Cyprian Broodbank (UCL) - Stanford Archaeology Center Distinguised Lecture

The deep history of globalisation is mapped by growing webs of connections across the sea as much as the land, with 1492 a late date in a far longer process that stretches back millennia. In this respect, early maritime activity across a handful of the world's inner seas created many of the conditions for the world we inhabit today. Of these cockpits of change, the Mediterranean is one of the largest, most dynamic and archaeologically most richly evidenced, from the first seagoing hunter-gatherers to the formation around its shore of the world's largest ancient empire, centered on Rome. This lecture explores the early Mediterranean as a unique human theatre, with a particular emphasis on its first emergence as a cultural and social arena centered on the sea.
Cyprian Broodbank grew up in London, and read History at Oxford. After a Masters at Bristol, he took his PhD at Cambridge, and from 1994 until 2014 was based at the UCL Institute of Archaeology, where he rose to the title of Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology. From October 2014 he moved to Cambridge University as John Disney Professor of Archaeology and Director of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research. His first book, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades (2000) won the Runciman Award and the James R. Wiseman Prize of the Archaeological Institute of America, and his second The Making of the Middle Sea (2013) won last year's Wolfson History Prize. His current research embraces Mediterranean archaeology and history, comparative island archaeology, and archaeology as deep global history. He also co-directs a large-scale landscape archaeology project on the Greek island of Kythira.