CENTRAL Joint Workshop 2024 Mosaics of Details: From Little Pieces to the Big Picture within an Interdisciplinary Framework
Interdisciplinary Approaches to Ancient Egypt, Roman Gundacker
CENTRAL Joint Workshop 2024 Mosaics of Details: From Little Pieces to the Big Picture within an Interdisciplinary Framework
Date: 2–5 December 2024
Place: University of Vienna and Austrian Academy of Sciences
Ancient Egypt is commonly known for spectacular monuments, magnificent artefacts, and captivating texts. Yet, beyond the fascinating beauty of “wonderful things” (H. Carter), all this enshrines plentiful information which bear witness to a great culture, its evolution, and its history. Egyptology is dedicated to unearthing, analysing, and interpreting all different kinds of sources of information; but today, research requires much more than “simply” excavating, cataloguing, or translating. The challenge is therefore to develop, fine-tune, and apply well-established and innovative, but also interdisciplinary methodologies in order to get one step closer to what was at the core of ancient Egyptian culture.
Up-to-date research has to consider old and new material alike; and it is both formerly neglected minutiae and the new big data which may bring about decisive new insights on the small scale or even paradigmatic change on the large scale. Research of this kind always requires attention to detail, the ability to organise huge amounts of information, and the capacity to proceed with a fine-grained methodology which combines various approaches and disciplines from archaeology to archaeometry, from history of arts to pictorial sciences, from (text) philology to linguistics, from mythology to religious studies, from cultural studies to social sciences, from anthropology to the natural sciences, and far beyond. Only a plethora of details will allow successfully to address research questions, to develop hypotheses, and to piece together the big picture. In this changing and challenging research landscape, the MA and PhD students of today will shape tomorrow’s Egyptology with new ways of searching, new ways of analysing, and new ways of thinking.
This workshop to be held at the University of Vienna and at the Austrian Academy of Sciences on 2–5 December 2024 aims to bring together MA and PhD students with experienced scholars and researchers in order to initiate a methodological discourse. All workshop participants are invited to reflect on their methodologies with the aid of which they conduct their research, and how they develop and adapt their tool kit. At the same time, participants are strongly encouraged to present the data or material which they investigate, how they apply their methodologies, and what new (preliminary) results they have gained so far or expect soon. We are therefore looking forward to a workshop which will allow to get a sense of what kind(s) of well-established and highly innovative methodologies are currently used and to discuss what potential there is for ongoing and future research to the benefit of all workshop participants and their work on little pieces and the big picture.
This workshop takes place within the CENTRAL-Netzwerkes.
Organisers: Roman Gundacker, Frank Kammerzell, Tamás Bács, Hana Vymazalová, Kamil O. Kuraszkiewicz
Organising Institutions: University of Vienna, Humboldt University Berlin, ELTE Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Charles University Prague, University of Warsaw, Austrian Archaeological Institute of the Austrian Academy of Sciences
REGISTRATION FOR KEYNOTE LECTURE
Please register for the keynote lecture until 27 November 2024 by sending an email with the subject “CENTRAL Joint Workshop: Keynote Lecture”. All emails shall be directed to:
The rest of this workshop will follow an open door policy with colleagues from participating institutions and students of Egyptology or neigbouring fi elds taking precedence over others.
Individual pictures starting in upper left corner (clockwise): (1) Rock Island near Assuan (Kora27, CCBY-SA 4.0); (2) Hydrological Map of Tell el-Dab’a (© Manfred Bietak, ÖAI); (3) Relief of Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II (Metropolitan Museum of Art 07.230.2, CC0 1.0); (4) Quartzite Head of Amenophis III (British Museum EA 7, © The Trustees of the British Museum, CCBY-NC-SA 4.0); (5) Outer Coffin of Henuttawi (Detail) (Metropolitan Museum of Arts 25.3.182a–b, CC0 1.0); (6) Kiosk of Trajan, Philae (Rémih, CCBY-SA 3.0); (7) Wine Jars in the Tomb of Meretneith (© E. Christiana Köhler, University of Vienna); (8) Model Granary of Meketre (Metropolitan Museum of Art 20.3.11, CC0 1.0); (9) Pyramid Texts of Pepi I (UC London) (Osama Shukir Muhammad Amin, CCBY-SA 4.0); (10) Papyrus of Ani, Book of the Dead, Chapter 125 (British Museum EA 10470.3, © The Trustees of the British Museum, CCBY-NC-SA 4.0); (11) Writing Board with School Exercises (Metropolitan Museum of Art 28.9.4, CC0 1.0); (12) Radiocarbon Model, Early New Kingdom (Sturt Manning et alii, CCBY 4.0); Centre: Great Sphinx and Pyramid of Khephren, Gizah (Mídia Ninja, CCBY-SA 2.0). All pictures have been processed, adjusted, adapted, or altered.