Visit to the Southern University of Denmark

A couple of weeks ago at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde Athena Trakadas, associate professor at the Southern University of Denmark (Syddansk Universitet, SDU), invited me to give a presentation for the master students of the maritime archaeology program at SDU in Esbjerg. The idea was to introduce the current masters to what it entails to write a MA-dissertation.

A talk on my MA-research, conducted at the University of Southampton under supervision of Fraser Sturt (senior lecturer at the University of Southampton), would be the ideal topic for this. Instead of presenting my research in a straightforward manner, I decided to tell the ‘story’ of writing the dissertation, from where I got inspiration for the topic, to transforming the dissertation into article-format.

For my masters in Southampton, I tackled a topic that up until then was fairly new to me: Connectivity during the Bronze Age. I used studies of bronzes, house architecture, settlement patterns and burial practices in the Scheldt basin and its surrounding territories to show that this river was part of an exchange network of objects and ideas with southern England, northern France and the southern Netherlands. Furthermore, I tried to push beyond all-encompassing monolithic concepts of ‘connectivity’ and tried to introduce a variable sense of intensity and directionality to this network. I have included three references below for those interested.

On the day of the presentation, I was warmly welcomed by my friend Niels Jennes, currently a maritime archaeology student at SDU, and Jens Auer, associate professor at SDU. Not only was this a great opportunity to present a piece of my research to a completely new audience, it was also very interesting to note the differences in programs and the ways in which the dissertations are set up. It was a great and educational experience for me and I hope the masters at Esbjerg found my talk informative for their future theses.

Literature:
– Fontijn, D. 2009. Land at the other end of the sea? Metalwork circulation, geographical knowledge and the significance of British/Irish imports in the Bronze Age of the Low Countries. In Bronze Age connections, cultural contact in Prehistoric Europe, P. Clark (ed.), pp. 129-148. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
– Bourgeois, J. & Talon, M. 2009. From Picardy to Flanders: transmanche connections in the Bronze Age. In Bronze Age connections, cultural contact in Prehistoric Europe, P. Clark (ed.), pp. 38-59. Oxford: Oxbow Books.
– Needham, S. 2009. Encompassing the sea: ‘maritories’ and Bronze Age maritime interactions. In Bronze Age Connections, Cultural contact in Prehistoric Europe, P. Clark (ed.), pp. 12-37. Oxford: Oxbow Books.