IDENTIS · Identity-scapes of Sardinia: productivity, burials, and social relationships of AD 100-600 west-central Sardinia

Identity-scapes of Sardinia: productivity, burials, and social relationships of AD 100-600 west-central Sardinia

IDENTIS is a an archaeology-focused research that addresses the problem of how we construct, understand, interpret, social identities out of the practices held by human communities. It looks specifically at the material remains that allow us to interpret the construction of social identies in the Mediterranean, and particularly rural Sardinia, during the Roman Empire and immediately after its fall (0-600 AD). A critical research on Identity is relevant to today's society because identity is currently a highly debated topic across Europe and the rest of the world. Often though, identity it is a token spoken about as an immutable tool, acquired by right of birth, immutable, and it has been appropriated by discourses on exclusivity that tend to essentialise and exclude from basic rights big portions of society. With this research, I aim at making archaeology contribute to the discussion by emphasising its unique vertical perspective over time, showing the complexity and dynamism of identities as something that needs to be constantly renegotiated through human decision. The general objective is returning identity to current socio-political debates as a critical tool based on human relationships, deconstructing the idea of unchanging identifications attached to national or ethnic tags. To achieve this overarching scope, the project, that centres on funerary and settlement contexts of Roman-period rural Sardinia, is developed in a very intra-disciplinary way - looking at human remains, landscape, social theory - at the Department of Humanities at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, under the supervision of prof. Sauro Gelichi, in collaboration with the Museum Broken Relationships, Zagreb, Croatia. This project focusses on the 'invisible people’ such as field workers and slaves, women and children of subaltern human groups, investigating the way they shared and formed social relationships through interactions with the past, power and with their surroundings. Traces of these identities were sought in two different media: the bodies of the people buried in the necropolises analysed in the research, and the landscape that surrounded these necropolises. Together with students from Ca' Foscari and the University of Ferrara, we run archaeological walking surveys in search for evidence of the working and social activities of the rural communities, finding traces of settlements and agriculture that date from the same period of the necropolises. This allowed us to broaden the scope of our research and contextualise the evidence gathered from the burials.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз