Looking through Landscapes:
The Spatial Turn of Late Antique Hilltop Settlements
Conference
27th – 29th November 2024
Archäologisches Museum Frankfurt am Main
Hilltop settlements are a long-standing research topic within the archaeological and historical disciplines. These sites – in an elevated position within their surroundings – re-emerged in the 3rd/4th century AD within and beyond the frontiers of the Imperium Romanum and gained further importance during the 5th/6th centuries as the settlement landscape of the Roman imperial period underwent profound changes. Between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, they played a key role in the cultural realignment of many European regions. The papers to be presented will explore topics and sites from different areas, namely the “Roman and non-Roman West”, the “Alpine regions” and the “Balkan Peninsula”.
With their distinct topography and the interlinked physical and social spaces created through the construction of walls and enclosures, they are ideally suited to analysis within the framework derived from the “spatial turn” in a comparative pan-European context. Surprisingly, this promising approach has so far received little attention in hilltop settlement research. Our main objective is therefore to approach the subject by examining the interactions between society, settlements and landscape against the backdrop of a period characterized by a plurality of challenging trajectories. Within the workshop, we conceive space and landscape as reflecting the social relationships of its actors, and place awareness of space and its construction at its core.
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