A center of excellence with the title Center for Urban Network
Evolutions has just been awarded by the Danish National Research Foundation to
Professor Rubina Raja, Classical Archaeology, Aarhus University, Denmark.
The Danish National Research Foundation has awarded 12 new centers, of
these only one was given to the humanities. For the first time a budget
exceeding those of the natural sciences has been awarded to a humanities
center. Professor Raja is furthermore the youngest recipient of a center in the
current round. The center will be based at Aarhus University and is expected to
begin early in 2015 with a budget of 100 million DKK for the first six-year
phase of the center. In total the center is expected to run for ten years.
The center will bring together a large group of established researchers
as well as junior scholars on Ph.D. and postdoc level, who will work together
in a completely new constellation across disciplinary borders with a firm
foundation in archaeology spanning from Northern Europe over the Levant to the
coastal regions of Eastern Africa.
More can be read about the Danish National Research Foundation here: http://dg.dk/
Professor Rubina Raja’s webpage: http://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/rubina-raja(446c29fb-4657-4bbb-be69-a7aafb287d3a).html
Short description of the center idea: Center for Urban Network
Evolutions
Becoming urban is widely recognized as one of the great turning points
of history. The innovations, cultural entanglements and environmental exchanges
afforded by urbanism led to social and material complexity, which make up the
core of today’s civilization. The complex stratigraphies of urban archaeology
form a uniquely rich archive of this process. This evidence – the single most
data-rich material archive of anthropogenic change in the last five millennia –
remains vastly underexploited. The Centre for Urban Network Evolutions (UrbNet)
will develop research that will offer comparison of convergent developments and
determine how, and to what extent, past urban networks catalysed societal and environmental
expansions and crises, potentially on a global scale. Emerging applications of
isotopic, biomolecular and geoarchaeological methods are transforming
archaeology’s ability to read the scale and pace of events and processes.
UrbNet will pioneer a “High Definition” view of urban dynamics and construct a
leading research body, integrating scientific techniques with contextual
archaeological and historical approaches It aims to unleash new forms of data
that are able to significantly test, challenge and revise narratives of
particular urban sites as well as fundamental assumptions about trajectories, dynamics,
and causal conditions of urbanization in the era of globally interlocking
pre-industrial civilizations, here defined as being the period app. between the
2nd century BCE and the 16th century CE.
