johannes Müller, Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes, Johanna Mestorf Academy, Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at the German Archaeological Institute in Madrid. The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students. Two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

The Graduate School invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. Please use this application form and send it to: v.m.viestad@iakh.uio.no. From these applications, c. 20 PhD students will be admitted to the course.

Information

Vibeke Maria Viestad, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1019 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: v.m.viestad@iakh.uio.no. Phone (+47) 22841945, Mobile (+47) 41467354.

Important dates

Application for participation: August 21, 2015

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): October 1, 2015

The Social Dynamics of Technology

PhD course, Centre franco-norvégien en sciences sociales et humaines (FMSH), Paris, June 1-5, 2015

Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology in collaboration with Programme franco-norvégien, FMSH

Time and place: June 1, 2015–June 5, 2015, Paris

Technology has an enormous importance and impact on modern society just as much as it is shaped by the values and beliefs of the communities creating and using it. Still, technology as an integrated part of social dynamics is hardly part of the public and political agenda. Sci-fi literature and social science are the only noticeable exceptions to this ignorance. This course deals with the social dynamics of technology from an empirical point of view.

The last 20 years have witnessed a fast growing interest in the French epistemological tradition of Chaîne Opératoire. This research tradition combines experimental and tangible analysis with critical reflection over the epistemological and social framework for this practice. Several important questions concerning the social dimensions of technology are raised inside this framework. Four main areas of research can be defined:

Technology as an aspect of social and cultural transmission through time and space.
The relations between cognitive capacities and technology, especially in regards to cultural representations and embodied practice
Technology, continuity, and social change
Technological aspects of social life

The first area encompasses the study of transmissions of skill and knowledge, the second the ever fascinating question of the relation between mind, body, and matter, the third touches upon the fundamental questions of the role of materialism and finally, the fourth field of study is the portal to the new vogue of social research, the ‘agency’ of things.

PhD fellows with an interest in these kinds of research areas are welcomed to sign up for this course. Expertise in the materials analysis of ancient technologies is not a prerequisite. Participants on the course must prepare a paper for discussion.

Lecturers

Dr. Marcia-Anne Dobres, University of Southern Maine
Professor Nathan Schlanger, Ecole nationale des chartes
Dr. Jan Apel, University of Lund

Organiser

Professor Håkon Glørstad, University of Oslo

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

The seminar will take place at the Centre franco-norvégien en sciences sociales et humaines. The Graduate School will finance and arrange travel and accommodation, as well as supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students. Two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

Information

Important dates

Application for participation: February 13, 2015

Submission of working papers: May 4, 2015

The Museum as Third Space

PhD course, Centre franco-norvégien en sciences sociales et humaines FMSH, France, April 13-17, 2015

Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology & MusVit in collaboration with Programme franco-norvégien, FMSH

Time and place: Apr. 13, 2015–Apr. 17, 2015, Paris

Aims

Museums and collections have in many ways operated as the birthplace for modern sciences of man and culture. Here, materials of the world could be ordered and categorized, and processes of cultural evolution and diffusion that could not be observed in the empirical world could be scrutinized through the odd amassment of objects. However, up through the 20th century the university took over as the prime mover in the development of these sciences while museums increasingly focused on their public relations, as places for educating and engaging ‘the people’.

This division of labor between university and museum seems to be challenged again today. A number of developments have made it possible to re-insert the museum as a main agent in the development of research: The re-emergence of materiality in social sciences, experiments in collaboration between art and science, and experiments in engaging the lay public in research processes are all issues of great importance to modern museums.

As an overarching term we will suggest that we may consider the museum as a ‘Third Space’; a constructed field away from the empirical field, where objects and ideas can be put together traversing time and space, and where different disciplinary backgrounds can be put in motion in order to constantly re-explore the potentials of ideas and objects. In this sense the museum challenges what empiricism is and how we may relate to that in the social sciences.

What we want to explore through this course is how the museum may position itself as a cutting-edge research institution that takes advantage of the particular framework given by the institution: interdisciplinary collaborations, collections, material installations and a direct relation to an audience.

To discuss these issues we have invited 3 key speakers who have all worked with and considered the potential of the museum as a particular kind of research institution:

As former director of Museum Cultural History in Oslo, Rane Willerslev has initiated an institutional change at MCH, aiming to place research in the centre of the museum’s operations.

As an archaeologist and visual anthropologist, Sara Perry has worked theoretically and practically with visualizations of the past, both towards a public and an academic audience.

And, as a visual theorist, Irit Rogoff has suggested the term ‘criticality’ as a way to describe new understandings of knowledge as always situated and performative in their essence.

Course work

The course will consist of lectures from senior researchers, seminars with pre-prepared student papers and museum visits. Each PhD student should have, before the start of the course, a paper of 5 pages prepared for pre-circulation. At the seminar, PhD students will give short presentations of c. 15 minutes on problems directly related to the course topic. After the seminar, a paper with reflections from the seminar is to be submitted.

Lecturers

Rane Willerslev, University of Aarhus
Sara Perry, University of York
Irit Rogoff, Goldsmiths, University of London

Organisers

Peter Bjerregaard, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

Brita Staxrud Brenna, Department of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select c. 20 PhD students for the course. Interested PhD students should apply for the course to: Vibeke Viestad, E-mail: v.m.viestad@iakh.uio.no, using this application form.

Information

Vibeke Viestad, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1019 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: v.m.viestad@iakh.uio.no.

Important dates

Application for participation: January 28, 2015

Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Submission of working paper (5 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 9, 2015

Submission of post-seminar paper (5 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): May 15, 2015

2014

Encountering Imagery: New strategies for using images as a source material for studies of the past

PhD Seminar in Berlin, November 3-7, 2014

Dialogues with the Past. Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time: Nov. 3, 2014–Nov. 7, 2014

This course will provide an advanced orientation in current archeological image-theory. We will discuss how a reflective iconography, an awareness of materiality and a revitalized concept of art may help us encounter images in a non-mimetic manner. The central question is how we can go from a search of what is being depictured to a more wide-ranging examination of the role of this depiction in the (pre-) historic life-worlds. As these issues concern all archeologists who use images as a source material, we hope to attract course participants from a wide range of research fields.

Images are, without doubt, among the most enigmatic and fantastic manifestations of human creativity. By creating and internalizing images we are able to cast phenomena which elude linguistic articulation into a communicable form. Images extend the borders of perception, they serve as tools for the comprehension of notions that cannot be duplicated, only conceptualized. In archeology the communicative capacity of images tends, however, to be down-played. Through our assiduous efforts to identify motifs, we nourish the idea that images mirror past life-worlds. What, we frequently ask, is the image in front of our eyes actually depicting? Is the anthropomorphous figure on the picture stone to be seen as a mythological or a real warrior? Is the rock art panel best interpreted as a narration of a hunt, or should it rather be understood as a schematic overview of the cosmological system? When these kinds of questions preoccupy our discussion we end up with a theory of images which resembles the platonic idea of mimesis. We handle images as if they were reflections of elements in the life-world, and fail to remember that images are also able to visualize a set of non-material aspects of social life.

The identification of what is being portrayed is of course not an unimportant part of the archeological work. To determinate what an image depicts, be it a mythological creature, a historical person, a particular plant, animal or thing, or element of a narrative is an important fundament for further examinations. That such an act of identification might be a crucial first step does not, however, imply that it is satisfying as a final conclusion. Because, the appearance and use of a motif is just as meaningful as the very choice of what is being depicted. How the motif has been portrayed, in what material, in what style, with what attributes and on what kind of object are examples of parameters that require our attention. When analyzing these aspects we approach the picture’s function rather than its model. Patterns in the use of a motif may tell us something about the role of the motif and how it has been utilized in order to manifest, and elaborate on, a conceptual content.

In recent years, a number of archeologists have explored images in order to achieve knowledge about their role. These new attempts to understand images as more than pure depictions can be narrowed down to three strategies or ‘analytical entrances’. This course will be devoted to discussing these three approaches and their usability for the particular case studies presented by the lecturers and the PhDs.

The first of these approaches is advocated by scholars who have searched for new ways of using iconography. By investigating variations of the same motif, scholars have shown that images depicting the same object may refer to different contents of meaning. This is an important insight that helps iconographic research overcome its tendency to see symbols as representative of one, and only one, meaning-content.

The second important reorientation has the discussion in thing-theory, materiality and post humanism as its point of departure. Several scholars have pointed out that since images have been comprehended as passive containers for the artist’s original intentions, their ability to evoke associations and practices has been ignored. The main point is that images do not just reflect, but also affect, the social life that surrounds them. This involves taking the images’ agency into account, seeing images as animated beings with demands and drives of their own, and has mainly been approached through analyses of the images’ material context. A common and rewarding strategy consists of a careful survey of how the landscape that surrounds an image choreographs the observer. What does the image require of the observer? Is it located in a spot hard to access or can it only be seen with the help of artificial light? These kinds of questions can give us information about how people interacted with imagery, a kind of knowledge that is hard to deduce from motif analysis alone.

The third important new-orientation constitutes a newly awakened interest in the philosophy of aesthetics, especially theories that concern concept(s) of art. As several scholars have pointed out, a revitalized concept of art might be a constructive methodology for taking the non-mimetic and multifaceted nature of images into consideration. If something general can be said about works of art, it is that they are not proxies for the depicted objects. Moreover, an art theoretical perspective on archeological images can help us move on from the strict dichotomies that usually structure our interpretations. Art is not entirely material or transcendental, nor profane or sacral and can neither be seen as entirely individual or collectively situated. Of course, the interest for art theory is not an attempt to project a modern and western notion of the sublime onto prehistoric imagery. The task is rather to explore the range of definitions that have been developed and see if it is possible to form an archeologically applicable concept of art. In such a case, we shall have a theoretical tool that can help us reconcile the fact that creative expressions are not exclusive for our contemporary society. Establishing an archeologically adjusted concept of art is thus not just a strategy to overcome the paradigm of identification, but also a way of illuminating that past societies have also been entitled to artistic and complex uses of imagery.

Course work

The course program will consist of lectures from the participating senior scholars presenting the different perspectives outlined above. The lectures will be followed by seminars in which the PhD students present and comment the pre-circulated papers. Regarding the arrangement of these seminars, each PhD student will prepare a 10 page paper for pre-circulation. The text should clearly address her or his research project in relation to the approaches in archeological image theory described in the course literature. In the seminars, each PhD student will present her or his paper for approximately 15 minutes. Thereafter, one of the other course members will comment for 10 minutes after which she or he will join the open discussion for about 20 minutes. The opponent is expected to make constructive comments, which means that the critical views should be presented in such a way that the respondent clearly benefits from them in her or his future research.

Outdoor session

Since the city of Berlin provides various opportunities for encountering imagery some of the seminars will also be held as outdoor sessions, which means that our discussions will take place at selected spots within the urban landscape. We will visit museums and stop at public spaces that contain interesting examples of imagery or drop by some open studio occupied by one of Berlins many contemporary artists.

Lecturers

Troels Myrup Kristensen, Section for Classical Archaeology, Department of Culture and Society, Aarhus University
Judith Barringer, School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh
John Robb, Department of Archaeology, University of Cambridge

Organiser

Ylva Sjöstrand, Dept. of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University,

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The Graduate School will support travel and accommodation for all participating PhD students. Air tickets must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

Interested PhD students should apply for the course to: Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901.

Deadlines

Application for participation: ~~August 4, 2014~~. Deadline extended to September 13.

Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Abstracts of ½ page: ~~August 25, 2014.~~ Extended to September 24.

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): ~~October 6, 2014~~. Extended to October 13.

Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: ~~October 13, 2014.~~ Extended to October 20.

Human and environment: From multidisciplinary to interdisciplinary research

PhD Seminar in Tromsø, Norway, September 30 - October 3, 2014

Dialogues with the Past. Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology & Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Time and place: Sep. 30, 2014–Oct. 3, 2014, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø

The overall theme for the course is the relationship between humans and their environment and how this can be addressed through interdisciplinary collaboration. The course opens with a consideration of the concept of interdisciplinary research, stressing the distinction between multidisciplinary and inter-disciplinary organization and approaches. The students will be introduced to publications discussing interdisciplinary research and projects. Examples of different types of interdisciplinarity (within and between faculties) will be provided. In particular the collaboration between humanities and environmental/natural sciences will be addressed. Main emphasis will be given to discussing how to initiate interdisciplinary research, how to formulate shared research questions, and how to communicate across disciplines by employing a shared set of concepts. As part of this it will be acknowledged that interdisciplinary research is time-consuming and requires understanding of each other’s source material, methods, restrictions and potentials. The importance of shared goals and mutual well-defined mid-term goals, that are adjusted regularly, will be stressed.

Senior researchers from relevant disciplines such as paleo-geology, zoology, archaeology, anthropology and pharmacy will contribute towards the identification of possible joint research questions with regard to the relationship between human and environment, relevant and accessible data, relevant methods and how to combine these in more embracing interdisciplinary projects.

The lectures will cover such themes as natural environmental processes, human adaptability to a changing environment, different human adaptations to the environment and human impact on the environment. Students will, based on the reading list and their own doctoral research, present a case study of relevance (i.e. how to make a theme close to their own research more interdisciplinary). This will be disseminated to all participants in advance of the seminar. Another student, selected in advance, will act as initial discussant and chair the following open debate.

The course is a part of the PhD course portfolio of the Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and Education at UiT (ARK-8004), which can be taken as a single course independent of study program.

Course work

The course is organised as a 4-day workshop. The course will consist of lectures from senior researchers, seminars with pre-prepared student papers and a one-day fieldtrip to relevant sites in the vicinity of Tromsø. The fieldtrip will focus on the potential for truly inter-disciplinary research questions and projects linked to human and environment.

Each PhD-student should, before the start of the course, have prepared a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. The maximum length of the paper is 10 pages. In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted ca. 1 hour, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. A fellow PhD student will be assigned in advance as discussant and present an approx. 10 minute comment, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for approx. 30 minutes.

The pre-circulated paper must be edited for a short article for publication in a collective volume on Human and Environment, for example in Journal of Nordic Archaeological Science.

Learning outcomes

After completing the course the students will have acquired a platform from which to proceed with interdisciplinary research projects. Other outcomes will be advanced knowledge of the potential and requirements of interdisciplinary research, as well as insight into the challenges in such projects. The students will attain an advanced understanding of the diversity in scientific concepts, language and data availability in different disciplines, and the challenges these pose for interdisciplinary research. They will be skilled in their ability to identify and formulate interdisciplinary research questions and their ability to write an academic paper addressing interdisciplinary research.

Lecturers

Prof. Dan Hammarlund, Department of Geology, Lund University, Sweden.
Dr. Kari Loe Hjelle, The Natural History Collections, University Museum Bergen, Norway.
Prof. Peter Jordan, The Arctic Centre, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
Dr. Åsa Larsson, Societas Archaeologica Upsaliensis (SAU), Sweden.

Organisers

Prof. Kerstin Lidén, Department of Archaeology and Social anthropology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway (and Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University).

Dr. Guiliana Panieri, Department of Geology, Faculty of Science and Technology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place in Tromsø, at The Arctic University of Norway. The Nordic Graduate School will finance travel, accommodation and supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students. Travel expenses and accommodation will be covered for visiting PhD-students from institutions participating in the Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology and the RES-clim Research School. Air tickets and accommodation must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself and will be refunded by the School after the seminar. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare available. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

Admitted PhD students in archaeology, anthropology, history, geology, botany, zoology and related disciplines are invited to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course, and an abstract of 1/2 page. Please use this application form. Make sure that you fill in both parts. From the applications the organisers will select up to 25 PhD students for the course, in cooperation with the Graduate School.

Interested PhD students should apply for the course to: Marcela Douglas, Email: marcela.douglas@uit.no

Information

Lene Melheim, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1019 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 22841957, Mobile (+47) 99755435.

Charlotte Damm, Department of Archaeology and Social anthropology, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Box 6050 Langnes, N-9037 Tromsø, Norway. Phone: (+47) 77644373.

Deadlines

Application for participation and an abstract of ½ page: August 1, 2014

Confirmation of your participation will be sent out mid-August together with a reading list

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): September 5, 2014

Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: September 8, 2014

Submission of papers for assessment: December 5, 2014

Outland use and upland landscapes (“Utmark”)

PhD Seminar in Rome, Italy, April 28 - May 2

Dialogues with the Past. Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Apr. 28, 2014–May 2, 2014, Swedish Institute in Rome

Outland use and upland landscapes in a European perspective

In many parts of Europe there are forested, marshy and mountainous areas, constituting outlands of different kinds. The outlands are part of, or indicate variable occupational structures, settlement patterns, land uses, subsistence strategies, socioeconomic structures and demographics. Throughout history outlands have played important roles in subsistence economy, but in several cases developments in the exploitation of outlands were highly dynamic and were, for example, an integral part of market systems. This is especially evident in the middle and early modern ages.

We can distinguish between three major trends in the European middle ages. First, strongly developed outland areas with various non-agrarian production, such as metals, glass, fur, stone products and other commodities, connected with significant market exchange. These areas were characterised by growing specialisation, sometimes as proto-industries, whilst subsistence agriculture often was downplayed. The second area is rather static regions where outlands were included in subsistence economy or a small surplus production in a more balanced economy. Third, there are regions with strongly developed cereal cultivation, and sometimes also cattle breeding. The agricultural surplus was aimed for the market, whereas outland commodities were purchased.

Outland use are not freestanding activities, but should be perceived as integral to the societies and the economies of the time. The dependent interworking of outland use, society and economy in different historical periods will be the focus for this course. For example; what chronological and geographical differences, and changes over time, is discernible in the European outlands? What roles did outlands and outland production play in times of socio-economic and cultural transformations such as early extraction and use of metals, the early medieval economic boom or the late medieval agrarian crisis? Likewise, how important were outland resources in the transition from feudalism to capitalism, during industrialisation, population growth, and the industrialisation of agriculture and forestry? And, looking towards our contemporary experience, how do post industrial urbanisation, suburbanisation and leisure activities affect previously productive outlands?

Perspectives, sources and methods in outland research

Outland areas have mostly appeared on the research agenda fairly lately, something that to a great extent is due to the often scarce or fragmented source situation. Historical research and written documents give insight into the long-term development of the social and economic structures, but is mostly restricted to the early modern and modern times. Some of the macro-historical interpretations moreover place too much emphasis on the economic categories, the influence of the market and social differentiation, and therefore need to be complemented by alternative theoretical frameworks that consider other factors, particularly microeconomic phenomena. Outland use in micro-economies, local societies or regional contexts, are more frequently addressed by cultural anthropology/ethnology, historical human geography, archaeology and paleobotany, i.e. in interdisciplinary manners. Analytic instruments for such complex research can, however, miss long-term development. Another limitation can be that the local scale and culturally specific explanations often do not permit generalisation. There are challenges in current outland research as to how to best combine and expand different research perspectives. How can observations of outland phenomena in different sources be connected to both macro- and micro-historical levels? How can interdisciplinary investigations be developed into multi-perspective interpretations? How can methods for long-term and cross regional comparisons be developed?

Course work

The course will consist of lectures from senior researchers, seminars with pre-prepared student papers and a one day fieldtrip. Each PhD student should have, before the start of the course, a paper prepared for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. The maximum length of the paper is 10 pages (Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5). In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted c. 1 hour, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. A fellow PhD student will be assigned in advance as discussant and present an approx. 10 minute comment, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for approx. 30 minutes. The senior researchers will each give a lecture of 45 minutes, as well as participate in the discussion of the PhD presentations. The fieldtrip will focus on an Italian landscape of upland herding and transhumance from antiquity until today.

Lecturers

Mark Gardiner, Archaeology and Palaeoecology, School of Geography, Archaeology and Palaeoecology (GAP), Queen´s University Belfast
Margarita Fernández Mier, Department of History, Universidad de León
Rainer Schreg, Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum

Fieldtrip guide: Barbro Santillo Frizell, Swedish Institute in Rome

Organisers

Tomáš Klir, Institute of Prehistory and Early History, Charles University in Prague, Tomas.Klir@ff.cuni.cz

Eva Svensson, Institute of Environmental and Life Sciences, Karlstad University, Eva.Svensson@kau.se

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place at the Swedish Institute in Rome. The Graduate School will finance travel, accommodation and supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students. Air tickets must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare, which will be refunded by the School after the seminar. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

Information

Deadlines

Application for participation: January 26, 2014
Confirmation on your participation will be sent out a week after this date together with a reading list.
Abstracts of ½ page: February 14, 2014
Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 28, 2014
Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: April 11, 2014.

2013

Dimensions of Heritage Value

PhD Seminar, Gothenburg, Sweden, September 16-20

The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology and Critical Heritage Studies, University of Gothenburg

Time and place: Sep. 16, 2013–Sep. 20, 2013, University of Gothenburg, The Ågren Residence

The most defining and enduring aspect of the 1972 World Heritage Convention was its novel concept of 'universal heritage value'. At the time the idea was to keep the definition of universal value as open and fluid as possible. However, the dominant bureaucratic and ideological framing of applications and procedural advice given led to the bias towards the monumental, art-aesthetic and architectural that subsequently resulted in the WHC being heavily criticised for its 'Eurocentrism', with an excessive focus on the monumental as expressions of genius, as well consolidating UNESCO’s role as the legitimator of global heritage (privileging a bias towards the nation/ states party as the originator and final arbiter of what constituted 'cultural property'). Following the recognition of the limitations of such 'heritage values' a shift occurred towards alternative forms of 'heritage value' based upon typicality rather than uniqueness. New heritage typologies - 'cultural landscapes', 'intangibility', 'urban historical landscapes' etc - was acccepted and has had consequences for the conceptualization of heritage value.

As part of the response to criticism, the idea of what constitutes 'heritage' has expanded rapidly from individual buildings and monuments to a broader idea of human creativity – both tangible and intangible. A focus on physical entities alone is no longer possible and the management of heritage should recognise context as a living and evolving environment. Also the views of experts and 'expert knowledges' has come under greater scrutiny and contestation. Democratising heritage and the recognition of diversity have become part of the general discourse of an interdisciplinary field. Complexity would therefore be cited as a watchword for an ethical approach to understanding heritage value as central to a values–based management approach.

How these aims are or will be implemented and by whom remain broad and visionary in scope at the moment. The course will be devoted to understanding both the intellectual legacies of these developments and their future effects.

The course will be focusing on two general and interrelated themes, where the applicant relates to preferably one of the two in her/his applications:

1. Intangible/immaterial heritage value

This theme will focus on the immaterial dimensions of heritage value, specifically health/mind/fantasy and identity in relation to 'outer worlds' - as well as how immaterial heritage is given fixity and form as substance and through material objectification. Immateriality has a longer term salience in philosophical terms (cf Whitehead) but in this context it relates to a conceptual crisis in the official heritage discourse. The original 1972 convention idea of heritage value was based on experience of cultural loss but recent arguments address fears of over abundance of the past and uncertainty about its value and efficacy. In the last decade there has been a significant shift of attention to issues of wellbeing and health, to understanding the concept of loss of identity as well as fears of an over abundance of the past, and to inquiries into the shift from material science to cultural values. Notions of health and well being are culturally conditioned and transmitted by perceptions of the body, emotions and morality, and recently the idea of heritage value has been employed particularly in post conflict conditions dealing with post trauma, the restoration of dislocations in space and place and needs for commemoration. Intangible heritage has also led to a revitalising of what had previously been designated as folklore studies and 'folkloric' has become recognised as ’living cultures' very much embedded in the present both as the continuation of knowledge and practices associated with skill, performance and cultural well being. New forms of documentation and the recording of intangible heritage have also become available through the expansion of digital technologies consistent with the promotion of cultural diversity and the protection of indigenous knowledges.

2. The economy of heritage

This theme will focus on the materiality and commodification of heritage value, with a specific focus on the forms of transformation of heritage value. The argument that heritage value can be transformed into economic value takes many forms and certainly the idea of conservation and preservation of the past has for long been seen as sustaining the market in antiquities, auction houses and design. Heritage and development includes studies of advocacy organisations both as public participation in and protest to heritage development and to map the diverse ‘actors’ in such operational networks. From macro to micro contexts we may examine how, for example, the World Bank, UN/ UNESCO, the Getty, the Aga Khan Foundation, interact with other ‘actors’ such as assemblies of Indigenous Peoples/ Survival International and national. Heritage as economic value treats the creation of heritage as a resource for sustainable development and may address the evaluation of tourism; the circulation of heritage value through auctions and antiquity sales as well as the accumulation and storage of value through archives, conservation, documentation and the role of guidebooks and travelogues in isolating and identifying value.

Course work

The course work will be structured as short lectures with established researchers and full day seminar sessions with the work of the students in focus. The second day will be a full day excursion. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to one of the two general course themes. The maximum length of the paper is 10 pages (Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5). In the course of the seminars, each paper will be allotted c. 1 hour, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. One of the other PhD students will be selected in advance as a discussant and comment for about 10 minutes, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for app. 30 minutes. The established researchers will give lectures as well as participate in the discussion of PhD presentations.

Lecturers

Mike Rowlands (UCL), Rodney Harrison (UCL), Lynn Meskell (Stanford), Beverly Butler (UCL), Cornelius Holtorf (Linnæus University). Additional researchers will be involved, mainly as discussants.

Organiser

Professor Mike Rowlands, University College London, UK.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place in Gothenburg, at the Ågren Residence. CHS/The Graduate School will finance accommodation – two students/room with shared kitchen – and supply a daily allowance during the course for all participating PhD students. Lunch will be provided Monday-Friday. Travel must be organized by the students themselves.

Registration

CHS and The Graduate School invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course connecting specifically to one of the two themes. (Important note: the structure and content of the course should be dynamic, meaning that if applicants wish to address an issue that is outside the two themes they may do so.) From the applications the coordinator and the board of the Graduate School will select 15 PhD students for the course. Interested PhD students should apply for the course by filling in and submitting this application form to: Lene Melheim.

Information

Lisa Karlsson Blom, Project Assistant, Critical Heritage Studies, Department of Historical Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Phone +46 (0)768 078 342.

Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Phone: (+47) 22841957, Mobile (+47) 99755435.

Deadlines

Application for participation: June 12, 2013 (has been prolonged). Confirmation on your participation will be sent out a week after this date together with a reading list. Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): August 9, 2013
Appointment of opponents: August 23, 2013.

Dynamics of agrarian transformation – and research

PhD Seminar in Rome, Italy, April 15-19

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time and place: Apr. 15, 2013 8:00 AM–Apr. 19, 2013 4:00 PM, Rome

This course explores the relation between variable agrarian strategies and cultural change through time, as well as general methodological and theoretical issues in archaeological studies of agrarian practices. Though there is an emphasis on Europe, the course will be useful for students interested in agrarian themes, irrespective of area and period. By comparing factors that have been seen as causes for cultural change – invasion, agrarian evolution, ecological or social change – in a perspective that includes a consideration of agrarian strategies, we may be able better to recognize the interrelation between economic agrarian strategies, technology, special ecological preconditions and changing cultural strategies. What are the structural conditions for reproducing agricultural organizations or generating developments – and what are the consequences of various choices by people in a given temporal or spatial context?

An example in case is the agriculture of the early Neolithic, the origin of which has been the subject of considerable discussion. Was the initial transition in different parts of Europe the result of migration – and if so: what was the migrants’ role and how did history play out? Or was this an indigenously driven change of subsistence strategy? If that is the case, what driving forces were involved? Recently the migration aspect has forcefully resurfaced, not the least in the wake of data from the sciences where aDNA and isotope analyses on human and animal skeletal material have revealed immigration into some societies. What dynamics are involved in the transformation of established agrarian societies, whether they be in the Late Neolithic/Chalcolithic of Northwestern Europe, in the later Bronze Age of the Mediterranean in 13th century, or Iron Age Scandinavia? For example, was the cause of mid-first millennium transformations in Germanic societies in Scandinavia a response to ecological conditions – the impact of volcanic events – as recently forwarded by many? Or is it a result of agrarian strategies initially pursued with the aim of gathering more land on fewer hands for an up-and-coming elite of petty kings? If the latter is the case, how can a complicated long-term agrarian history be analysed and understood? Similar questions are relevant for many cases in different spatial and chronological settings.

Dynamics of agrarian transformation and research will provide a series of interdisciplinary approaches to and studies of agrarian history, providing methodological and conceptual insights into complicated issues across time and space. With such a comparative approach it is possible to expand the debate on cause and effect for change in agrarian societies in prehistory and history at the interpretative level. We invite students to present aspects of their ongoing or planned research, using this DIALPAST course to elucidate and test their approach, ideas and problems – whether historical, anthropological or natural scientific. By exploring interpretative frameworks in a comparative perspective, as well as methodological issues, this course will provide a stimulating forum for developing ongoing agrarian research projects.

Course work

The course will consist of lectures from established reseachers as well as seminars. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. The maximum length of the paper is 10 pages (Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5). In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted c. 1 hour, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. One of the other PhD students will be selected in advance as a discussant and comment for about 10 minutes, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for app. 30 minutes. The etablished researchers will each give a lecture of 45 minutes as well as participating in the discussion of PhD presentations.

Lecturers

Wolfgang Haak, The Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, The University of Adelaide
Mads Kähler Holst, Section for Prehistoric Archaeology, Aarhus University
Lisbeth Prøsch-Danielsen, Museum of Archaeology, University of Stavanger
Marianne Skandfer, Department of Archaeology and Social Anthropology, University of Tromsø

Organiser

Associate Professor Mads Ravn, Archaeology Department, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, P.O. Box 6762 St. Olavs Plass, N-0164 Oslo, Norway. Email: mads.ravn@khm.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 22 85 96 32, Mobile (+47) 40481896.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place at the Norwegian Institute in Rome. The Graduate School will finance travel, accommodation and supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students. Air tickets must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare, which will be refunded by the School after the seminar. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

Interested PhD students should apply for the course to: Lene Melheim, Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no.

Information

Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 22841957, Mobile (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901.

Deadlines

Application for participation: January 7, 2013
Confirmation on your participation will be sent out a week after this date together with a reading list.
Abstracts of ½ page: February 15, 2013
Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): March 15, 2013
Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: March 25, 2013

2012

Past mirrors: Interaction and Integration in the North Sea region in the Bronze and Viking Ages

PhD Conference, Conference Hall, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo

Time and place: Dec. 1, 2012 9:00 AM–Dec. 2, 2012 5:00 PM, Oslo

The course is arranged as an open conference with a post-conference seminar for applied PhD students. Programme for the conference is now available.

Past mirrors: Interaction and Integration in the North Sea region in the Bronze and Viking Ages

The aim of the seminar is to explore the integration and homogenization of European cultures by comparing the Bronze Age (1700-500 BC) and Viking Age (800-1000 AD) in the North Sea region. Although displaying many similarities, these two periods are today represented by largely segregated research environments. We believe that by bringing profiled scholars working with similar issues across this time gap together, it is possible to reconsider and revitalize the debate on integration and interaction in pre-history. We invite the speakers to share their viewpoints and observations that elucidate this approach, as well as their perspectives on the use of analogies, or historical and anthropological perspectives in archaeology.

The Nordic Bronze and Viking Ages vigorously demonstrate the constant but also conflicting processes of interaction, integration and homogenization which characterize Europe in these periods. Both periods are characterized by an extensive mobility extending from the Bosporus Strait to the North Sea, and linking Scandinavia with the Continent through elite-exchange, raiding and trade. Scandinavian societies can in both periods be described as maritories – political units based on coastal and overseas interaction. Other resemblances are also striking, i.e. the emphasis on monumental burials, excessive hoarding and a strong warrior ethos. Are these apparent parallels based on simplified abstractions, or can a comparison between the two offer a novel approach for studying processes of cultural integration and transformation?

The two archaeological periods are distinguished by their own set of empirical material and scholarly approaches, resulting in largely segregated research discourses with limited dialogue. It is essential to overcome specialized research environments in order to take on an integrated approach to how regions and social groups are connected through large-scale communication systems that generate social and political dynamics and change. At the core of these issues lies exchange studies and the variety of research within economic anthropology and archaeology arising from, among others, Karl Polanyi’s and Elman Service’s groundbreaking studies on the relationship between modes of exchange and social formation. Their analogy-based interpretations of pre-state societies are formative for any study within the field, but also subjected to controversies, and entail both reductionist and post-colonial pitfalls. Recent perspectives also emphasize the social and cultural embeddedness of exchange, and how exotic objects facilitate constructions of identities and political legitimacy. By pairing the theory-driven debate in Bronze Age research on the transmission of knowledge and ideas with the more detailed knowledge of trade and socio-political development in Viking Age research, the seminar aspires to extend the study of dynamic integration and connections between and within societies.

Yet, a comparison between the two is clearly not an aim in itself. We invite participants to present new perspectives on the use of analogies, or historical and anthropological perspectives in archaeology, and rather than simply transposing one social form to a technologically similar material complex, also to emphasize what differentiates the two structurally and historically. Could a comparison of Bronze Age and Viking Age mobility contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how patterns of exchange and mobility relate to diplomatic relations and polity interaction? How are local identities combined with awareness of regional similarities and cultural flexibility? Do certain groups represent this interconnectedness and contribute to link local awareness with the development of common references and understanding? Are neo-evolutionary perspectives on social transformation relevant for the differences in stability and integration that we see between the Bronze and Viking Ages? Or, could the study of materiality as a structured expression and structuring force explain these differences, and also contribute to illuminate the flexibility and formations of social identities?

Course work for PhD students

This two-day course will consist of the open conference and a post-conference seminar for PhD students only.

Day 1) PhD students admitted to the course are expected to contribute to the conference as discussants. At the conference, the keynote speakers will each give a lecture of 30 minutes, followed by a 15 minutes open discussion, which is led by the organizers and PhD students.

Day 2) At the post-seminar, the participating PhD students will be responsible for summing up the sessions of the conference and for preparing and leading discussions. This part should focus on the overarching questions and topics raised at the conference. Each PhD student will be allotted c. 30 minutes for this, of which c. 10 minutes should be spent on an oral presentation addressing the main objectives of the conference.

PhD students are encouraged to prepare for the course by reading the abstracts carefully and updating on relevant literature in order to be able to chair discussions and address the conference's main topics. Abstracts and programme will be distributed shortly after the confirmation of participation. Detailed programme for the PhD course is now available.

Preliminary list of speakers

Kristian Kristiansen, University of Gohenburg
Mike Rowlands, University College London
Johan Ling, University of Gothenburg
Neil Price, University of Aberdeen
Dawn Hadley, University of Sheffield
Christian Horn, University of Gothenburg
Magdalena Naum, University of Lund/ Cambridge

Organisers

Zanette Glørstad & Lene Melheim, University of Oslo

Credits

3 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo.The Graduate School will to some extent support travel, accommodation and meals for participating PhD students from out of town. Air or train tickets must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare. Accommodation will be arranged by the School. Note that two and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation at the course. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the conference. Please use this application form. From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select up to 20 PhD students for the course.

Other participants who want to attend the conference on December 1st are asked to use this application form.

All should apply for the course to: Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901.

Information

Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Deadlines

Application for participation: October 15th, 2012. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with the programme.

Materialities of Time: Ritual, death and the practice of archaeology

PhD Seminar in Århus, Denmark, June 12-15, 2012

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology

Time: June 12, 2012 8:00 AM–June 15, 2012 4:00 PM

Aims

This course focuses on the topic of time in archaeology, exploring how archaeology recognises, explains and interprets time in the past, and it scrutinises how the methodologies and interpretative frameworks of archaeological practice affect the understanding of temporal issues in the study of past societies. Archaeological approaches to time will be explored primarily – but by no means exclusively – through rituals and death practices, which may offer particularly concrete ways of scrutinising understandings of time in the past as well as in the archaeological practice. The course is open to PhD students enrolled under The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology. Keynote speakers are chosen to represent a variety of theoretical and empirical points of departure, and will be able to offer diverse and wide-ranging angles on the themes of the course, based on their excellent and abundant research in the field.

In archaeology, time is often reduced to a matter of chronology and dating, and Nordic archaeology has a long tradition for developing increasingly fine-grained chronologies of the remains of past societies. This course seeks to expand on these insights, turning the focus towards time as a cultural occurrence and a social experience. It does, however, not exclude PhD students working with chronology and dating, yet it asks of all participants that they reflect on the social dimension of time.

PhD students are invited to explore time through ritual, mortuary practices and/or the archaeological methodologies. The course does not proceed from a solid statement of what time or ritual is, or how death should be conceptualised in archaeology, but offers a forum for exploring how time, death and ritual materialise in various archaeological contexts and case studies.

The course asks the crucial question how archaeology can observe time, how ritual can be recognised in the material record, and how deathways and commemoration may be linked to time and ritual as social phenomena. Do ritual and mortuary practices offer a glimpse into past notions of time? How does commemorative practices reflect experiences of time? Does time have a material dimension? How does the pronounced emphasis in archaeology on chronology, dating and the long term affect the discipline's ability to conceptualise social or experienced time? Can archaeology study the moment and events or only the long term? And has archaeology got anything to offer in the study of present-day societies or does the discipline have to see things at a temporal distance? These are some of the questions that will be brought up in the course, and they will be supplemented by the no less important issues and problems raised by the PhD students on the basis of their research projects.

Course work

The course will consist of both seminars and lectures. Before the course starts, each PhD student will prepare a paper for pre-circulation, addressing her or his research project in relation to the course theme. In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted ca. 45 minutes, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. One of the other PhD students will be selected in advance as a discussant and comment for about 10 minutes, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes. The keynote speakers will each give a lecture of circa one hour, presenting different perspectives on time, ritual practice and death based on their field of expertise, as well as participating as prime movers in the discussion of PhD presentations.

List of lecturers

Liv Nilsson Stutz, Emory University
John Robb, University of Cambridge
Howard Williams, University of Chester

Organiser

University of Aarhus, Department of Anthropology, Archaeology & Linguistics

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place at Moesgård in Århus, Denmark. The Graduate School will support travel and accommodation for all participating PhD students. Air tickets must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. Please use this application form. From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select c. 20 PhD students for the course. Interested PhD students should apply for the course to: Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Information

Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Deadlines

Application for participation: March 12. Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.
Abstracts of ½ page: April 10.
Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): May 7.
Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: May 21.

Archaeological perspectives on cultural analysis – material culture and the transmission of knowledge

PhD course in Paris, France, May 7-11th 2012

Time and place: May 7, 2012 8:00 AM–May 11, 2012 4:00 PM, Paris

This PhD course is jointly coordinated by the "Nordic Blade Technology Network" and the Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology – "Dialogues with the Past". It is the first in a series of master classes financed by the Swedish Foundation for International Cooperation in Research and Higher Education (STINT) and the Norwegian Science Foundation. The master classes are related to studies of technological change in Stone Age societies, and they are open to both doctoral and master students. Participants will be invited to join the "Nordic Blade Technology Network" in the whole series of master classes.

Aims

The "Nordic Blade Technology Network" comprises five national academic research partners from Uppsala University, University of Oslo – Museum of Cultural History, University of Helsinki, University of Copenhagen, and Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology in Schleswig, as well as several associate partners within the Scandinavian and Baltic Sea region. The purpose of this research network (henceforth NBTN) is to investigate and rewrite the prehistory of human societies in Fennoscandia from the first human colonisation after the last Ice Age to the beginning of agriculture. Our research focus and hence the name is derived from the fact that lithic blade technology has accompanied pioneer settlements throughout Scandinavia and the Baltic area following the retreat of the Weichselian glacier.

As a formalized research network the NBTN collaborates closely with the Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology "Dialogues with the Past", and the Graduate School "Human Development in Landscapes" at the University of Kiel, to support ongoing PhD projects, training and research. To this effect we offer doctoral students and master students the possibility of participating in a series of consecutive master classes and workshops on cutting edge analysis of Stone Age technologies. The approach in question is based on contextual, typological, technological, functional and not least experimental studies. These material studies are further supplemented by a conceptual terminology inspired by palaeo-ethnological (André Leroi-Gourhan) and sociological (Pierre Lemonnier) analyses pertaining to the role of technology in society. The concepts of schème and chaîne opératoire are particularly essential in this respect. On this analytical basis it is possible to decipher and reconstruct, with great precision, the coherence of the prehistoric technological process, the techniques and methods employed, and the aims of the actor.

The purpose of the announced series of master classes is to establish a common interpretive framework and knowledge platform (terminology, methodology, approach, data material) for analysing and discussing technological signatures pertinent to archaeological inventories from the period in question. The first master class will take place under the auspices of the Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology "Dialogues with the Past" in Paris on May 7-11th 2012. Here we will focus first and foremost on the conceptual frameworks and the methodological approach. Doctoral students and master students working on Stone Age material from the point of view of long term history and colonization processes, pioneer settlements, mobility and communication networks, technological innovation, knowledge transmission, etc., are hereby invited to participate in the course.

The course will be organized around three components:

# Lectures from established researchers. These lectures will be substantiated by a beforehand circulated reading list.

# Hands-on workshops pertaining to artefact studies. The NBTN focuses on long term history and colonization processes based upon studies of lithic blade technology. However, even though lithic technology is of indisputable importance it is not the whole story. In Paris one full day will accordingly be devoted to a hands-on examination of organic (bone and antler) artefacts.

# Seminars where student papers are discussed. To these seminars students will be required to submit a 5 page long paper before the seminar. At the seminar, students will be required to briefly present (15 minutes) elements relevant to a discussion of the submitted paper, as well as participate actively in the discussion of fellow student's papers. To ensure a productive discussion the submitted papers will be circulated among all participants before the seminar. All students and lecturers are expected to participate in an ensuing open discussion.

List of lecturers

Dr. Eva David, CNRS
Dr. Jacques Pelegrin, CNRS
Dr. Valentine Roux, CNRS
Prof. Dr. Boris Valentin, Université de Paris 1
Members of the Nordic Blade Technology Network steering group (Berit V. Eriksen, Håkon Glørstad, Jarmo Kankaanpää, Helena Knutsson, Kjel Knutsson, Tuija Rankama, Mikkel Sørensen)

Organisers

PD Dr. Berit Valentin Eriksen, Centre for Baltic and Scandinavian Archaeology, Schloss Gottorf, D-24837 Schleswig, Germany.
Email: berit.eriksen@schloss-gottorf.de
Phone: +49 – (0)4621 813 482

Prof. Dr. Kjel Knutsson, Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, BOX 256, SE-75105 Uppsala, Sweden
Email: kjel.knutsson@arkeologi.uu.se
Phone: +46 – (0)184 712 094

Credits

6 ECTS

Participation in all 10 courses will amount to 30 ECTS.

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place in Paris, France. The organisers will finance travel and accommodation during the seminar for all participating graduate students. Transport to Paris must be arranged by the graduate students her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare, which will be refunded by the organisers after the seminar. Accommodation will be arranged by the organisers and two graduate students will share a room. Participants who need a visa for the trip must organize this by themselves.

Registration

The organisers invite doctoral and master students from the Nordic countries and from neighbouring Baltic Sea countries to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD or master project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. From these applications the organisers will select c. 15 students for participation in the course. Doctoral or master students who commit themselves to participate in all 10 master classes will be given preference in this selection process. For further information on the complete program please contact the organisers (Berit V. Eriksen or Kjel Knutsson).

Application

Please use this application form and submit it to:

Anne Lene Melheim
Dialogues with the Past
Department of Archaeology, Conservation and Historical Studies
Box 1008, Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway

E-mail: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no
Phone: +47 – 22841957, Mobile: +47 – 99755435

Deadlines

Application for participation due February 1st, 2012
Confirmation on your participation will be sent out within two weeks after this date together with a reading list.
Abstracts of ½ page due March 1st, 2012
Submission of working papers due April 2nd, 2012
Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents due April 16th, 2012

2011

Digitization in archaeology and (re)presentations of the past

PhD Seminar October 24-28, 2011

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology
Time: Oct. 24, 2011 8:00 AM–Oct. 28, 2011 4:00 PM

Aims

A vast number of digital tools are available for archaeologists to be used for documentation, analyses, to share data, for learning, or to engage with the past. These include hardware such as scanners, software programs, applications for mobile phones/iPad/tablets, pod casts, Internet sites, social media, etc. This seminar aims at exploring digitization in archaeology and museums, and the themes raised cover both practical/technical issues and theoretical considerations.

Based on their PhD work, the student participants will present papers that, in some regard, relate to digitization in archaeology or museums. The participants are welcomed to demonstrate available digital tools, but focus ought to be on wider methodological and theoretical questions that digitization raises. The presentations might, but are not limited to, touch upon one or several of the following themes:

How digitization influences various aspects of archaeology

Digitization is an important reminder that external factors such as technical achievements influence the discipline of archaeology. The participants are therefore encouraged to identify and discuss to what extent and in what ways new technologies influence how knowledge about the past is constructed and presented, and consequently how the past is perceived, or the consequences digitization might have for museums or heritage management.

Technical and methodological aspects

Papers are welcomed that present available digital tools and how these can be utilized by archaeologists and museums. Challenges posed by using these tools ought to be considered, whether of technical or epistemological nature. For instance, how are “data” being selected and “captured” through digitization? To what extent does digitization represent material culture? Does digitization influence how we value original artefacts? Does digital data and representations become a new type of heritage? Should archaeologists and cultural historians themselves achieve necessary technical skills in order to maintain a disciplinary control of the material? What will the consequences be for the cultural historical disciplines if we leave much of this development work to technical experts?

Digitization in museums and presentations of the past

Digital resources are often seen as viable tools for sharing data, learning and presenting a cultural historical material to the public, students and school-children. However, the expanding potential of digitization raises several questions. For instance, to what extent does digitization influence the role and character of museums? Is it possible that the expectations generated by the current technical advances are too high and impossible to fulfil for most museums? The need for digital access varies for different interest groups, but is it realistic to expect that the museums can take into account all these different needs? Are digital and interactive tools in the museums more about exploring new technologies – toys to play with – than useful tools for learning about the past? What characterizes good digital learning tools?

Virtual pasts and popular culture

Digital technology offers a unique chance for people to construct and experience versions of the past that differ from those constructed by academics. For instance, Internet and social media can be used to create networks where people share their own interests in and interpretations of the past. Digital reconstructions, virtual communities and computer games enable people to experience the past and even play a role in it. However, which past is created and experienced in these digital worlds? Do they nourish a multivocal and democratic involvement with the past, or are they controlled by commercial interests, a fascination for current technology, or particular ideologies that ought to be identified and analyzed? To what extent should museums, archaeologists and other cultural historians be inspired by the digital tools used in popular culture and use these in order to communicate, or to create a dialogue about, “our” versions of the past?

Course work

The format will be organized around two components:
- Lectures from established researchers. The lectures will be underpinned by a beforehand circulated reading list.
- Seminars where student papers are discussed. To these seminars students will be required to submit a 10 page paper before the seminar. At the seminar, students will be required to orally present (15 minutes) elements relevant to a discussion of the submitted paper, as well as serve (10 minutes) as a first opponent to fellow students papers. All students and lecturers are expected to participate in an ensuing open discussion (30 minutes).

List of lecturers

Palmyre Pierroux, Associate Professor, InterMedia, University of Oslo

Timothy Webmoor, Research Fellow in Science and Technology Studies,Institute for Science, Innovation and Society, University of Oxford

Sarah Lowe, Associate Professor of Graphic Design, University of Tennessee

Atle Omland, Post doc., Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo.

Organiser

Post doc. Atle Omland, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo.

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place in Athens, Greece. The Graduate School will support travel and accommodation for all participating PhD students from Nordic universities. Air tickets must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select c. 20 PhD students for the course. Interested PhD students should apply for the course to: Atle Omland. Email: atle.omland@iakh.uio.no with a copy to Lene Melheim. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no.

Information

For further information please contact Lene Melheim, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway. Email: a.l.melheim@iakh.uio.no. Phone: (+47) 99755435, Fax: (+47) 22841901. Or Atle Omland, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo. Email:

Deadlines

New deadline for applications: August 22, 2011, 12 AM

Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.

Abstracts of ½ page: August 29, 2011

Submission of working papers (10 pages, Times New Roman 12, Spacing 1,5): September 12, 2011

Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: September 19, 2011

Environmental Archaeology and Science in Archaeology - concepts, methods and practice

PhD Seminar in Turku/Åbo, Finland, April 11-15, 2011

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology
Time and place: Apr. 11, 2011 8:00 AM–Apr. 15, 2011 4:00 PM, Turku/Åbo

Aims

Archaeology has long been perceived as a borrower discipline …. As electronic communication expands and information flows more freely globally, it will be crucial for researchers to command the basic theory and assumptions of other special fields and disciplines, in order to evaluate claims for new methods, applications and results (Dincauze 2000:4).

Archaeologists have embraced novel results, and built on some of the new data, not always understanding the theoretical and methodological bases on which these results were founded; some of these foundations have since been shown to be unsteady. Premature adoption of poorly evaluated analytical techniques and their preliminary results have given archaeology a decade or more of spectaular claims and attendant rebuttals, creating an uneasy atmosphere (Dincauze 2000:3).

“We seem perilously close to that characteristic failing of interdisciplinary study – an enterprise which often seems to merit definition as the process by which the unknowns of one’s own subject matter are multiplied by the uncertainties of some other science….” (Marshall Sahlins 1974:51).

Archaeology is inherently cross-disciplinary, and within Scandinavian archaeology there is a tradition of collaboration with the natural sciences (particularly geo- and biological disciplines) back to the 1830´s. Over many years, but with increasing impotance, numerous ground breaking insights in archaeology have been dependent on data from the natural sciences, for example concerning early cultivation and stockholding (palynology, osteology, sedimentology, ams-dating), ancient migration (ancient DNA, isotopes), diet and ceramic studies (lipid analysis and isotope studies) or provenience studies (geo-sciences, physics and material studies). Some of the most important cultural historical results of the last twenty years are based on scientific methods. A likely prognosis for the near future is that science-based methods will supply the most dramatic new insights into what happened in prehistory.

The impact of the natural sciences has continued to expand with powerful new and refined methods (e.g. within ancient DNA, isotope analysis, chemistry, dating methods). While the application of scientific methods continues to be developed within research projects, numerous methods (paleobotany, archaeozoology, soil science, chemistry, radiometry) are now routinely applied in rescue archaeology in the field and laboratories. A majority of modern PhD-studies in archaeology utilize, often implicitly, elements of science-based data, concepts or methodology.

Concurrent with the expansion of science methodologies suited to illuminate environmental questions, archaeology has a potential to address contemporary issues like environmental degradation, climate change, adaptation to environmental fluctuation and migration. Though not exploited to its full potential, future contributions to the history and comparative study of contemporary issues will rest on combining archaeological and scientific perspectives. Science-based methods develop and are becoming more complex. Contemporary issues enhance the relevance of interdisciplinary environmental data. A number of very thought provoking studies have surfaced concerning migration, environmental collapse and resource utilization. Several of these have been conducted by or in collaboration with Nordic research groups. It is therefore a paradox that parallel with these advances, ecology, environment, and science-based methodologies are commonly regarded by archaeologists with skepticism. This is matched by a trend within Nordic university programs in archaeology since the 1990s (under post-modern influence or driven by economic priorities?) towards less training in science-based approaches and methods.

Archaeology, with some striking exceptions, has increasingly alienated itself in regard to science and environment, leading to a dichotomized blindness. Archaeologists tend to either uncritically adopt objective results from poorly understood methodologies or, on the other hand, to reject natural science as irrelevant or undependable. These attitudes to environmental archaeology and science are rooted in outdated insights concerning knowledge production, tenets and practices within the sciences and environmental archaeology.

Steps are being taken to remedy this situation i.a. the training of cross-disciplinary specialists as well a more general introductions to methods and concepts. A renewed interest in environmental archaeology actualizes four areas that can support ongoing PhD projects, training and research:

Methods and methodologies, their potentials and problems - within fields with a long history of collaboration (e.g., biology, geo-sciences and physics) but also new fields (e.g. molecular biology, bio-chemistry).
Conceptual frameworks concerning the natural sciences and environmental perspectives.
Interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary research: Collaboration between disciplines with fundamentally different traditions, terminologies and methodologies.
Exemplar studies within new fields (e.g., molecular biology and bio-chemistry).

The DIALPAST course Environmental Archaeology and Science in Archaeology - concepts, methods and practice is to explore these issues, and we hope that PhD students from the sciences working with archaeology-relevant themes and archaeologists collaborating with scientists or availing themselves of scientific data or methods take part in the course.

Course work

List of lecturers

Professor Peter Rowley-Conwy, Department of Archaeology, Durham University

Dr Marcos Martinón-Torres, Institute of Archaeology, University College London

Dr M. Thomas P. Gilbert, Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen

Dr Gunilla Eriksson, Archaeological Research Laboratory, Stockholm University

Organiser

Professor Christopher Prescott, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1019 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: christopher.prescott@iakh.uio.no
Phone: (+47) 22841908, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place in Turku/Åbo, Finland. The Graduate School will finance travel, accommodation and supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students from Nordic universities. Air tickets to Turku/Åbo must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare, which will be refunded by the School after the seminar. Accommodation will be arranged by the School, and two PhD students will share a room.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select c. 20 PhD students for the course. Interested PhD students should apply for the course to:
Unn Pedersen, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1019 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: unn.pedersen@iakh.uio.no
Phone: (+47) 22841999, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Information

Unn Pedersen, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1019 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: unn.pedersen@iakh.uio.no
Phone: (+47) 22841999, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Deadlines

Application for participation: January 7, 2011
Confirmation on your participation will be sent out a week after this date together with a reading list.
Abstracts of ½ page: February 14, 2011
Submission of working papers: Mars 11, 2011
Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: March 18, 2011

2010

Colonisation in Archaeology

PhD Seminar Reykjavik October 11-15, 2010

Dialogues with the Past. The Nordic Graduate School in Archaeology
Time and place: Oct. 11, 2010 8:00 AM–Oct. 15, 2010 4:00 PM, Reykjavik

Aims

Migration and colonisation used to be central themes in archaeological explanation of culture change. But since the 1960s it has been largely ignored, shunned even, in favour of other approaches that emphasise autochthonous developments. This remains true as a generalisation, despite calls for the recognition of migrations and colonisations as phenomena that clearly did take place in the past as well as significant theoretical advances which can allow methodical discussion of them (Kristiansen 1989; Anthony 1990).

Nevertheless, colonisation and migration have continued to be investigated and discussed within individual subfields of archaeology, in particular those areas where the reality of these phenomena is no doubt. These include Mesolithic studies where the first peopling of Scandinavia is a major theme, and the study of the Viking age when the North Atlantic islands were first colonised. Migration also remains of concern in the context of particular research questions, (e.g. the Neolithic transition, the Mediterranean in antiquity, the medieval repopulation of the Åland islands). Migration is a major research theme in all the social sciences, the fields from which archaeologists have tended to seek theoretical inspiration. Also the last two decades have seen a resurgence of debate about population movement based on linguistic evidence (e.g. Renfrew 1987; Bellwood and Renfrew 2002) and a whole new discipline is emerging around the analysis of human DNA as evidence for migration and colonisation (e.g. Cavalli-Sforza and Cavalli-Sforza 1995). More recently isotope studies have emerged as a major contributor to this discussion (e.g. Sjögren et al. 2009).

The course will concentrate on colonisation, defined as the establishment of new societies in new lands, whether in the context of first peopling of uninhabited lands or the founding of colonies in inhabited lands. There are fundamental differences between these processes, and each has its own set of theoretical and empirical problems, but there are enough similarities to justify systematic comparison and joint discussion. Colonisation is a form of migration and can only be discussed in the theoretical framework of the latter, but archaeological migrations will not be the primary subject of the seminar in order to focus more firmly on questions about why people actually move rather than whether they moved at all. The seminar will give an overview of traditional explanations for colonisation, ranging from climate change and population pressure to resource exploitation, trade and conquest and ideology. Different intellectual traditions will be discussed and the participants will be invited to reflect on each other’s sub-fields’ and disciplines’ varying approaches to the issue.The course aims to bring together students working within different sub-fields of archaeology with an interest in e.g. human mobility, adaptation, ethnogenesis and ethnicity, culture change and social structure with the hope that different approaches and perspectives can be exposed and discussed to mutual benefit.

Anthony, D.W. 1990 Migration in Archaeology. The Baby and the Bathwater, American Anthropologist, New series 92, 895-914.
Bellwood, P. and C. Renfrew eds. 2002 Examining the farming/language dispersal Hypothesis, Cambridge McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research.
Cavalli-Sforza, L.L. and F. Cavalli-Sforza 1995 The great human diasporas. The history of diversity and evolution, New York. Basic Books.
Kristiansen, K. 1989 Prehistoric migrations the case of the Single Grave and Corded Ware cultures, Journal of Danish Archaeology 8, 211-25.
Renfrew, C. 1987 The Archaeology of Language. The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, London: Penguin.
Sjögren, K.G. et al. 2009 Megaliths and mobility in south-western Sweden. Investigating relationships between a local society and its neighbours using strontium isotopes. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 28(1), 85-101.

Course work

The course consists of both seminars and lectures. For pre-circulation before the course starts, each student will prepare a paper on her or his research project and addressing issues related to any of the course themes. In the course seminars, each paper will be allotted an hour of time, beginning with the student presenting a 15-minute summary of its contents. One of the other students will be selected in advance as a discussant and comment for about 10 minutes, after which she or he will then chair an open discussion on the paper for approximately 20 minutes.The participating lecturers will each give a talk during the course, presenting different perspectives on colonisation.

List of lecturers

Hein Bjerck, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Section of Archaeology and Cultural History
Hildur Gestsdóttir, University of Iceland, Department of Archaeology
Lise Hannestad, University of Aarhus, Section for Classical Archaeology
Agnar Helgason, University of Iceland, Department of Anthropology / Decode Genetics
Heinrich Härke, University of Reading, Department of Archaeology / Universität Tübingen, Archäologie des Mittelalters
David Meltzer, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, Department of Anthropology
Orri Vésteinsson, University of Iceland, Department of Archaeology

Credits

1 month or 7 ECTS

Location, travel and costs

The course will take place in Reykjavik. The Graduate School will finance travel, accommodation and supply a daily allowance during the seminar for all participating PhD students from Nordic universities. Air tickets to Reykjavik must be arranged by the graduate student her-/himself. We encourage you to buy the cheapest fare, which will be refunded by the School. Accommodation will be arranged by the School.

Registration

The Graduate school invites all registered PhD students to apply for participation. The application (in English) should include information on the individual PhD project, and how the project will benefit from the planned PhD course. From these applications the board of the Graduate School will select c. 20 PhD students for the course. Interested PhD students should apply for the course to:
Unn Pedersen, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: unn.pedersen@iakh.uio.no
Phone: (+47) 22841999, Fax: (+47) 22841901

Information

For further information, please contact:
Unn Pedersen, Administrative Officer, Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History, University of Oslo, Box 1008 Blindern, N-0315 Oslo, Norway.
Email: unn.pedersen@iakh.uio.no
Phone: (+47) 22841999, Fax: (+47) 22841901
or
Orri Vésteinsson, Department of Archaeology, University of Iceland, Sæmundargötu 2, 101 Reykjavík, Iceland.
Email: orri@hi.is
Phone: (+354) 525 4203

Deadlines

Application for participation: July 19, 2010
Confirmation on your participation will be sent out shortly after this date together with a reading list.
Abstracts of ½ page: August 9, 2010
Submission of working papers: August 31, 2010

Length of working paper: 10 pages with Times New Roman 12 and 1,5 line spacing.

Distribution of papers and appointment of opponents: September 6, 2010

Published Dec. 2, 2022 11:10 AM - Last modified Mar. 16, 2026 9:05 AM