SEMINAR – HYBRID EVENT: Writing Ancient DNA (aDNA) into Medieval Indian Ocean History – Challenges and Opportunities
- Date: 11 October 2022, 16:15–18:00
- Location: SCAS, Linnéanum, Thunbergssalen, Thunbergsvägen 2, Uppsala
- Type: Seminar
- Lecturer: Elizabeth A. Lambourn, Fellow, SCAS. Professor of Material Histories, De Montfort University, Leicester
- Web page
- Organiser: Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study (SCAS)
- Contact person: Klas Holm
Elizabeth A. Lambourn, SCAS and De Montfort University, gives a seminar on "Writing Ancient DNA (aDNA) into Medieval Indian Ocean History – Challenges and Opportunities". The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.
Abstract
My fellowship project embraces the Collegium’s invitation for “curiosity driven” and even “risky” research. Entitled Forgotten Frontiers: Islam and the Indian Ocean World 600-1000 CE this project writes a new synthetic history of Islam’s early impact on the peoples, polities, trade routes and regional circuits of the Indian Ocean region during the first four Islamic centuries It does so by retrieving and (re)connecting a heterogeneous body of evidence - archaeological material, visual sources, multi-lingual primary sources and newer genomic data – from across the vast area between eastern Africa and East Asia. The project aims to challenge and enrich early Islamic historical study by integrating an “eastern maritime frontier” – in effect the Indian Ocean - too often overlooked in the subject’s dominant terracentric and westwards focused frameworks. For historians of the Indian Ocean, its islands and surrounding terrestrial regions, this analysis promises a new connected history of these crucial centuries including a more nuanced understanding of regional chronologies and processes of Islamization.
This talk takes the opportunity to discuss probably the riskiest and most challenging aspect of my project, namely that of how to integrate and reconcile aDNA evidence from across the Indian Ocean region into a field of medieval history entirely reliant until now on written, visual and material sources. With 15 years of archaeological science publications to build on, the time is ripe to address this problem head on. I do so as a humanities researcher with no science background.
For more information and the webinar link, please see http://www.swedishcollegium.se/subfolders/Events.html.