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Anchoring Urban Lived Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages – a “digital showcase”

Anchoring Innovation is a heuristic model for understanding how innovations, be they technological, political, or cultural, achieve acceptance by building upon recognizable, “anchored” elements of the past. On June 16, 2026, the workshop Anchoring Urban Lived Experience in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages was held at the University of Groningen, organized by Dr. Marlena Whiting (University of Groningen). The workshop examined the relation of “innovation” to the late antique and medieval city as a lived space. We asked, How do city dwellers adjust to new circumstances, incorporate disruptions into their routines, or reinterpret familiar spaces in the face of crisis? The goal of the workshop was to bring together scholars from the Netherlands and abroad to explore methodologies recovering the lived experience of everyday urban life from archaeological and literary evidence. Scholars specializing in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages in Europe and the Islamic world were invited to shar...
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A space, because it is a place, can be an anchoring point

Anchors are very powerful symbols: they can be lifted and transported wherever needed and, at any convenient spot, they can be dropped and turned into a fixed point of safety and constant reference. They represent conscious decisions to remain while giving enough leeway to orbit around. This intersection between choice and location overlaps with many aspects of the theoretical framework I am applying to my current project: Place Theory. Place Theory distinguishes between three-dimensional environments (space) and the feelings, memories and emotions that define, in our cognitive processes, these locations (place). Individual experiences create place, but a group of people interacting at the same space will also generate a communal place. When spaces gain this shared meaning of place they become important landmarks for the community that lives in and around it; these spaces with important place meaning become landmarks, anchors. This social and cultural importance assigned to a specific ...
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Anchoring Istanbul’s Water Heritage

In what way can ancient water supply systems serve as an ‘anchor’ to raise and increase awareness of contemporary issues relating to the availability and consumption of drinking water in an urban environment? I will try to answer this question in relation to my project   ‘ Engaging with Istanbul’s Water Heritage ’, which focuses primarily on increasing knowledge about the tangible and intangible remains of the city’s rich and multilayered water heritage. This heritage comprises the remains of water supply systems dating from both the Roman-Byzantine and Ottoman periods, which consisted of pipes, channels, tunnels, bridges, and collection points, of which mainly the monumental aqueduct bridges have survived. These include the so-called Valens Aqueduct, an aqueduct bridge that formed part of the Valens water supply line, which came into use in 373 and is situated in the heart of Istanbul’s historic centre (Figures 1 and 2); sections of the Valens line located in forest areas out...
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Waste, work and religion in medieval Cairo: How Cairo's dirtiest professions were (and still are) anchored in religious inequality

Anchoring innovation refers to the inclusion of recognisable and culturally familiar elements (anchors) in agendas of change. As a versatile analytical tool, ‘anchoring ’  helps us to see and understand how authorities make use of the familiar to smoothly enforce the new from above. But anchoring can also describe processes that originate from below. Social groups of movements may explain who they are and what they want in reference to historical or local stories, personalities, physical space, and other cultural carriers of meaning. A question relevant to my research is whether anchoring can also exist in the space between top-down and bottom-up: not as a strategic tool for change, but as a passive point of attachment that holds things together. In this short entry, I will explore the extent to which social subjects in a society can be anchored, passively, to an intersubjectively intelligible system of cultural meaning and social hierarchy simply because they are what they are. ...
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How to package novel mealtimes?

Patterns of time change only very slowly, as sociologists have shown. The same goes for one of the corner stones of our rhythm of life, urban or rural: mealtimes. The main meal of the day, for example, has moved from midday to the evening. Whereas most people of my generation use the word dinner to refer to the evening meal, my mother-in-law (celebrating her 90th birthday soon), consistently understands dinner to meal the midday meal – in the evening one has ‘tea’. Another novelty is brunch, this mid-morning meal, often eaten out or on holidays, that combines all the good things of breakfast and lunch. In my research of Roman mealtimes, I have found some similar phenomena. In texts, we find two standard meals, referred to in texts the ariston and the deipnon . These daily meals were eaten in this order and are hence often rendered as ‘lunch’ and ‘dinner’. Dictionaries will also give the option of translating ariston as ‘breakfast’, but this mostly refers to the early archaic period, wh...
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Anchoring and resilience in Jerash after the earthquake of 749 CE

In my research on Jerash (Jordan) after the earthquake of 749 CE, anchoring has become a valuable tool to help reconstruct human behaviour and understand the resilience of societies after devastating and life-altering natural catastrophes. In the middle of the eighth century CE, a series of earthquakes along the Red Sea Transform (conventionally known as the earthquake of 749) devastated cities and countryside in the region of what is today northern Jordan, Israel and Palestine, and southern Syria. The evidence is both textual and archaeological, and modern seismologists have estimated a magnitude of 7.5 or higher. The earthquake coincided with the political disintegration of the Umayyad caliphate and the rise of the Abbasids, who founded the city of Baghdad in 762 as their new seat of power. In modern scholarship, this political move away from the Mediterranean world and towards the East has been seen as reducing the incentive to rebuild settlements affected by the mid-eighth-century ...
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