Diederik Halbertsma
Rijksmuseum van Oudheden
Leiden, 26-27 November 2026
Organized by: Diederik Halbertsma
In a world increasingly preoccupied with the escalation of conflict, natural disasters, and rising temperatures and sea levels, it is no surprise that concepts like resilience, adaptive behaviours, resilient norms, and societal reconfiguration currently attract significant scholarly attention. Because of the benefit of long-term perspective offered by archaeology, the past offers great potential to inform us on how to find resilience against issues faced today. Ancient West Asia, for a plethora of reasons, provides a suitable setting for the study of human resilience. Despite periodic collapses, many societies in the region demonstrated remarkable resilience, adapting to shifts in climate, resource scarcity, warfare, and socio-political upheavals. This conference aims to explore how key resilience factors, such as social cohesion, economic diversity, social and political complexity, infrastructure, knowledge systems, environmental adaptation, and crisis preparedness, manifested across ancient West Asia.
This conference aims to bring together scholars from a broad academic background, including that of regions other than the Ancient Near East, to integrate state-of-the-art theoretical and archaeological thinking on resilience in the ancient world. As such, the conference will be divided into three sections. The first section, ‘Theoretical insights from World Archaeology’, will explore broad themes and current thinking in archaeology and resilience studies from various regions of the world, informing and furthering the study of resilience in ancient Southwest Asia. The second section, ‘Foundations in Resilience Studies’, will investigate current scholarship on central pillars of resilience theory within West Asian archaeology. The final section, ‘Regional Case Studies’, will bring together case studies from across various archaeological periods and geographic regions of West Asia.