In this course, you will explore the functioning of the formative phase in Roman expansionism using primarily archaeological data from the Western Mediterranean, and confronting these with current models of Roman expansion. We will focus on the archaeology of the Italian peninsula, with outlooks into developments in the Iberian peninsula, Corsica, Sicily and southern France.

In this course we will analyse the questions “what is Greek(ness)” and “what determines the attractiveness of things Greek/‘Greek’ to non-Greeks” critically and from a variety of different perspectives. These are questions that go to the very heart of the disciplines of Classics, Ancient History and Classical Archaeology (and of much of cultural history at large).

Focusing on Ancient History and Classical Archaeology in particular, we will investigate the struggles of earlier scholars dealing with questions of ancient and of modern identity. To do so we will also draw on comparable concepts and their scholarly debates, for instance Egyptianisation and Romanisation.

This course will explore various aspects of the manifestation of the Crusades in the Mediterranean and in the Near East: ranging from the conquest of Sicily and southern Italy by the Normans (1000-1130 C.E.) to the fall of Akko in the Holy Land (1291 C.E.).

The aim is to address how we can study the Crusades from an archaeological perspective, and what the archaeological data can tell us about the nature of these events.