The Second MACS Workshop 2025

With the support of the Departments of Classics, Art History, and the Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations of the University of Toronto, The Mediterranean Archaeology Collaborative Specialization (MACS) program and the Archaeology Centre present the Second MACS Workshop 2025: “Mortuary Traditions in the Ancient Mediterranean World.”

Friday, March 7th from 9:30 am – 4:00 pm, and Saturday, March 8th, from 9:30 am – 1:00 pm, in AP130 (19 Ursula Franklin St). This workshop is hybrid; to register please click here for March 7th, and here for March 8th.

Mortuary traditions play an important role in the creation of cultural landscapes and the maintenance of social relations. The materialization of burial practices, however, varies in scale and form across space and time. Traditional scholarship on mortuary contexts has primarily focused on issues of social hierarchy and social mobility without adequately addressing the material dimensions —objects, artefacts, structures, and spaces—associated with the dead. Being relational at multiple scales of observations, materials and spaces offer us the opportunity to understand and apprehend the varied choices involved in the representation of the dead and their significance for the living communities. Moreover, critically analyzing the visuality, materiality, and spatiality of mortuary contexts in conjunction with cross-disciplinary approaches to remains of the dead—skeletal (osteology) and Ancient DNA data—can bring new insights into mortuary practices.

To this end, a two-day workshop is organized to explore mortuary matters and associated practices. With a focus on the ancient Mediterranean, our workshop aims to provide a forum for scholars with diverse disciplinary perspectives to come together for collaborative engagement. What inferences can we draw by analyzing the intermediate space between the living and the dead delineated by physical things? What choices are involved in the demarcation of specific spaces by burials? How can we interpret the containment of a person’s memory – often associated with personalized objects – in a pot, surrounded by stone slabs, or in a burial pit? Is it possible to shed light on past life events by combining current scientific skeletal analysis with contextualinformation? Can we elucidate how people understood, created, and moved within and amongst their mortuary landscapes?

Full Program Poster: MACS_Program.pdf