20th November
The ERC Project ‘Roman Empire of the 2000 Cities’
Prof. John Bintliff (Edinburgh University)
Time and Venue: 17.30 Bilkent A-130
I think most of us have a good idea of what Roman towns looked like: a Forum with public offices and a market, well-built domestic dwellings in insulae, and an efficient orthogonal street plan, maybe city walls, a theatre and an amphitheatre.
But if we look deeper, central questions have long remained little researched. How many official and unofficial cities were there in the Roman Empire, and what exactly did they do, beyond baths and circuses for leisure, a market, and a forum to enact council business and legal transactions? To answer these questions, a European project was proposed for an urban network that underpinned the structure of the Roman world: the everyday management of the Empire was primarily delegated to the provincial cities.
John Bintliff (London, England 1949) is Emeritus Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology at Leiden University, the Netherlands, and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the Archaeology Department at Edinburgh University, U.K. He studied Archaeology and Anthropology at Cambridge University, where he also completed his PhD in 1977 on the (pre)history of human settlement in Greece. He was Senior Lecturer in Archaeology at Bradford University, where he taught from 1977, then moved to Durham University as Reader in Archaeology in 1990, where he taught till moving to Leiden in 1999. In Leiden he was Professor in Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology from 2000 to 2014. In 1988 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries. Since 1978 he has been co-directing (with Cambridge University) the Boeotia Project, an interdisciplinary programme investigating the evolution of settlement in Central Greece, widely-recognised as one of the most significant regional research programmes in the Mediterranean region. He is currently co-director in Leiden University, Institute of History, of the ERC Project ‘Empire of 2000 Cities’.
Recent book-publications include Bintliff and Pearce, Eds. (2011). The Death of Archaeological Theory?, Bintliff (2012) The Complete Archaeology of Greece, from Hunter-Gatherers to the Twentieth Century AD, Bintliff Ed. (2015). Recent Developments in the Archaeology of Greece, Bintliff et al. (2017) Boeotia Project, Volume II: The City of Thespiai. Survey at a Complex Urban Site (2017). He is general editor of the Journal of Greek Archaeology.