Daily Deeds and Practiced Patterns: Using Interdisciplinary Collaboration to Advance the Study of Daily Life in the Classical Mediterranean

Summary

The patterns of daily life are vitally important to our understanding of the past. What people do to make ends meet, to worship their gods, and to take care of their families and property help define a culture and create identity. However, the routine practices of non-elite people, often occurring in non-monumental spaces, have often not received significant scholarly attention, especially in Classical Archaeology. However, since 2013, an interdisciplinary group of graduate students from six departments at Brown University has met bi-weekly to discuss recent advances in the study of daily life in the past worldwide and to workshop dissertation chapters and other student work. The research of our workshop participants spans four continents and 4,000 years of human history. Our workshop has covered topics such as settlement and household archaeology, rural archaeology, resource acquisition, agriculture, and craft production in our various disciplines. We, the two workshop organizers, here present the ways in which a comparative focus on these themes can help reconceptualize and reinvigorate the study of daily life in our own discipline, Classical Archaeology.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage