“Place-making in the desertscape: the socialisation of the Egyptian-Sudanese Eastern Desert landscape in the longue durée (4th millennium BCE- 4th century CE)” is the title of a hybrid conference organized by the Institut Français d’Archéologie Orientale and the Polish Centre of Mediterranean Archaeology UW, Research Centre in Cairo.
The organization of this conference is part of a joint Ifao-PCMA Post-Doctoral Fellowship and will be coordinated by this year’s fellow, Dr. Cristina Alù.
The conference, covering a wide geographical and temporal range, aims to bring together scholars who have approached the topic of the relationship between man and the desert landscape from different but complementary theoretical and methodological perspectives. In particular, the focus is on the processes of place-naming and place-making, understood as the social practices of defining places, plotting mental maps, constructing shared meanings and cultural memories, mechanisms in which the negotiation between places and people comes into play.
In the framework above, the conference will host papers that apply cross-disciplinary methodologies and interpretative frameworks to the study of the mining landscape of the Egyptian-Sudanese Eastern Desert, borrowing new tools of analysis from disciplines other than Egyptology and Archaeology – such as linguistics, sociology, cognitive sciences, computer sciences, geography, ecology, and topography.
The conference will take place in Cairo from 27 to 29 April 2024 at both PCMA and Ifao. All the conference sessions are open to the public to attend. As places are limited, please register using this online form. Deadline for registrations: April 19, 2024.