Ancient Lives, New Stories: Current Research on the Ancient Near East - Introduction

The first edition of the London Postgraduate Conference for the Ancient Near East (LPCANE) took place on 1st and 2nd December 2018 at the British Museum in London. It bore the title Ancient Lives, New Stories: Current Research on the Ancient Near East, which aimed to highlight how new research and new approaches can shed light on hotly debated topics of the past and open new avenues of research. Aimed at graduate students (Master’s and PhD) and early career researchers, the primary objective of this event was to create a forum of discussion for emerging scholars to showcase their research at any stage of progress and to foster exchange between the diverse disciplines working on the Ancient Near East, including Archaeology, Assyriology, Anthropology, Historiography, Conservation and Museum Studies. Near Eastern Archaeology, Assyriology and sister disciplines often tread separate paths in spite of having a common focus of attention. Thus, in this conference we aimed to highlight overlapping ideas and the interaction and complementarity between the knowledge derived from material culture, textual sources and other types of studies, and collaboration among scholars from different disciplines was facilitated and encouraged. The chronological periods under consideration were the Palaeolithic to the Islamic conquest, and the geographical scope, Anatolia to Afghanistan and the Caucasus to the Arabian Peninsula.