Ömür Harmanşah co-organized a conference session “Dialogues Across Landscapes” at the ASOR Annual Meeting, Chicago IL 15-18 November 2023
He will also present a paper titled "Surveying Anthropocene Landscapes" in the same session.
Prof. Ömür Harmanşah has co-organized a conference session "Dialogues Across Landscapes: New Challenges to Practicing Landscape Archaeology in Western Asia" at the American Schools of Overseas Research Annual Meeting, Chicago IL 15-18 November 2023, and he will also present a paper titled "Surveying Anthropocene Landscapes" in the same session.
Dialogues Across Landscapes: New Challenges to Practicing Landscape Archaeology in Western Asia
Session Chairs: Dan Lawrence, Durham University; Omur Harmansah, University of Illinois Chicago; Claudia Glatz, Glasgow University; Jennie Bradbury, Bryn Mawr College
Description: Landscape archaeology represents a rich assemblage of field practices that document and analyze traces of the past, and reconstruct human-environment relationships in diachronic perspective. From pedestrian surveys to remote sensing, geomorphology to climate and vegetation change, landscape archaeologists address research questions on a regional scale with a fine grained understanding of deep time and deep history. This richness of tools and perspectives allowed archaeologists to forge unique collaborations with other disciplinary fields such as the environmental sciences and anthropology. Decolonial shifts in the discipline bring to focus the incorporation of public and collaborative archaeologies and engaged/activist scholarship. What is the current state of landscape archaeology in the contemporary world of climate change, ecological challenges, the pandemic, immigration and displacement of communities and endangered cultural heritage? We invite landscape archaeologists of Western Asia to discuss the state of the discipline, and to reflect on what makes Western Asian landscape archaeology unique in the broader field of landscape research. What are the specific challenges landscape archaeologists face in carrying out their research in the field? Our goal is to give voice to some of the creative and resilient research carried out by landscape archaeologists in contemporary Western Asia. In 2023, we focus on imperial, colonial, resistant, and decolonial landscapes, linking colonial and imperial histories of landscape archaeology to contemporary attempts to decolonize the discipline, and on landscape histories from non-state and non-imperial perspectives. We also welcome contributions addressing infrastructure, whether as organizational networks, material flows or contested sites of ecological politics.