| The material culture of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires offers crucial information for our understanding of these societies, which played a vital role in the formation of Western Civilization. However, until now both Byzantine and Ottoman archaeology lack a solid social and historical perspective. The research aims to provide a new approach to the material culture of these two subsequent and intertwined Mediterranean Empires. The project will use archaeological objects as instruments to advance the understanding of historical developments and social change in a diachronic (longue durée) perspective. The focus will be on the dynamics of Byzantine and Ottoman societies, especially on the relation between changing forms and functions of artefacts, changing pottery production and trade patterns, changing cooking and dining habits as well as changing social identities (e.g. the emergence of outsiders, such as Western Crusaders in the Byzantine world; or new elites, such as bureaucrats at the Ottoman Court). The approach will be comparative as well as multidisciplinary. Data from four key city centres as well as from various rural regions in the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires will be studied in a comparative perspective. The study of the data is multidisciplinary, combining archaeological artefacts (ceramics, glass and cutlery), written texts and pictorial evidence as sources of information. Earlier research by the applicant suggests that this line of research has a very high potential of providing new insights on long-term regional and cross-cultural developments during Byzantine and Ottoman times (cf. Vroom 1998; 2000; 2003; 2006a; 2007a; 2007b; 2007c). The project will make a major contribution to Byzantine and Ottoman archaeology because it will result in a better understanding of the dynamics of material culture and daily life in the Eastern Mediterranean from Late Antiquity to the Modern era and will provide insights which are unobtainable through written sources alone. |
