The Department of History and Archaeology at Macquarie University are delighted to welcome you all to our 2022 National Archaeology Week Lecture presented by Professor Philipp Stockhammer, and hosted by Dr Susan Lupack.
Since the famous excavations of Heinrich Schliemann in Mycenae and of Arthur Evans in Knossos, we have been trying to understand the life of the Mycenaean and Minoan societies of the second millennium BCE. Outstanding palaces, literary sources and rich burials have inspired our fascination of the Aegean Bronze Age. However, many basic questions have remained unanswered: How were families structured? What about individual mobility in the Aegean? Did people move from Anatolia to the Aegean or from Mainland Greek to Crete? What about their food and health? Now, a plethora of bioarchaeological approaches from archaeogenetics to the study of food residues in human dental calculus opens up new horizons of knowledge. Within my European Research Council project “FoodTransforms” and at the Max Planck Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean, we have now assembled a bioarchaeological dataset of the Aegean Bronze Age, which enables novel insights into Bronze Age marital rules, biological relationships in collective burials, human mobility, culinary practices, resource management and infectious diseases in the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC Aegean. I will present these datasets and integrate them into our rich archaeological evidence in order to shed a new light on Mycenaean and Minoan societies.
About the presenter: Philipp W. Stockhammer is Professor of prehistoric archaeology with a focus on the Eastern Mediterranean at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University (LMU) Munich and co-director of the Max Planck-Harvard Research Center for the Archaeoscience of the Ancient Mediterranean at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig. In 2008, he earned his PhD at Heidelberg University. He continued to work as a postdoctoral researcher at Heidelberg until 2016 and received his venia legendi at the University of Basel in 2013. He received an ERC Starting Grant in 2015 and an ERC Consolidator Grant in 2020. He is PI or Co-PI of several collaborative research projects on the Bronze and Early Iron Ages in Central and Southeastern Europe, the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean. His research focuses on the transformative power of intercultural encounter, social practices and the integration of archaeological and scientific data with regard to mobility, food and health. He is a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute and a member of the Center for Advanced Studies at LMU Munich.
When: 6pm AEST, Monday 16 May 2022
Where: Online, via Zoom
To register: https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/macquarie-university-dha-2022-national-archaeology-week-lecture-tickets-331039065757
For details of all the fantastic MQ DHA National Archaeology Week events, download the program here.
Images: "Epic Palace: Knossos" Illustration Nikola Nevenov; Production Philipp Stockhammer