Camel caravan

Camel caravan
Mosaic from Deir al-Adas, Syria, 8th century (photo: J.C.Meyer)
The research project Mechanisms of cross-cultural interaction: Networks in the Roman Near East (2013-2017) investigates the resilient everyday ties, such as trade, religion and power, connecting people within and across fluctuating imperial borders in the Near East in the Roman Period. The project is funded under the Research Council of Norway's SAMKUL initiative, and hosted by the Department of archaeology, history, cultural studies and religion, University of Bergen, Norway.

This blog is no longer updated, for any queries, please contact project leader Eivind Heldaas Seland

Monday 13 October 2014

New publications

Ancient West & East 13 / 2014 / Textile trade and Distribution in Antiquity, Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (ed.) 2014

As I got back from fall-break, the print versions of our two latest publications, one article and one book chapter, were on my desk. Call me old-school, but I enjoy holding the book in my hands, and book chapters are really best read in context with the rest of the volume.

Eivind Heldaas Seland (2014) Caravans, Smugglers and Trading Fairs: Organizing Textile Trade on the Syrian Frontier. Pages 83-90 in Kerstin Droß-Krüpe (ed.), Textile Trade and Distribution in Antiquity. Harrassowitz Verlag.

Eivind Heldaas Seland (2014) The  organisation of the Palmyrene caravan trade. Ancient West and East 13, pp. 197-211. doi:10.2143/AWE.13.0.3038738.

As a word of warning to Network Analysis enthusiasts, there is nothing of that in these articles, both, however, address how networks operated, and how we can approach this by means of modern models, in this case New Institutional Economics.

The AWE article is available online, the book chapter unfortunately not. Also, it was not possible to publish these open access. Preprints should appear in Bergen Open Research Archive (BORA) in time (they are not there yet). Meanwhile, drop me a line if your library does not have these and you require an offprint.