Wednesday, 5. February 2025
From 12 to 2 pm
Schloss Hohentübingen, Burgsteige 11
Übungsraum 212
This paper aims to explore mobility and its relationship with tangible and intangible resources. We often tend to think of resources as something exclusively material and valuable in purely economic terms, creating a de facto equivalence between resources and commodities. On the other hand, resources can be broadly understood as socially produced constructions that express what people find relevant to their lives, whether in terms of physical or social needs. As such, like raw materials or finished goods, they play a role in mobility. The 3rd millennium BC is an epoch characterised by the presence of large-scale and ideologically motivated interactive networks that spread across Europe and beyond. These networks were materially expressed through complex archaeological assemblages in which different features and practices were distributed over large areas. In the Western Balkans, the so-called Cetina culture can be described as a widespread pattern of interconnections, traceable through a particular ceramic style, which spread in the Adriatic-Ionian area in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. The diffusion of Cetina pottery types across the central Mediterranean is the material evidence that reflects the movement of small groups of seafarers and testifies to recurrent contacts. In this paper I will attempt to provide a further explanation for these patterns by adopting a community of practice approach to network analysis, focusing mainly on the ritual and ideological spheres and their connection with mobility.
