Papers and Talks by Elena Scarsella
The conference will take place online on the 9 th of May 2022. Mediterranean mountains have been ... more The conference will take place online on the 9 th of May 2022. Mediterranean mountains have been looming on the background of modern scholarship for many years, and, with few exceptions, they have often been regarded as secondary or not relevant at all in the grand scheme of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean Archaeology. This tendency has changed in the last few years and new and timely projects are now thriving around the Mediterranean uplands. Mountains, indeed, have often been perceived by lowland people as inaccessible, savage and distant places, where mythical creatures dwell and where the laws of "civilisation" do not
The Later European Prehistory Group of Cambridge is excited to invite you to submit an abstract t... more The Later European Prehistory Group of Cambridge is excited to invite you to submit an abstract to our conference “A Blessing and a Curse: Mediterranean mountains between idyll and violence in later Prehistory”
Mountains are indeed double in their nature: on one hand, they are places of idyllic refuge, where to escape the stress of urban and civilised life, uncontaminated corners of beauty and loci amoeni; on the other, they are liminal places, places of anxiety, where phenomena of colonisation, globalisation and normalisation happened at a different pace, or never at all, frictional landscapes where the rules are dictated by a harsh and unforgiving environment.
World Archaeology, 2020
When Roman writers wrote about Pre-Roman Central-Italy, they consigned to History a picture made ... more When Roman writers wrote about Pre-Roman Central-Italy, they consigned to History a picture made of epic wars and brave warriors. Indeed, the Archaic period is the golden age of the Pre-Roman aristocracy and warrior ideology played a crucial role in building it. In this paper I will focus on the specific case of the Vestini Cismontani, a Sabine tribe of modern Abruzzo, in order to define the role of war and its display within communities of the same ethne. The high number of weapons and warriors, along with the widespread fortification of the territory, even in areas supposed to be within the borders, are indicators of a society where fighting and rivalries are part of the wider diplomatic balance of the region. In this paper I will explore settlement patterns and archaeological evidence in order to define the role of war and inter-communal aggression in a mountainous and harsh landscape.
Feeding Communities International Conference, Cambridge-LMU Strategic Partnership. 1-2 November 2019 Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Sharing food and drinking has a special role in the Orientalising and Archaic Italian burial pra... more Sharing food and drinking has a special role in the Orientalising and Archaic Italian burial practices. This is clear from the huge amount of drinking, storage and eating vessels in the Etruscan, Latin, Sabine and Picene tombs. The mosaic of small peoples of the Middle-Adriatic region makes no exception and, along with general similarities, some minor and still significative differences can be detected. In this presentation I will show these differences and similarities in order to trace a frame as detailed as possible of the meaning of food in the funerary ritual and its role in asserting identity of the Middle-Adriatic Italic peoples.
Paper presented at the LEPG Symposium (Cambridge, UK), 4th of May 2019
Ancient Cyprus, An unexpected Journey. Proceedings of the 15th Annual Meeting of Postgraduate Cypriote Archaeology Torino, Italy, November 25th-27th 2015, 2017
Globalization is a modern word for an old concept, but which forms did it take in ancient times, ... more Globalization is a modern word for an old concept, but which forms did it take in ancient times, when communications and territorial control were challenging issues? Starting from this brief reflection, this paper focuses on the transformations occurred in Central Italy after the romanization of the area. As a case study, it will operate within the territory that the Latin literature attributed to the Vestini Cismontani people and that in modern era correspond to the nearby of L'Aquila, Abruzzo (Italy). The romanization of the area can be divided in two phases, as they correspond to two different kind of relationship between Rome and Vestini: the first period started by the end of the 4 th century BC, when the area in exam lost part of its independence after the foedus with Rome; the second phase occurred around 90 BC after the Social War. After those events, Roman interference within the territorial management of the area was much more invasive and make the territory completely "Romanized", within the wider "globalized" system of Roman hegemony.
Desde el mar Tirreno hasta la Península Ibérica: proyecto de investigación y datos preliminares s... more Desde el mar Tirreno hasta la Península Ibérica: proyecto de investigación y datos preliminares sobre el hierro, cobre, plomo y plata
In: Akrothinia, Jasink A.M. and Bombardieri L. (eds), Firenze 2015
This paper will have at its focus the complicated connection between the production and circulati... more This paper will have at its focus the complicated connection between the production and circulation of copper and the control over it exercised by political elites and religious authorities. During the Late Cypriot period, copper production and trade were a central source of wealth and internal development on the island. This can be seen in terms of external trade, but also in relation to an ideological control of this metal by religious authorities in the urban centers. Indeed, workshops were situated in close vicinity to sanctuaries, and symbols iconographically related to metallurgy are attested specifically at Enkomi, with notable specimens being the Ingot God statuette and the miniature bronze ingots. The transition between the LC IIC and LC IIIA periods marks a phase of radical transition all over the East Mediterranean, characterized by the decline of economic exchanges, as well as a destruction horizon clearly visible in many macro-regions of the Mediterranean. On Cyprus, a destruction level is attested in many large settlements, but such discontinuity cannot be ascribed to several sites of crucial cultural importance, such as Enkomi, Kition and Palaepaphos, which enjoyed a new floruit. This paper aims to define the cultural sequence for the transition to LC IIIA in a critical light.
Talks by Elena Scarsella
Conference Presentations by Elena Scarsella
Abstract Book - SOMA2018.pdf, 2018
In the period between the 10th and the 8th centuries BCE the area of south-eastern Anatolia and n... more In the period between the 10th and the 8th centuries BCE the area of south-eastern Anatolia and northern Syria was occupied by small political units established by the Luwians that arose after the collapse of the Hittite Empire and population movements at the end of the 12th century BCE. The area over which the Luwians seized power was inhabited by an ethnically mixed population and the kingdoms founded by the newcomers, commonly referred as to Neo-Hittite, were in fact mult-ethnic and multi-cultural in their composition. This ethnic mix as well as intensive contacts with neighbouring peopoles found their reflection in the material remains of these kingdoms. The complexity of what we call Neo-Hittite culture is best illustrated by small glyptic products which iconographic repertoire most fully reflects the fusion of Hittite artistic achievements and foreign decorative motifs. Decoration of some of the seals recognized as Neo-Hittite contains separate motifs or whole scenes which prototypes are to find in Assyrian art, both from the Middle and the Neo-Assyrian period. The history of Neo-Hittite kingdoms was namely determined by their relationship to Assyria. Contacts of the Neo-Hittite states with the Neo-Assyrian Empire are attested by Assyrian historical records as early as the reign of Assurnasirpal II who initiated strong expansionist policy of the Assyrian Empire to the west. Intensive Neo-Hittite -Assyrian contacts in the 9th and 8th centuries which resulted, among other, in population displacements, created good conditions for artistic exchange and the presence of Assyrian elements noticeable in the Neo-Hittite art as well as in the glyptic was definitely a result of a number of military expeditions led by Assyrian kings to the west against Neo-Hittite states, first in order to capture spoils and then to annex new territories. The process of turning the Neo-Hittite states into provinces annexed to the Assyrian Empire started in the 8th century BCE. It is also the time of the strongest Assyrian influence on the Neo-Hittite art. The best examples of it are small seals mainly used by inhabitants of the Neo-Hittite kingdoms for marking wares and also as amulets, most of which, as it will be shown, was made in this period. The aim of the paper is therefore to discuss these single motifs or even whole decorative patterns occuring in the Neo-Hittite glyptic which reveal in my opinion the clear Assyrian origin as being worked out by Assyrian craftmen, whose artistic production was one of main sources of inspiration of Neo-Hittite artists. The Private Agency in the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean Elena SCARSELLA University of Cambridge [email protected]
22nd Symposium Of Mediterranean Archaeology (SOMA2018), "From East to West. The mobility of people, goods and ideas in the ancient Mediterranean", 22.25 November 2018, 2018
The last few years, in the history of studies on Late Bronze Age Mediterranean, archaeology has b... more The last few years, in the history of studies on Late Bronze Age Mediterranean, archaeology has been particularly productive in the investigation of the ancient economy and trade, having brought to light a complex system of connections, both maritime and terrestrial. The existence of a wide and systematic network regulated by laws, norms and a value system, although in nuce, is now evident. Within this network, commodities, people and ideas freely circulated and a certain degree of safety seemed to be assured. These connections were mostly in the hands of the palaces, as testified by the written sources, but nonetheless it is possible that some commodities circulated by different means, external to the palatial control. In this talk we will enquiry the possibility of the existence of a private agency in the Eastern Mediterranean trade and its relationship with the palatial controlled economy. In order to do so, two kinds of data will be taken into consideration: written sources and pottery. The first piece of evidence will consist mostly in tablets coming from Ugarit and the Amarna letters, and an overview of possible traces of trade in the Linear B tablets will be made, along with a short reference to some interesting new interpretation of the miniaturized inscribed ingots coming from Cyprus. For the latter, the case study in exam will be the Mycenaean pottery, mainly due to its wide distribution and the large amount of available data, but also because presumably out of the palatial control, as it is not mentioned in the archive records. The analysis of the pottery will be mainly quantitative and focused on an area that includes Anatolia, Syria, Cyprus and Levantine coast during a chronological span that goes from 1450 to 1200 ca. BC (LH IIB-LH IIIC in relative chronology). In this area, the imports include fine examples of drinking pottery and stirrup jars, these latter intended for the transport of wine and perfumed oils. As the results of this research will show, the distribution pattern of this kind of pottery is not homogeneous and varies in time and space.
The focus of this paper is to investigate the changing relationship between human societies and l... more The focus of this paper is to investigate the changing relationship between human societies and landscape in time of crisis and socio-economic instability. Such reflection has a timely relevance for our own society, and explores the historical circumstances in a geo-political perspective. History, economy and geography concur, all together, in shaping the choices of human communities toward the landscape and its occupation. In order to offer a retrospective view of this subject, this paper investigates a very complex period of the Mediterranean Late Bronze Age in an area that in historical times had a crucial importance: we will focus on Late Bronze Age Laconia and its changings after the great crisis of the 12th century BC, the so-called Collapse. As emerged from a precedent study, the settlements in the Eurota's Valley from Pellana (north) to Ayios Stephanos (south) and from Lekas Panayiotis (west) to Apidhia (east) formed a contiguous polity in the shape of an inverted "T". According to such vision, this paper will deal with the geographical and archaeological analysis of the settlement pattern and its changings between the 15th and 12th century BC in the area from Apidhia to Epidauros Limera. Once the changings have been highlighted, their relationship with morphology of the area and its natural sources (mining ores, orography and approdals) will be analyzed, in order to understand the factors that determined the survival of some communities and the disappearance of others.
Papers by Elena Scarsella
Many contradicting models have been applied so far to interpret the interactions between the Myce... more Many contradicting models have been applied so far to interpret the interactions between the Mycenaeans and the Cypriots, starting at the turn of the 12th century BC. The current state of research forces us to adopt a different and multidisciplinary approach in order to obtain a more complex perspective on the cultural dynamics in a crucial moment of protohistoric Cyprus and thus go beyond the classic monolithic view of ancient interactions. That outdated view was based on the assumption of a Cyprus being colonised by the Aegeans, who imposed architectural, cultural and social models that superseded and marginalised the old ones. The aim of our research is to analyse social dynamics by looking at the burial practices adopted in the major urban Cypriote centres, namely Palaeopaphos, Kition and Enkomi. The funerary choices will be considered in light of the architectural and structural change that simultaneously take place in the settlements and of the economical transformations in wh...
espanolEl estudio arqueometalurgico y arqueometrico de objetos manufacturados metalicos en la Ita... more espanolEl estudio arqueometalurgico y arqueometrico de objetos manufacturados metalicos en la Italia medio-tirrenica se esta realizando en el marco de una vision conjunta que tome en consideracion las relaciones, bien interregionales que internacionales, que surgen en las distintas areas del Mediterraneo Occidental y Oriental, en un periodo que abarca desde la primera Edad del Hierro y la Epoca Clasica, entre los siglos X-IX y V-IV a.C., hasta el inicio del proceso de romanizacion, el cual supondra una radical transformacion de la dinamica comercial del metal conocida en el Mediterraneo. Esta investigacion se centra en un estudio interdisciplinar, en el que se conjuga los analisis arqueometalurgicos con los arqueometricos y arqueologicos, de los objetos de cobre, bronce, hierro, plomo, oro y plata procedentes del area territorial de Etruria (conjuntos de Veio y santuario de Pyrgi) y de la zona de la Lazio (necropolis de “Poggio dei Cavallari” en Satricum) con el objetivo de profundi...
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Papers and Talks by Elena Scarsella
Mountains are indeed double in their nature: on one hand, they are places of idyllic refuge, where to escape the stress of urban and civilised life, uncontaminated corners of beauty and loci amoeni; on the other, they are liminal places, places of anxiety, where phenomena of colonisation, globalisation and normalisation happened at a different pace, or never at all, frictional landscapes where the rules are dictated by a harsh and unforgiving environment.
Talks by Elena Scarsella
Conference Presentations by Elena Scarsella
Papers by Elena Scarsella
Mountains are indeed double in their nature: on one hand, they are places of idyllic refuge, where to escape the stress of urban and civilised life, uncontaminated corners of beauty and loci amoeni; on the other, they are liminal places, places of anxiety, where phenomena of colonisation, globalisation and normalisation happened at a different pace, or never at all, frictional landscapes where the rules are dictated by a harsh and unforgiving environment.