Identity-scapes of Sardinia: productivity, burials, and social relationships of AD 100-600 west-central Sardinia

Project Information

IDENTIS

Grant agreement ID: 893017

DOI

10.3030/893017

Project closed

EC signature date 20 March 2020

Start date 1 September 2020

End date 31 August 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 257 209,92

EU contribution

€ 257 209,92

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITA CA' FOSCARI VENEZIA
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - IDENTIS (Identity-scapes of Sardinia: productivity, burials, and social relationships of AD 100-600 west-central Sardinia)

Reporting period: 2020-09-01 to 2023-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

IDENTIS is a an archaeology-focused research that addresses the problem of how we construct, understand, interpret, social identities out of the practices held by human communities. It looks specifically at the material remains that allow us to interpret the construction of social identies in the Mediterranean, and particularly rural Sardinia, during the Roman Empire and immediately after its fall (0-600 AD).

A critical research on Identity is relevant to today's society because identity is currently a highly debated topic across Europe and the rest of the world. Often though, identity it is a token spoken about as an immutable tool, acquired by right of birth, immutable, and it has been appropriated by discourses on exclusivity that tend to essentialise and exclude from basic rights big portions of society.
With this research, I aim at making archaeology contribute to the discussion by emphasising its unique vertical perspective over time, showing the complexity and dynamism of identities as something that needs to be constantly renegotiated through human decision. The general objective is returning identity to current socio-political debates as a critical tool based on human relationships, deconstructing the idea of unchanging identifications attached to national or ethnic tags.

To achieve this overarching scope, the project, that centres on funerary and settlement contexts of Roman-period rural Sardinia, is developed in a very intra-disciplinary way - looking at human remains, landscape, social theory - at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, under the supervision of prof. Sauro Gelichi, in collaboration with the Museum Broken Relationships, Zagreb, Croatia.

This project focusses on the 'invisible people’ such as field workers and slaves, women and children of subaltern human groups, investigating the way they shared and formed social relationships through interactions with the past, power and with their surroundings.
Traces of these identities were sought in two different media: the bodies of the people buried in the necropolises analysed in the research, and the landscape that surrounded these necropolises. Together with students from Ca' Foscari and the University of Ferrara, we run archaeological walking surveys in search for evidence of the working and social activities of the rural communities, finding traces of settlements and agriculture that date from the same period of the necropolises. This allowed us to broaden the scope of our research and contextualise the evidence gathered from the burials.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

- (01.09.2020) beginning of MC in Venice
- (09-10.2020) RESEARCH on publications on: a)landscape b)identity c)body d)Roman archaeology e) Sardinia
- (5-13.10.2020) 1st MISSION in Sardinia for: a) inventory of human remains form the Roman-period necropoleis at the Museo Antropologico Sardo of Cagliari; b) study of excavation journals;
- (11.2020) 1st PUBLICATION. L’isola del millennio prima. In F. Sedda, P. Sorrentino (Eds.) Isolanità: per una Semiotica Culturale delle Isole. Aracne pp. 233-248.
- (12.2020) 2nd PUBLICATION: Romanization, Romanizzazione: a rhyzomatic account. O T I V M, 9(9).
- (02.03.2021) 1st LECTURE. Paesaggio e Identità. Lecture for Corso di Topografia Medievale SP. – Prof. Sauro Gelichi A.A. 2020-2021, Venezia, IT.
- (18.06.2021) 1st TALK. "‘The Romanization of Britain’ (1990) 30 years on: an account on hegemony and subalterns". For Power, Coercion, Consent. By Michele Bellomo, Emilio Zucchetti, BSR British School at Rome, IT.
- (16.07.2021) 2nd TALK. "Being Orient in the Centre". For Othering and the other: performing identity in the Roman Empire. Evora, by Bio.Rom Universidade de Coimbra, PT.
- (06.09.2021) 3rd TALK. Il Simbolo in Archeologia: Gli Scavi, i discorsi, i nuraghi. For Seminario di Semiotica Simboli d’oggi by Dario Mangano, Franciscu Sedda, University of Urbino, IT.
- (27.09.2021) 4th TALK. Islands of Power. For Anatomy of Islands – Anatomija Otoka Cultural Centre, Lastovo, CR.
- (03-15.11.2021) 3rd MISSION in Sardinia: archeological fieldwork with 5 students from Ca' Foscari and Cagliari Universities, teaching on site of survey methodology,and postcolonial theory.
- (02.2022). 3rd PUBLICATION. Why archaeology today? What archaeology today? Material traces and absences of the past. In Actes Sémiotiques, 126.
- (7-9.04.2022) 2 SESSIONS ORGANIZATION: TRAC Split, CRO, "An Archaeology of Subalterns" (4 speakers); and "Burial Manipulations" (5 speakers)
- (26-27.05.2022) 2 Day SYMPOSIUM "How do We Live with the Meanings of the Past?" with 14 international invited speakers and 4 Marie Curie Panelists from several departments.
- (11.2022) 4th MISSION in Sardinia: archeological fieldwork with 4 students from Ca' Foscari and Ferrara Universities, teaching on site feminist theory and archaeology of Sardinia.
- (8.2.2023) 5TH TALK (invited). TRAC Webinar Series on The Archaeology of the Roman Empire and the World Cup 2022 in Qatar.
- (30.6.2023) 6th TALK (invited). "Women as Subalterns” for the Gramsci Research Network at the Royal Holloway, University of London.
- (29-31.08.2023) 7th TALK. Women and roman Period Sardinia, at EAA, Belfast, IR
- (31.08.2023) Opening of EXHIBITION in collaboration with the Museum of Broken Relationships.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

IDENTIS has pushed beyond the state of the art by impacting both specialists of archaeology and broader public.

A. As far as specialists are concerned, IDENTIS progressed in two ways:
1) by centring the debate of archaeology on the concepts of identity and subalterns, through an interdisciplinary approach embraced by 18 renown international scholars during the Symposium I organised in Venice (May 2022). Scholars involved agreed on the risks run by archaeology to impose "identity" onto the past and present of communities as a fixed and static label, and argued for the need to deconstruct it. This work has impacted the debate so much that I have agreed with the editors of Cambridge Archaeological Journal to publish a five-articles special issue for CUP
2) by creating an interdisciplinary team aimed at answering social questions on the past of Roman period Mediterranean placing at the centre of history the bodies of the people who lived and worked in the rural areas of the island exploited by the Empire, through the use of collaborative bio-archeology and genetic analyses, ongoing at the University of Cagliari, and University of Tubingen. The results of such analyses will further impact the state of the art of both archaeological interpretation, funerary archaeology, and Roman archaeology, as they will put at the centre of the identity debate the bodies of unknown people often deligitimised by official sources and their social relationships.

B. As far as the broader public is involved, IDENTIS brought close to the subject of archaeology the numerous people (students, workers, the neighborhood) who visited the exhibition "Shards of the Past, Meanings of the Present", making them familiar with the problems connected to our common use of the word identityin relation to entire populations or regions. The exhibition was covered both at local level (newspaper Venezia.today) national level (newspaper Il Manifesto and magazine Archeo), and st an international level (professor and writer Maia Kotrosits' blog, followed by thousands, posted about it in September 2023).

Exhibition Opening Invite

Survey of the site of Masullas (Sardinia), IT.

Poster and programme of International Symposium with 18 speakers

Poster of Exhibition held in Venice