Regionalism and Globalism in Antiquity: Exploring Their Limits

By F De Angelis

How we concieve of the movement of ancient phenomena through time andspace has been undergoing reassessment over the last two decades, causing the grip to be loosened on the well-entrenched interpretativemodels that had dominated research up to that point. The 'Regionalismand Globalism in Antiquity' conference, held in Vancouver on March16-17, 2007, aimed to take stock of this situation and in particular toinvestigate in fresh ways how regional and global phenomena in theancient Mediterranean, Near East and Eurasia shaped local life. Stilltoday two models tend to guide explanations of intercultural andinterregional contact and interaction: diffusionism from cores (orcentres) to peripheries, involving 'superior' civilisations influencingother 'inferior' ones, and Mediterraneanism, the set of distinctiveenvironmental, cultural and historical images that create a unified andunchanging view of the Mediterranean. These two models have come underincreasing scrunity since the 1980s, as we have been living in a worldof shifting perceptions of time and space and of greaterinterconnectedness that affects our everyday lives in numerous ways. Thesource of these shifts has been credited to globalisation, and with ithas also come a greater historical appreciation of the phenomenon, including the recognition that the world has witnessed periods ofglobalisation since the end of the Ice Age. This volume contains 14reworked and peer-reviewed essays from the original conferenceproceedings and provides a fair overview of the various chronologicalperiods, methods and data, and perspectives encountered at theconference. The essays consist of case studies whose subjects range indate from the 10th millennium BC to the 4th century AD and draw in allthe major regions of the ancient world. These essays and the originalconference from which they derive have by no means exhausted all thepotential topics raised by the framework within which they work. Muchwork remains to be done for antiquity and, given the framework's wideapplicability, later periods of history.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 9042926694
• ISBN13: 9789042926691
• Release Date: May 2013
• Publisher: Peeters
• Length: 378 Pages
• Weight: 1.83 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.5" x 9.8"