EVENTS

Forthcoming

Steppe people exhibition

Senior researcher Falko Daim together with Dominik Heher prepares an exhibition on early medieval mounted steppe warriors from March to November 2022 at the Schallaburg, one of Austria’s main centres for large historical exhibitions, which will then move to the Museum für Vorgeschichte in Halle/Saale (Germany).

The exhibition will be devoted to nomadism and the formation of war elites in the Eurasian steppe zone, but then focuses on the entities of the Huns, Avars, Bulgarians and Hungarians in the Carpathian Basin and Danube region. The comparative perspective will make visible the diversity of their social structures, their cultural characteristics and their material legacy. This exhibition will give a first opportunity to present results from HistoGenes, and to conduct accompanying research on some objects to be exhibited and their significance for an overarching historical narrative.

Forthcoming

Workshop

Questions of terminology

Translating the data of scientific archaeology into historical language

Postponed from September 2020, no date yet

Topic: How do we render the results of genetic and other scientific analyses comprehensible in historical terms and narrativse? In particular, the problem is the terminology in which we describe the different groupings which emerge from the clustering of genetic similarities/differences. To what extent can they be linked to cultural or ethnic labels? When do we need artificial designations, and how could they be constructed? This problem is particularly virulent in using comparative data from other genetic studies, which are already uncritically classed by ethnonyms or the designations of ‘archaeological cultures’. The workshop is not intended to reopen fundamental debates about ‘ethnic interpretation’ of burial evidence, but rather seeks for pragmatic ways to find a consensual language of communication between the disciplines.