Elena Isayev – författare

This collection of essays focuses on the peoples and communities of ancient, and mainly pre-Roman Italy. Alongside the Etruscans, a range of less well-known ancient peoples of the Italian peninsula are increasingly coming into focus, and it is now possible to write the history of these communities; a history that led eventually to the formation of Roman Italy and ultimately of the Roman empire. 'Ancient Italy' consists of a series of studies, covering the Ligurians and Celts in north-west Italy, the Veneti, Picenes, the Etruscans, the Faliscans, the Latins, the Samnites, the peoples of Campania and the peoples of south-east Italy. Each essay provides a brief introduction to the region and its communities, a summary of recent scholarship and a map showing the location of significant sites, and then goes on to bring out the key issues raised by the most recent research within that region. The book addresses themes in the study of the ancient world: settlement and landscape; identity; religious and funerary ritual; elite stratification and display; social and cultural interaction drawing on evidence from archaeological excavation and survey, numismatics, epigraphy and literature. Designed to be an important tool for researchers working on the ancient Mediterranean, it is also accessible to undergraduates, providing a starting point for anyone interested in the peoples of Ancient Italy.

Mobility and Migration in Antiquity investigates human movement in the context of the ancient world from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indian Ocean, addressing small-scale, everyday mobility as well as movement that engenders major socio-political change.The volume’s fundamental concern is to interrogate how historical transformations in Antiquity may be better understood once movement is recognised as a pervasive phenomenon. The chapters span a wide chronological and geographical range, collectively providing openings for a new history of societal change that takes movement as its starting point – in its myriad of forms – from personal to community, from local to long-distance, from temporary to permanent, from voluntary to forced. It is organised in seven sections: borders and boundaries; environmental adaptions; cosmopolitanism; forced mobility and displacement; trade, craft, and labour; journeys and pilgrimages; and sedentism, gender, and immobility. The final part of the volume pivots towards the future of these disciplines in their approach to mobility. Each of these sections is united by an overarching theme and focus while also addressing larger historical questions associated with mobility in the ancient world and explicitly placing approaches from classical literature, history and archaeological sciences side by side.Mobility and Migration in Antiquity is an invaluable resource for anyone working on mobility and migration in the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as those interested in theories of migration across history, and societal change more broadly.

Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from one place to another. In so doing it highlights moments of change in the concepts of mobility and the definitions of those on the move. By providing the long view from history, it exposes how fleeting are the conventions that take shape here and now.

Migration, Mobility and Place in Ancient Italy challenges prevailing conceptions of a natural tie to the land and a demographically settled world. It argues that much human mobility in the last millennium BC was ongoing and cyclical. In particular, outside the military context 'the foreigner in our midst' was not regarded as a problem. Boundaries of status rather than of geopolitics were those difficult to cross. The book discusses the stories of individuals and migrant groups, traders, refugees, expulsions, the founding and demolition of sites, and the political processes that could both encourage and discourage the transfer of people from one place to another. In so doing it highlights moments of change in the concepts of mobility and the definitions of those on the move. By providing the long view from history, it exposes how fleeting are the conventions that take shape here and now.