12-13 November
Radboud Institute for Culture & History
This workshop aims to explore the various challenges, problems and potentials for collaboration between historians and archaeologists in the study of water management. Since early 2020, the NWO-VICI project ‘Source of Life’ has been combining archaeological and historical data to study the different ways in which water was managed in Middle Eastern cities and their hinterlands between the 7th and 15th centuries AD. As disciplines, archaeology and history share common aims and interests yet often produce data at different scales, both spatially and temporally, which relate to different groups of people and spheres of life. As a broad theme ‘water management’ encompasses an extremely broad variety of components including physical infrastructure, social institutions and individual actors. It is a complex task, therefore, to select which methods are most appropriate to combine, analyse and understand these different elements and the overall systems they created. The various sources of data-both material and textual-and the ways we choose to put these together affect the reconstructions of the past that we create. Through a variety of presentations exploring different case studies and methodologies that address different approaches, difficulties and best practice, this event aims to consider, critique and develop cross-disciplinary approaches to water management in the past from the combined perspectives of archaeology and history.
You can register and find more information here.
