Digging Politics: The Ancient Past and Political Present in East-Central Europe

This workshop will explore political uses of ancient pasts and archaeology in east-central Europe in the states during the Cold War and post-communist period. While studies have often focused on individual episodes such as Dacomania in Romania or the Thracian past in Bulgaria, this workshop will bring together different approaches and disciplines in a collaborative, comparative and interdisciplinary manner. We invite proposals for papers from scholars working on the region (loosely conceived) to establish a conversation about uses of the ancient past from the Cold War to the present.

Possible questions and issues might include (but are not limited to):

Thinking about why ancient pasts became so important to east-central Europe from the late-twentieth century

• Considering which narratives emerged

• The location and exhibition of ‘ancient pasts’

• The formation of networks of knowledge and knowledge transfer among experts in the regions

• Identifying transnational and comparative developments in the period

• The relationship between the local, the national, and the transnational/European dimension

• Processes of forming cultural identity

• Exploring the actors in shaping ‘ancient pasts’

• The role particular disciplines took on in ‘creating’ ancient pasts

• The wider reception of ancient pasts in east-central European societies

Please submit an abstract of up to 300 words with a brief biography to e.r.hanscam@durham.ac.uk and james.koranyi@durham.ac.uk by 15 March 2019