Consuming Ecologies: Environment and Society in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages

Registration for in-person attendance: https://airtable.com/appfahyswCHKqsQi4/shru9YA6XHZ8RcvLZ

Registration for Zoom: https://princeton.zoom.us/meeting/register/aesw2dOiSs2cY3m9NJYywg#/registration

This one-day workshop aims to investigate late antique and early medieval ecologies as unfolding socio-environmental formations. Recent scholarship has highlighted some of the messy ecological entanglements that gave root to political ideologies and homegrown squashes across the Mediterranean world—feeding hairy pigs alongside persistent imageries. Digging deeper into the matter of ecologies, this workshop explores the emergence of socio-environmental assemblages in the past through the prism of consumption. The undetermined precarity of ecological forms that characterize the present is not merely a feature of capitalist modernity. It is indebted to the longue durée entanglement of individuals and communities with non-human forms of life. The colloquium therefore poses the question of how different forms, materialities, commitments, and ideologies of consumption in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages endangered ‘consuming ecologies’: that is, socio-environmental formations emergent out of human appetites that simultaneously swallowed human and non-human labor, knowledge, and lives. What lifeways, spaces, and practices arose as a result of living in devouring formations, co-created by people, non-human animals, climatic events, things, states, plants, and geological forces?

Since the concept of ecologies asks us to bring together evidence traditionally studied by different disciplines, the workshops will gather scholars working in different fields (history, archaeology, archaeology, literature, etc.). Our goal is to facilitate conversation about ecologies and consumption across disciplinary, temporal, and geographical boundaries.

Speakers:

Prof. Wendy Davies, Department of History, Emeritus, University College London

Dr. Bryna Cameron-Steinke, Department of History, Queen’s University

Dr. Denis Genequand, Site et Musée romains d’Avenches

Prof. Cam Grey, Department of Classical Studies, University of Pennsylvania

Prof. Emily Kneebone, Department of Classics and Archeology, University of Nottingham

Prof. Christina Papageorgopoulou, Laboratory of Biological Anthropology, Department of History and Ethnology, Democritus University of Thrace

Radka Pallová, Department of History, Princeton University

Dr. Rebecca Redfern FSA, London Museum, Newcastle University

Prof. Caroline Goodson, Andrew W. Mellon Humanities Professor, American Academy in Rome

This event is sponsored by a David A. Gardner ’69 Magic Project Grant from the Humanities Council, the Program in Medieval Studies, the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, the Department of Classics, the Department of History, and the Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies.