The Netherlands Institute for the Near East

Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten  -  Institut néerlandais du Proche-Orient

26 Nov 10:00

Resilience and Adaptation in Ancient West Asia

Diederik Halbertsma

Rijksmuseum van Oudheden

Resilience and Adaptation in Ancient West Asia

NINO Postdoctoral Research Fellow 7th Annual Conference

Leiden, 26-27 November 2026

Organized by: Diederik Halbertsma

Registration

This conference will be held as a hybrid event. Join us in Leiden, or follow the lectures online live – no recordings will be made, it is not possible to watch at a later time.

Please register in-person attendance before 23 November.


Theme

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.

Venue

Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Rapenburg 28, Leiden, The Netherlands.

Entrance to the conference, held in the Leemans Room on the ground floor, is free. If you are a Museumkaart holder, please show your card at the Museum’s reception desk.

Program

Day 1: Theory & Foundations

Theoretical Background & World Archaeology, followed by Foundations in Resilience

Time Session Speaker Topic
10:00 Doors Open — Informal Welcome
10:30 Opening Miriam Müller & Diederik Halbertsma Welcome & Introduction
10:45 Keynote Ian Kuijt Resilience as a Nine-Headed Hydra
11:45 Coffee Break —  
12:15 World Archaeology Dita Auzina Community-Based Monumentality as a Resilience Strategy: Case Studies from Southern Central America
12:45 World Archaeology Sean Desjardins Braiding Knowledge on Long-Term Inuit Subsistence Practices and Environmental Health in Amittuq, Nunavut, Arctic Canada
13:15 Lunch Break —  
14:45 Foundations I Gül Aktürk Hauser Transhumance in a Changing Climate: Resilience and Adaptation across Turkic Landscapes
15:15 Foundations I Aris Politopoulos Labour, Lives and Legacies: Building and Excavating Nineveh
15:45 Afternoon Break — —
16:00 Foundations II Jennifer Swerida Beyond Survival: Environmental Intermittency and Resilience in Bronze Age Arabia
16:30 Foundations II Bleda Düring Boom and Bust in the Sohar Hinterlands – Archaeological Data and Demographic Reconstructions


Day 2: Regional Deep Dive & Student Panel

Time Session Speaker Topic
10:00 Doors Open — Informal Welcome
10:15 West Asia I Nathaniel Erb-Satullo A Resilience Framework for Analyzing Cultural Persistence in the South Caucasus during the Bronze Age-Iron Age Transition
10:45 West Asia I Andrew Danielson A Tale of Two Wadis: Subsistence and Social Adaptation in the Highlands of Western Jordan
11:15 West Asia I Bruce Routledge The Infrastructure of Resilience: Tells as Persistent Places in Landscapes of Mobility
11:45 Coffee Break —  
12:15 West Asia II Douglas Baird Resilience and Adaptation in the Konya Plain, 14,000-6,000 cal BC
12:45 West Asia II Pascal Flohr Moving on from ‘Collapse’ vs ‘Resilience’: Studying Early Farming Societies during the 8.2 ka Event in West Asia
13:15 Lunch Break —  
15:00 West Asia III Sajad Samii From Inhabited House to Archaeological Record: An Experimental Approach to Resilience and Adaptation in West Asian Vernacular Architecture
15:30 West Asia III DLshad Aziz Marf Mountain Resilience in the Zagros: How Ancient Communities Endured Socio-Environmental Crises and Preserved Their Architectural Heritage
16:00     Group Discussion
16:30 Closing Organizers Final Remarks & Thanks
17:00 Reception All Informal Drinks at the University

 

Abstracts

Read the abstracts of the lectures.

NINO/OIKOS course for MA students

The elective MA course Human Resilience in the Ancient Near East: Archaeological and Interdisciplinary Perspectives – for students of Archaeology, Ancient Civilizations, and/or Classics – integrates with the NINO Postdoctoral Researcher’s 7th Annual Conference.