Talk: “Between the steppe and the sea: Scythians, Taurians, and Greeks in Crimea” by Adam T. Rabinowitz
- Event Date: Sunday, April 22, 2018
- Time: 3:00 pm (CDT)
- Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL
- Cost: Free Admission
Part of the Archaeological Institute of America Lecture Series
For more than three thousand years, the Crimean peninsula has been a meeting point for different worlds: the nomadic world of the great Central Asian steppe, the trade routes leading over land from the Middle East and Anatolia through the ranges of the Taurus and Caucasus, and the interconnected maritime environment of the Mediterranean. These diverse currents were particularly entangled during the Iron Age, when the local population – known to the Greeks through Herodotus and Euripides as the bloodthirsty Taurians – met, on the steppe side, increasingly sedentary Scythian horsemen, and on the sea side, wave after wave of Greek sailors establishing cities and trading posts along the coast. And these Greeks and Scythians met each other, too, eventually forming hybrid societies like the Bosporan Kingdom in eastern Crimea.
This talk will discuss the demographic and cultural transformations that took place in Crimea between the 7th and the 4th centuries BC, transformations that saw some of the most spectacular works of Greek metalsmiths deposited in the kurgan burials of Scythian princes. Rabinowitz will focus on the effects of culture contact on these diverse societies, with a particular focus on the western side of the peninsula, where, as part of UT’s Institute of Classical Archaeology, he carried out fieldwork and heritage management at the Greek city of Chersonesos between 2002 and 2011. Rabinowitz will also explore some of the more recent cultural interactions in Crimea, which finds itself once again contested between cultural forces both opposed to and deeply entangled with each other.
This talk is organized by the Central Illinois Society of the Archaeological Institute of America.