Upcoming Events

ROOTS Public Lecture Series by JMA-Chair Gary Feinman

Feb 06, 2023 from 04:00 PM

CAP 3, Hörsaal 3 / Christian-Albrechts-Platz 3 / 24118 Kiel


How History Matters: Rethinking Premodern Governance and Inequality
Gary Feinman (Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, USA)

We have learned a lot empirically in archaeology over the last 50 years, but our concepts and presumptions about human groups and how we organize politically stem from the mid-20th century and, in a sense, the century before that with focus on two big ideas, classifi cation and evolution (progress), as well as a strong emphasis on uniformity and linearity. Now, we have collected enough data to reassessand evaluate our long-standing tenets and assumptions. We now recognize that humans can be both
selfish and highly eff ective in affi liations with nonkin, so cooperation is situational and contingent, hence variable in space and time, not simply an outcome of our specific nature. We no longer can model premodern political organization as a black box or presume that the agency of people in the past was restricted to the elite few. Rather, as we have begun to defi ne under-conceptualized axes of variation, recognize the prevailing openness of our interpersonal affi liations, and see that the path of history is
not linear, it is time to probe and assess the temporal relationships between governance, well-being, and persistence through new conceptual lenses. The formulation of new frames, tenets, indicators, and research questions that leverage the analysis of variation to foster syntheses of the human career has the potential to provide probabilistic lessons to help understand the present and guide our futures.

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Social Inequalities Forum

Feb 07, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Room 105, Leibnizstr. 1, 24118 Kiel

Social Inequality Forum.

Title: "On the Mounds of Inequality: Prehistoric Burial Mounds in Central Europe Reveal Increasing Inequality Through Four Millennia" by Johannes Müller, Julian Laabs and Johannes Marzian

For more information please contact Tim Kerig (Email).

The program of the Social Inequalities Forum of the Winter Term 2022-23 can be downloaded here.

Social Inequalities Forum Schedule

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Feb 07, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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Social Inequalities Forum

Feb 14, 2023 from 10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Room 105, Leibnizstr. 1, 24118 Kiel

Social Inequality Forum.

Title "Subsistence Production, War, and Leadership in New Guinea (and Beyond): The Roots of Social Inequality?”" by Paul Roscoe (The University of Maine).

 

Abstract:

The polities that populated New Guinea at the time of European contact offer a useful theatre for probing the roots of social inequality, in particular political inequality. They embraced a variety of subsistence regimes, from hunting and gathering through horticulture to agriculture; they were all either episodically or permanently at war with at least one of their neighbours; and they displayed diverse leadership forms from egalitarian bands through Great-Men and Big-Men communities to petty chiefdoms. An analysis of polities from more than a hundred New Guinea language groups indicates that subsistence productivity and war were important in determining this political variability and in driving the development of gendered leadership and patriarchy. As a brief coda, the results of this analysis are extended to understanding the emergence and development of political centralization in northern and central coastal Peru.

 

 

For more information please contact Tim Kerig (Email)

The program of the Social Inequalities Forum of the Winter Term 2022-23 can be downloaded here.

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Amber – a Connector of Knowledge and Societies

Feb 23, 2023 09:00 AM to Feb 25, 2023 02:30 PM

Leibnizstraße 1, R. 105

Amber in prehistory is still a big and important topic. Therefore, we would like to invite you to a joint workshop on amber as a "link between knowledge and societies" in the framework of the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS in Kiel.
The aim of the workshop is to gain an overview of the European amber trade from the Late Neolithic to the Iron Age, less with regard to possible exchange routes than to the social aspect of the people who had access to amber. The main topic will be the social context of amber.

Symposia on amber have a long tradition since the analysis of Baltic amber by C.W. Beck. Much has been discussed about origin, exchange and possible course of exchange routes. We know in which regions amber appears in the archaeological find context and about its frequency in the individual regions. But what was its importance for the societies of that time and which group of people really had access to this strange stone from the north. Is amber just as important in the north at its source as it was in far away Mycenae? Who wore the large amber necklaces, who wore only pendants, who had access to raw amber? Who worked it? Were its flammable and electrostatic properties known? These are all questions we want to explore together in this workshop in order to gain as comprehensive a Europe-wide understanding as possible of the importance of amber in different societies.
Individual presentations will provide an overview of the social environments in which amber occurs. Does it occur primarily in dumps, in graves, or in settlements? Is it socialized with women and children or different age groups, or is it only encountered in rich graves or special burials? What does this say about the appreciation of amber in each society? Is it possible to find uniform patterns across Europe and do they differ depending on how close they are to the resource amber (succinite/simetite/ruminite)? Do we know which groups of people were involved in the amber trade or its processing and which group of people or region benefited from it?

We will try to answer the following questions in our workshop.

  • - What was the social status of the bearers of the amber?
  • - Can age, gender or wealth differences be determined?
  • - Is it possible to identify traders or the buyers?
  • - Is there a change in the knowledge about amber (origin, use, function)?
  • - What new methods for determining origin do we know?

 
The workshop is scheduled for 3 days, February 23-25, 2023. An excursion to one of the amber-rich coasts on the North Sea with a museum visit is planned.
This Workshop is organised by the subcluster Knowledge in the context of the Cluster of Excellence ROOTS of Kiel University.

Contact and Organisation:
Benjamin Serbe ( bserbe@roots.uni-kiel.de) und Dr. Jutta Kneisel ( jutta.kneisel@ufg.uni-kiel.de )

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Mar 07, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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Kiel Conference

Conference: Knowledge Transfer in Serial Sources. Administration, Routines and Society in Europe's Late Medieval Towns

Mar 30, 2023 to Apr 01, 2023

Internationales Begenungszentrum Kiel (IBZ)

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Apr 04, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

May 09, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Jun 06, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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Conference "Comparative Guts"

Jun 07, 2023 to Jun 09, 2023

Kunsthalle Kiel, Düsternbrooker Weg 1, 24105 Kiel

This international conference focuses on the representation of human innards (especially those involved in digestion and nutrition, what English refers to as ‘guts’) in a variety of contexts. It aims to avoid the implicit framework of Eurocentrism by bringing together body representations from different regions, times and layers of human cultural production, emphasizing their irreducible variety and refusing to rank disciplines or contexts. Sensual experience, learned anatomy, religious feelings, medical practices, emotions, political sentiments, decorative intentions, ‘art’: each of these testifies to human reflections about our ‘embodied’ life, and each is valid in its own terms. ‘Comparative Guts’ accordingly explores the approaches of visual methods and image interpretation by foregrounding the potential of images to mediate anthropological information — with ‘image’ meaning not only the visually, optically perceived, but also mental images accessed through proprioceptive feelings, projection, auditory and olfactory stimulation.

Chiara Thumiger

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Jul 04, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Oct 10, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Nov 07, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*
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ROOTS Internal Board Meeting*

Dec 05, 2023 from 12:00 PM to 02:00 PM

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