We cordially invite you to a public lecture by

 

Prof. Cyprian Broodbank

University of Cambridge

 

Remaking the Middle Sea with Archaeological Science: Eight Questions that Mediterranean Archaeologists Should be Interested in

Wednesday, 20 September 2023     |     Lecture 18:00 - 19:00, followed by reception     |     Fresnel Auditorium, The Cyprus Institute

Watch on The Cyprus Institute YouTube channel & Facebook channel

 

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The Mediterranean has long acted as a crucible for exciting advances in archaeological science, which have enabled huge advances in our understanding of its long-term history and dynamics.  These stretch from the radiocarbon revolution, environmental archaeology and first steps in provenance studies during the 1950-1970s through to the biomolecular breakthroughs of the present and emergent future.

Archaeological science is to an ever-increasing degree a collaborative project, involving multiple experts and techniques applied to multifaceted questions. But it also needs to be a profoundly archaeological endeavour, driven not only by the possibilities enabled by science but also, emphatically, the questions, big and small, to which archaeologists want to know the answers.

This lecture celebrates five years of outstanding archaeologically-led science at the Cyprus Institute under its Leventis Chair, by highlighting (roughly) eight major questions that archaeologists of the early Mediterranean should want answers to, and considering how present and future science, working closely with archaeology, can help to get us there.

Cyprian Broodbank studied History at Oxford and Aegean archaeology at Bristol before gaining a PhD from the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge. After a Junior Research Fellowship at University College, Oxford, he moved in 1993 to the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where he remained until 2014, rising from Lecturer in Aegean Archaeology to Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology. In 2014 he moved to Cambridge as Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. In 2015 he was elected to the Fellowship of the British Academy, where he currently serves as the Vice-President for the British International Research Institutes. He is a Trustee of Museum of London Archaeology.

His lifelong research passions are archaeology as deep global history, and specifically comparative approaches to the archaeology and history of the Mediterranean, with a particular focus on the prehistoric Aegean, as well as the archaeology of islands and maritime connectivity. He co-directs the Kythera Island Project and is also currently engaged in research projects and fieldwork in Cyprus and Morocco.

He is the author of numerous papers and articles, as well as two books. The Making of the Middle Sea (2013) won the Wolfson History Prize and the Nonino Prize in 2014. Previously, his first book, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades, won the Runciman Award of the Hellenic Society and the James R. Wiseman Prize of the Archaeological Institute of America.