ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

This project has the potential to radically change current understanding of cultic and social transformation in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem (c. 6th-4th centuries BCE), an important formative phase of ancient Judaism. “BABYLON” draws on recent, ground-breaking advances in the study of cuneiform texts to illuminate the Babylonian environment of the Judean exile, the socio-historical context which gave rise to the transformative era in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, these new data show that the parallels between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization were substantially more far-reaching than presently recognized in Biblical scholarship. “BABYLON” will study the extent of these similarities and explore the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem. This goal will be achieved through four sub-projects. P1 will study the social dynamics and intellectual universe of the Babylonian priesthood. P2 will finalize the publication of cuneiform archives of Babylonian priests living in the time of the exile. P3 will identify the exact areas of change in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem. P4, the synthesis, will draw from each of these sub-projects to present a comparative study of the Second Temple and contemporary Babylonian models of cultic and social organization, and to propose a strategy of research into the possible routes of transmission between Babylonia and Jerusalem. The research will be carried out by three team members: the PI (P1 and P4), a PhD in Assyriology (P2) and a post-doctoral researcher in Biblical Studies specialized in the Second Temple period (P3 and P4). The participation of the wider academic community will be invited at two moments in the course of the project, in the form of a workshop and an international conference. “BABYLON” will adopt an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together Assyriologists and Biblical scholars for a much-needed dialogue, thereby exploding the artificial boundaries that currently exist in the academic landscape between these two fields.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2015-08-31

This project revisits a major question in world history: how can we explain the continuity of the Chinese Empire. Moving beyond the comparison of early world empires (China and Rome) to explain the different courses Chinese and European history have taken, this project aims to assess the importance of political communication in the maintenance of empire in the last millennium. The core questions are twofold: 1) How can the continuity of empire in the Chinese case be best explained? 2) Does the nature and extent of political communication networks, measured through the frequency and multiplexity of information exchange ties, play a critical role in the reconstitution and maintenance of empire? Its methodology is based on the conviction that an investigation of the nature and extent of political communication in imperial Chinese society should include a systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of the rich commentary on current affairs in correspondence and notebooks. By combining multi-faceted digital analyses of relatively large corpora of texts with an intellectually ambitious research agenda, this project will both radically transform our understanding of the history of Chinese political culture and inspire wide-ranging methodological innovation across the humanities.

1 432 797 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2017-08-31

Colonial-Liberation Wars generate plural memories, conflicting evocations and persisting amnesias. The project’s main challenge is to produce innovative knowledge about the memories of the wars fought by the Portuguese state and pro-independence African movements between 1961 and 1974/5. The approach chosen is simultaneously diachronic and comparative, inasmuch as it contrasts changes that took place between the end of the conflicts and nowadays, regarding how wars, colonial pasts and anticolonial legacies have been remembered and silenced in Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and São Tomé and Principe. The key hypothesis is that wars - as pivotal moments that ended the cycle of Empire in Portugal and started the cycle of African independences in the former Portuguese colonies - triggered memorialisation and silencing processes which had their own historicity. CROME is divided into two strands. The first one, named ‘Colonial Wars, Postcolonial States’, looks at the role played by the states under consideration in mobilising, articulating and recognising the past, but also in actively generating selective representations. ‘Memory as a battlefield’ is the second strand, which will highlight distinct uses of the past and dynamics between social memories and individual memories. The project intends to demonstrate how wars gave rise to multiple memories and conflicting historical judgements, mostly in Portugal, but also to examine how the specific nature of the (post-)colonial histories of each African country has generated different ways to summon war memories and (anti-)colonial legacies. CROME will, thus, put forward a ground-breaking perspective in terms of colonial-liberation war studies, and will be instrumental in dealing with such traumatic experience, for its comparative approach might help overcoming everlasting constraints still at play today, caused by the historical burden European colonialism left behind.

1 478 249 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

The project will create new methodology for identification and interpretation of animal domestication, with a case study pertaining to reindeer domestication among the indigenous Sámi in northern Fennoscandia. Identification of early animal domestication is complicated due to the limited human control over the animals’ life cycles in early stages of domestication, leading to difficulties in interpreting morphological and genetic data, as well as in using traditional concepts and definitions of domestication. These problems are especially pressing in the study of reindeer domestication, characterized by very limited human control over animals. However, understanding reindeer domestication is important to local communities as well as to the scientific community due to central role of human-reindeer relation as a carrier of culture and identity among many peoples, including Sámi of northern Fennoscandia. As a novel approach, we propose a focus on interactional events between humans and animals as indications of domestication taking place. We will create methods aimed at identifying interactional events such as draught use and feeding, between reindeer and humans. The methodological package includes physical activity reconstruction through entheseal changes, pathological lesions and bone cross-sections, and analysis of stable isotopes as indicator of animal diet. These methods will then be applied for archaeological reindeer bone finds and the results will be checked against aDNA data to examine changing human-animal relationships among the Sámi. The project has a potential to break new ground in understanding animal domestication as human-animal interaction, a viewpoint pivotal in today’s human-animal studies. Moreover, the project has potential of methodological breakthroughs and creation of transferable methodology. The results will be relevant to local communities and researchers dealing with domestication, human-animal studies and colonial histories.

1 490 915 €

Start date: 2018-02-01, End date: 2023-01-31