A road is a place where time dissolves in space through repeated action: herds of sheep walking towards open pastureland over hundreds of years carved hollow ways into the ground. Caravans of donkeys moved between Syria and Anatolia, marking the Assyrian trade routes. Every 15 August women arriving to the island of Tinos crawl to the Church of Virgin Mary on their knees, embodying cyclicality and resurrection.
A road is also a place where space dissolves in time through singular events: the “Retreat of the Ten Thousand” from inland Persia, Gandhi’s Salt March in the British Raj, the Long March of the Chinese Red Army, the Trail of Tears, and the roads upon which captives of war were deported en masse throughout the Assyrian Empire.
The conference on “The Archaeologies of Roads” invites landscape-oriented papers on the topics of archaeology, history, geography, and anthropology from across the globe. The aim of the conference is to bring together digital/computational approaches to roads with the phenomenology, aesthetics, emergence, and ideology of roads. For enhancing the collaboration we use the term “road” in its broadest sense to envelope all possible categorizations, including trails, paths, highways, byways, and so on.
Ancient roads cross-culturally reflect motivations and needs behind social, economic, political and religious relations of past societies; they imposed spatial order on production, enabled transportation of bulk-goods, mediated power, and facilitated urban fabric. Actions of past individuals must have had contributed to the formation of roads. Conversely, roads must have had sustained individual (and societal) connectivity. Therefore, considered not only as the container of action, but also the action itself, the road has much more to say on the ancient movement praxis.
GeoMOP investigates Early Bronze Age (Third Millennium BCE) road systems (also called hollow ways) in Khabur Basin, Upper Mesopotamia. At this space-time, the movement praxis embedded within agricultural and pastoral economies as well as the socio-political life significantly contributed to the formation of hollow ways. In pursuit of this phenomenon, GeoMOP constructs a detailed typology of hollow ways based on estimates of the volume of ancient traffic. Thus, the study surpasses the current archaeological knowledge on locations and dimensions of hollow ways –the container– and builds an analytical model for the movement –the action–. In return, movement praxis provides details of Early Bronze Age (EBA) political economy, including land ownership, urban-rural relationships, and nodes of economic complexity.