With colleagues from Bologna University, Bern University and Radboud University, I am organising a session on the archaeology of disasters at the next EAA Annual conference in Rome (28-31 August 2024). It is entitled ‘The Day After: The Materiality of Resilience, Memory and Inequality in Post-disaster Scenarios‘ (Session #1112).
Below you can find the session abstract. If you want to participate in this session and present your work, please submit a paper proposal by the 8th of February by accessing the EAA website. We are looking forward to discussing with you exciting new research on the archaeology of disasters in Rome next August.
For any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me at paolo.forlin@unibo.it
The Day After: The Materiality of Resilience, Memory and Inequality in Post-disaster Scenarios
Natural hazards are key agents in transforming landscapes, sometimes in largely irreversible ways. These significant episodes of environmental change can have profound repercussions for affected human societies across different timescales and spheres of life.
This session focuses on ‘natural’ disasters and aims to explore how catastrophes stimulated the transformation of cultural landscapes throughout the past. In so doing, the session seeks to shine new light on how human societies were impacted by natural hazards in different periods and cultural settings, and how they responded to short-and long-term consequences unleashed by these processes. Instead of simply examining ‘continuity’ and ‘discontinuity’, we seek to debate the materiality of resilience, adaptation, power, inequality, agency and memory in both pre- and post-disaster scenarios.
We invite contributions that reflect on the critical role played by disaster-affected societies in shaping cultural landscapes and ecologies. Disasters may be considered both windows of opportunity and stimuli for innovation but also manifestations of structural environmental injustice and catalysts for increasing social inequality. We also invite methodological papers that are more focused on the identification, assessment and dating of destructive events, or of post-disaster responses.
The session encourages theoretical and methodological papers focusing on European and Mediterranean case studies without chronological restrictions.
Session presenters will be invited to contribute to the publication of a special issue of Quaternary Environments and Humans which will be devoted to the archaeology of disasters.
Keywords:
disasters, landscape, resilience, memory, inequality, ruination
ArMedEa 