Events for the spring of 2023 (Jan-Jun)

Click here for the Zoom address!

6th of May

12:00 pm in Helsinki, 11:00 am in Bologna

Out of the ordinary “common places”? Critical insights on island archaeology from the Mediterranean and beyond

with Helen Dawson, University of Bologna/University of Tübingen

Island archaeology has gone through three major turns: from its original biogeographical and ecological focus in the 1960s-1980s, shifting towards cultural and social perspectives in the 1990s-2000s, and embracing network and relational approaches in the last two decades. Drawing on such legacy, current island archaeology provides an alternative perspective to mainstream (i.e. largely mainland) environmental and socio-cultural research agendas, though the extent to which terrestrial and maritime perspectives are integrated in practice remains variable. Island archaeology over the decades has contributed considerably to our understanding of processes of colonisation and abandonment, human-environmental interaction, seafaring, and exchange. Though no longer formulated in such terms, underpinning these questions is the now “common place” notion of islands as natural and cultural laboratories, as out of the ordinary places to be studied under a microscope, from the outside looking in. The recent relational turn in island archaeology, meanwhile, is messing this up and encouraging a decentralisation also in the production of knowledge. With no single perspective arguably dominating the agenda, a more relational way of viewing islands encourages us to consider research questions that are more in tune with present-day islanders, in terms of the “stories” being told about their past, present, and future.

Helen Dawson is an archaeologist specialising in comparative island archaeology with a focus on the later prehistory of the Mediterranean islands, an interest nurtured by her growing up in Sicily. After studying archaeology at the University of Cambridge and University College London, and holding post-doctoral fellowships at the Freie Universität Berlin, she joined the Department of History and Culture of the University of Bologna where she is currently an adjunct professor, and most recently (as of March 2024) the University of Tübingen as a post-doctoral research associate. Her research to date has focused on understanding island colonisation, abandonment, interaction, and their effects on cultural identities. She has carried out archaeological fieldwork in Italy, Greece, Cyprus, Barbados, the Channel Islands, as well as the UK. Helen is member of the editorial board of the interdisciplinary island studies journal “Shima” and advisory board member of the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative (SICRI).

Host: Veronica Walker Vadillo

3rd of June

Pleistocene and Neolithic fishing in Island SEA and Oceania: A view from  zoo-archaeological and ethno-archaeological studies

with Rintaro Ono, National Museum of Ethnology of Japan