October 26-29, 2017, University of Copenhagen
The aim of the conference is to honor the scientific achievements of Klavs Randsborg, a longstanding and renowned Professor of World Archaeology at the University of Copenhagen where he had been an influential voice for 50 years. He had also held appointments at the Universities of Washington, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Gothenburg. K. Randsborg was also an active field archaeologist: a track that developed during his participation in the UNESCO campaign to save the monuments of (Sudanese) Nubia and consequently brought Randsborg to his own projects that included work in the Aegean, Norway, the mid-western USA, Ukraine, Russia, Cephalonia, Bulgaria, Ghana, and Benin.
The participants are former collaborators and students. (The expected attendance is 300+, corresponding to the maximum capacity of the University Hall)
The scientific program of the conference is very diverse, reflecting the great breadth of Klavs Randsborg’s interests and research. Indeed, K. Randsborg was not constrained by time or geography, always seeking temporal and spatial connections that led to new interpretations of the past and each time placing cultural phenomena on a larger scene, providing intellectually thrilling perspectives and promoting curiosity. “Crossroad Archaeology” can be seen as an instrumental approach to building models where 10th c AD royal center at Jelling can be explained through Dahomean traditions of Colonial era; where counting of decorative elements on Bronze Age finds in Denmark suddenly reveals unambiguous knowledge of calendars and measuring systems in the past; where fluctuations in supply streams of Arabic coins unveil raiding patterns on England and the Carolingian kingdoms by the Vikings. These global narratives of local encounters were always convincingly and legibly presented in K. Randsborg’s works.
With persistent vision, K. Randsborg constantly reviewed the interaction between “abstract phenomena” identified by social sciences and “the physical world” that also includes man’s ability to act independently.
This inspired repeated reinvention of himself and quest for original – for some controversial – insights, especially in matters that seemed to be resolved. He underlined the contemporaneity of archaeology, never static, always evolving, as he unpretentiously stated in his many seminal books or “the products of specific time”.
K. Randsborg was constructing a vision of archaeology that strived to define its own and independent domain within the wider universe of social (and other) sciences, criticizing modernity for being “clouded historicism with little content” ignorant of tradition and beliefs as means of survival and social reproduction. Said in his own words: “The present is a strange world. Over the past fifty years, the rapid increase of information has surpassed anything previously experienced. Nevertheless, the loss of history is immense (…), the past is rarely taught as a coherent story. Conflicts have arisen between globalization and tradition. Perhaps an understanding of the workings of history may help to fill this gap” (The Anatomy of Denmark). Therefore he maintained the ambition of writing comprehensively in a global age.
Hence the conference is seen as a platform for the intersection of geographies, periods, personalities and views, towards the past as a coherent and relevant story.
In 2017 Klavs Randsborg would have celebrated a 35-year jubilee as a chief editor of Acta Archaeologica, the most prestigious Scandinavian annual launched in 1930. The proceedings of the conference will be published in the commemorative volumes of the journal.
The conference is planned as three major thematic blocks:
- Denmark & Scandinavia (26.10.2017)
- Europe (including the Classical world) (27.10.2017)
- The World (with a focus on Africa, South America & Asia) (28.10.2017).
The last day (29.10.2017) of the conference is dedicated to the guided tours that used to be the arena of the non-surpassed eminence of Klavs Randsborg, knitting stories, perceptions and personal experiences with buildings, monuments, and elevations in the terrain.
The organizing committee:
Prof. Richard Hodges,
Dr. Per Ole Rindel,
Dr. phil. Jane Fejfer,
MA Thomas Roland,
MA Søren Albek,
Dr. Inga Merkyte
For further information: merkyte@hum.ku.dk
Download the Conference Program here
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KLAVS RANDSBORG (1944-2016)
Klavs Randsborg, Professor of World Archaeology in Copenhagen University, who died on 13 November aged 72 was one of the great figures in Scandinavian and world archaeology over the past half-century. Randsborg spent most of his academic life in Copenhagen University, but it was for the great breadth of his international research that he should be celebrated. Best known for his many books beginning with his ground-breaking work on the Danish Bronze Age, which was followed by a revolutionary book on the Viking Age in Denmark and then his re-evaluation of Europe in the first millennium and most recently his personal cultural interpretation of his home, Anatomy of Denmark. Since the 1980s each year was marked by a new study or monograph or by a clutch of provocative re-readings of sites or places. He was no less an active field archaeologist: his projects included work on sites in the Aegean, Sudan, the Mid West of the USA, Ukraine, Kephallonia and Benin.
Randsborg’s range of interests and his grasp of languages coupled with his restless reading made him an exceptional intellectual force. These gifts brought him invitations to be a Visiting Professor at several British, Dutch and German universities as well as George Washington University at St. Louis in the USA. In Randsborg, students found an intellectual who would seek to understand their point of view . No less important to his research was his tireless travelling in eastern Europe, the USA (he visited 49 states), western Asia, the Mediterranean and western Africa. These research trips informed and strengthened his belief and love of Copenhagen and his Danish roots.
In essence Randsborg was a romantic. Immersed in the history and historiography of Danish archaeology and truly fascinated by its long cultural evolution culminating in the architecture of modern Copenhagen, he considered his work to be burnishing this global bastion of social democracy.
Every study was sketched out from quotations of poetry, each being an investment in critical thinking, seeking temporal and spatial connections that led to new interpretations of the past. Above all he aimed to extract ideas from measured information – from numbers of places and objects, and distribution maps – turning these prosaic details into ideas to challenge the status quo. So, having re-positioned the archaeology of the Vikings, he turned his hand to understanding how they had fitted into European history. A decade of research on the first millennium AD led him to organize the ground-breaking conference on this theme in the Danish Institute in Rome in January 1987. At the conference and in the published proceedings he pitted the interpretations of the North against the South, and had archaeologists challenge historians, the ventriloquist of a remarkable reappraisal of canonical European classical and postclassical history. He would repeat this for Bronze Age chronologies and was progressing towards the same overturning of traditional cultural histories for West Africa from the Palaeolithic to early modern times.
Generosity of spirit was his hallmark as much as his wonderfully idiosyncratic guided tours through Copenhagen. In so many ways this big man was a giant in the field, modest yet supremely creative, poetic yet able to handle the prose of publishing all manner of archaeology. He was a prehistorian who evolved and reinvented himself repeatedly to make archaeology thrilling and hugely relevant to our fast-changing world.