Project description
Cracking the ancient code to unearth societal collapse
In the late 4th to early 3rd millennium BCE, Mesopotamia experienced a cataclysmic period of societal upheaval. This era of profound change has long baffled historians, leaving us with more questions than answers. Backed by Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, the TRANSFORM project will explore the extent of major societal transformations during this turbulent period. It will focus on pottery production at the Kani Shaie site in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq. Pottery reflects a society’s intricate social and technological choices. By scrutinising the pottery-making process, TRANSFORM aims to provide critical insights into how Kani Shaie’s inhabitants adapted to these seismic shifts, transcending traditional approaches through a multidisciplinary methodology that integrates archaeology, material science, geology and anthropological theory.
Objective
The late 4th-early 3rd millennium BCE in Mesopotamia featured widespread changes, often cited as a period of societal collapse. TRANSFORM will explore the effect of this rapid change through close examination of pottery production at the site of Kani Shaie in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI). The key research question driving TRANSFORM is: To what extent are the major societal transformations during this period replicated in the production of pottery at Kani Shaie?
Pottery production is the realisation of a set of social and technological choices. Thus, sudden changes to it the likes of which are documented during this period at Kani Shaie are socially and culturally significant. Thus, TRANSFORM will reconstruct the pottery manufacturing process across this transitional period, to investigate the effects of these societal transformations, and how the occupants at Kani Shaie adapted to them. This project will transcend traditional approaches by examining the social dimension of pottery production through application of a multidisciplinary methodology which seamlessly integrates archaeology, material science, geology, and anthropological theory.
The researchers background and methodology uniquely place him to critically examine how localised trajectories underpin larger socio-cultural transformations. The project will benefit from the researchers cross disciplinary skills, combined with unprecedented access to an extensive archaeological dataset, and expertise at UC. In questioning the effect of the LC-EBA transition at Kani Shaie, TRANSFORM will produce significant results by highlighting the effect that local communities had upon, and how they were affected by supraregional cultural processes. This investigation presents an exciting opportunity to examine behavioural transformations when faced with major societal upheavala better understanding of which should give us pause to consider the ramifications of impending transformations facing us today.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistoryancient history
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyarchaeology
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeology
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Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
3004-531 Coimbra
Portugal