2024-2025 Academic Catalog

Sep 29, 2024

2024-2025 Academic Catalog

ARTH 223 - Medieval Mediterranean Cities, Urban Environments, and Cultural Heritage

Many medieval cities in the Mediterranean region possess immeasurably long lives, with archaeological layers stretching back to the prehistoric Neolithic and into today. This seminar will study the medieval eras of a series of cities from across the Mediterranean. Our goal is to explore these cities’ pasts and present from the perspective of cultural heritage, a branch of anthropological study, combined with architectural history, archaeology, and history. For the purposes of this course, we will define “city” as an urban settlement, the landscape or sea-scape that surrounds it, and pertinent archaeological data. We will also consider ways that cities are visited, recorded, constructed, reconstructed, and experienced, and how those varieties of engagement can be recorded through photography, cartography, mapping, video / film, documentary, virtual and augmented reality, as well as traditional scholarly methods and archives, to analyze how cities are physically created and represented across different media.

The dynamic socio-political history of the modern Mediterranean world, with its nation-states and their respective spheres of belonging, influence, and identity, will illustrate a wide range of preservation practices and cultural/heritage legislative models, allowing students to gain familiarity with the role that contemporary cultural heritage management plays in different countries. To that end, we will also address the history of cultural heritage and how it bears on medieval Mediterranean cities and their remains. We will attempt to define a specific cultural heritage for the “medieval city,” which belongs to a period regularly overlooked due to its association with the Dark Ages. We will also discuss how cultural heritage designations work, and how cultural heritage intersects with the tourism industry, changing demography, migration, changes in industry and technology, climate change, conflict, and cultural genocide, looting, and the trafficking of cultural artifacts due to war and migration, and the role that local stakeholders can play in relation to their local cultural heritage.

Course Designation/Attribute: HP, DI

Anticipated Terms Offered: Bi-annually