The Archaeologies of Roads
A road is a place where time dissolves in space through repeated action: herds of sheep walking towards open pastureland over hundreds of years carved hollow ways into the ground. Caravans of donkeys moved between Syria and Anatolia, marking the Assyrian trade routes. Every 15 August women arriving to the island of Tinos crawl to the Church of Virgin Mary on their knees, embodying cyclicality and resurrection.
A road is also a place where space dissolves in time through singular events: the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand” from inland Persia, Gandhi’s Salt March in the British Raj, the Long March of the Chinese Red Army, the Trail of Tears, and the roads upon which captives of war were deported en masse throughout the Assyrian Empire.
The conference on “The Archaeologies of Roads” invites landscape-oriented papers on the topics of archaeology, history, geography, and anthropology from across the globe. The aim of the conference is to bring together digital/computational approaches to roads with the phenomenology, aesthetics, emergence, and ideology of roads. For enhancing the collaboration we use the term “road” in its broadest sense to envelope all possible categorizations, including trails, paths, highways, byways, and so on.