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Desert Sea Connectivity: Arid-Zone Food Security and Climate Change in Late Antiquity | Israel Institute for Advanced Studies

Desert Sea Connectivity: Arid-Zone Food Security and Climate Change in Late Antiquity

Desert Sea Connectivity: Arid-Zone Food Security and Climate Change in Late Antiquity

Free Dead Sea Jordanian Coast photo and picture
September 1, 2023 - January 31, 2024

Organizers:

Guy Bar-Oz (University of Haifa)
Gideon Avni (Israel Antiquities Authority)

Gil Gambash (University of Haifa)

 

The last decades have witnessed the intensification of archaeological and historical research on
ancient arid areas bordering on the Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Key elements in this research
focus on agricultural practices, food systems and food security of past societies. At the same time,
a number of multidisciplinary research groups have produced separate relevant databases, which
demand a comparative overview, and make possible the reconstruction of food production and
distribution processes on regional scale. The expanding research, with its new insights and synthesis,
has influenced numerous hybrid initiatives which rely strongly on synergy between economic
history, environmental archaeology, and bio-archaeology. It is the intersection between these
relative disciplines that has the potential to shift research to new methodological criteria, and
provide a model for similar geographic areas. Yet, platforms allowing such groups and disciplines
to engage in thorough, meaningful discussion, are preciously few, to the effect that no such initiative
has been attempted to date.
The proposed research group aims to develop a coherent and multidisciplinary approach towards
the reconstruction of food systems in ancient arid areas, focusing on North Africa, the Near East
and southern Europe during the Late Antique period (4th-10th centuries CE). The period has been
selected because it spans the transformation of the Roman imperial ‘world system’ into the diverse
social, economic and religious structures that shape these regions today.

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