Ancient Greek, Roman and Byzantine fibulae. An international e-conference in honour of Dr Maurizio Buora, Colloquia Anatolica et Aegaea Congressus internationales Smyrnenses XII, Zoom, May 12–13, 2022

An international virtual conference on fibulae in the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine Mediterranean and Black Sea area will take place on May 12-13, 2022 on Zoom.us, with each day dedicated to several thematic sessions using the Zoom webinar platform. The conference is dedicated to the 75th birthday of Dr Maurizio Buora, the former director of the Civici Musei Castello di Udine in Italy and an international authority on fibulae.

A fibula is a brooch or pin for fastening garments, typically at the right shoulder. The fibulae developed in a variety of shapes and are usually divided into families that are based upon historical periods, geography, and/or cultures. They are also divided into classes that are based upon their general forms. Fibulae were found in relatively large quantities in the Mediterranean and Black Sea area, where they were in use and produced frequently between the Bronze Age and Medieval periods. So far the study of these multifunctional objects has been overlooked in the Mediterranean whereas there is still a huge amount of unpublished material from excavations and museums in an area from Portugal down to Egypt.

We warmly welcome submissions from junior and senior scholars, including advanced graduate students and postdoctoral scholars from a variety of disciplines related to these objects. We seek to bring together researchers who can present new syntheses of archeological data and enter into dialogue with scholars working on the same material subsets. The organizers will accept papers that offer methodological, theoretical or analytical approaches to material datasets. Intended to bring together scholars of Greek, Roman and Byzantine archaeology to discuss a range of issues concerning these instruments’ characteristics, this electronic conference should be an excellent opportunity to increase our knowledge about this material.

We invite papers that engage the following themes and topics:

• Fibulae from archaeological field projects (especially well-dated finds), museums and private collections,
• Ancient Greek and Latin textual sources on fibulae,
• Evolution of fibulae in the Mediterranean and Black Sea area during the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine periods,
• Similar instrumenta in the ancient Near East and their relations to ancient Graeco-Roman fibulae,
• What ancient Greeks and Romans thought about afterlife? Fibulae in funerary and votive contexts,
• Domestic and commercial use of fibulae,
• Early Christian fibulae,
• Byzantine fibulae,
• Post-Byzantine or modern replicas of Classical fibulae,
• Eastern fibulae in the ancient western world,
• Major production centres of fibulae in the eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea area,
• Related instrumenta to fibulae in the regards of their function,
• Documentation and analysis of fibulae,
• Publication of fibulae in the Mediterranean in possible corpara,
• Miscellanea.

English is the official language of the e-conference. Your lecture will be recorded during the conference and this record will be displayed in Youtube after. Conference sessions are structured around the respondent’s presentation and discussion of each paper followed by an author response and general discussion by session participants.