Redefining Ancient Epirus

BORDERS, BOUNDARIES, LANDSCAPES. Cultures or societies and their physical surroundings are defined as much by their edges as by their centres. This series seeks to challenge the traditional view of frontiers and borders - both actual and conceptual as places of transition and separation that bound defined environments. Instead, it encourage works that focus on the importance of peripheries as places of dynamic interaction between geographical, political, cultural, or metaphorical landscapes, places where norms are challenged, connections made, and identities contested, adapted, and reformed.
By inviting monographs and edited collections from scholars across a broad spectrum of disciplines including anthropology, history, archaeology, and literary, geographical, and palaeographical studies, this series aims to take an interdisciplinary, global perspective that will challenge traditional perceptions of borderlands, frontiers, and landscapes in any form, real or imagined. REDEFINING ANCIENT EPIRUS.
Ancient Epirus, "the Mainland" of the Odyssey, has meant different things at different times. Covering a region that today spans parrs of south Albania and north-west Greece, Epirus was an important crossroad in antiquity, a meeting place of differenr peoples and cultures. Yet while the history of the region is well-known, thanks to a combination of historical studies and major Greek myths, its archaeology has remained relatively little studied.
Now, derived from a larger project based at Oxford University entitled "Beyond the Borders", this volume for the first time offers a reliable and up-to-date account of the archaeology of Epirus. The contributions gathered here written by some of the most influential international scholars currentR involved in archaeological research in Epirus, aim to offer abalanced synthesis of the different cultural and historical phenomena at play in the region.
Chapters span the Archaic period to Roman Imperial rimes, and starting from the material record, touch upon a wide range of subjects : landscape studies, urbanization, fortifications and defence, ritual, sanctuaries, burial practices, relationships between mother cities and colonies, and borders and borderlands. Through this approach, the volume effectively moves Epirus from the border to the centre of the map of current archaeo-historical research, as well as offering a scarring point for further historical investigations in the field.