The BSR Podcast

Lecture by Gabriele Neher (Nottingham)

Lecture by Julian Gardner (Warwick).

Lecture by Prof. David Abulafia (Cambridge).

How is power over the open sea exercised? What do we mean when we talk of ‘maritime empires’ in the Mediterranean and beyond? This lecture will look at examples from the ancient, medieval and modern Mediterranean, and from other seas a swell, in the hope of discovering how control of the sea has been exercised in the past.

Lecture in Italian by Rita Volpe (Sovraintendenza ai Beni Culturali di Roma Capitale).

Fin dalla sua riscoperta nel 1780 il Sepolcro degli Scipioni ha creato un enorme curiosità intorno a sé, dovuta soprattutto alla fama e alla rilevanza che molti componenti di questa famiglia hanno avuto nella storia di Roma repubblicana. La recente esecuzione di lavori di restauro, consolidamento e allestimento, finalizzati alla riapertura al pubblico dell’area archeologica, ha fornito l’occasione per intraprendere una nuova stagione di studi, andando oltre le conoscenze tradizionali, che fino ad oggi si sono perlopiù concentrate quasi esclusivamente sull’interpretazione storica delle iscrizioni degli Scipioni. Si mostreranno quindi i primi risultati delle ricerche in corso sul monumento e sull’area archeologica circostante.

Lecture by Michael Crawford (University College London).

The transmission of a knowledge of Roman law in Italy in the Middle Ages has traditionally been studied through the surviving manuscript evidence for the availability and use of the Justinianic corpus, in particular the Digest; but such an approach neither explains how people knew what to do with the Digest when its use began to intensify from the last quarter of the eleventh century onwards nor does justice to the range of available evidence and to the whole intellectual context within which legal knowledge is to be seen. This lecture attempts to tell these different stories.

Lecture by Hendrik Dey (Hunter College CUNY).

Lecture by Marta Ajmar (Victoria and Albert Museum/Royal College of Art).

This talk focuses on ostensibly disparate cross-cultural artefacts – lacquer, gilded leather and glazed pottery – which share some distinctive properties concerning their appearance and their actual and perceived materiality already at their time of production in the ‘long Renaissance’. Themes of global trade, customization, imitation and import substitution have provided the interpretive framework for much recent scholarship on these kinds of cross-cultural commodities. Ajmar focuses instead on the materiality of these artefacts, constructed through a comparable process of layering and demanding the beholder to look in. Recognizing this deep material, technological and sensory bond allows us not just to expand the geography of what is conventionally known as ‘the Renaissance’ and to question its temporal boundaries, but also to explore the heuristic role of objects within Renaissance understandings of materiality.

LADY SHEILA HALE, author of the acclaimed biography Titian: His Life, gives a talk to coincide with the 2013 exhibition Tiziano at the Scuderie del Quirinale.

Lecture by Olof Brandt (Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana).

The Early Christian baptisteries, built between the fourth and the sixth centuries, were monuments to the victory of the new faith, and great investments were made in their architecture and decoration. Some forms were more appreciated than others, and various motivations were involved at different stages of the building process: in the original choice of the form, in its diffusion, and in its interpretation by users. Many of these motivations are far from modern in their mentality, but they tell us much about how ancient architecture was considered in the late Roman period.

Lecture by Ufuk Kocabaş (Istanbul University).

Thirty-six shipwrecks dated to the fifth to tenth centuries AD have been discovered in the Theodosian harbour of Istanbul, in the district of Yenikapı. Under the auspices of the ‘Istanbul University Yenikapi Shipwrecks Project’, carried out by Istanbul University’s Department of Conservation of Marine Archaeological Objects, our team has undertaken the recording and dismantling of twenty-seven shipwrecks as well as conservation/restoration and reconstruction projects of thirty-one shipwrecks in total. Shipwrecks of various types and sizes have been exposed since 2005; the majority are still under study.

During the construction of the Marmaray railway and metro stations in Yenikapı between 2004 and 2012, no fewer than thirty-six shipwrecks, dating from the Middle Byzantine period to about the fifth to tenth centuries AD, were revealed. The ongoing archaeological excavations have confirmed that Constantinople’s main harbour, Portus Theodosiacus, was once situated in this former natural bay, now silted by the ancient Lykos (Bayrampaşa) river and lying about 300 m from today’s shoreline.

The ships from the Theodosian harbour display a moment frozen in time and have made tremendous contributions to information on shipbuilding technology and development during Antiquity and the Middle Ages. The Istanbul Archaeological Museums turned to the Istanbul University’s Department of Conservation of Marine Archaeological Objects to deal with most of the shipwrecks. Department President and project director Professor Ufuk Kocabaş and a hard-working team of Department assistants, full-time specialists, and Istanbul University graduate students have been working for over 6 years in the active construction site in tent-covered pits to document and carefully recover the shipwrecks. Undoubtedly, the shipwrecks constitute the most remarkable artefact group, especially for nautical archaeologists. The thirty-six ships can be divided into three groups: long warships (galleys); sea-going traders; and small, local trading vessels.