Content in Context in Ancient Anatolia: A conference in memory of Stephen Mitchell

Stephen Mitchell passed away on 30 January in Berlin at the age of 74. Throughout his career, he was largely focused on the history, epigraphy and archaeology of Anatolia and his contributions to a variety of disciplines studying ancient Anatolia are hard to overestimate.

His work was characterised by thoroughness, and superb understanding of different resources as well as the ability to bring them together. His interests were broad and diverse, ranging from family gravestones and imperial coins to the beliefs of ordinary people and olive production and so much more. Stephen has long been acknowledged internationally, as a leading authority not only of Greek and Latin inscriptions and the history and archaeology of Asia Minor but also of religion, cult, Christianity, Judaism, paganism and church history in Roman and Early Byzantine times.

This conference seeks to honour Stephen and his work by bringing together students and colleagues and by focusing on what was so important to Stephen: content in context. He stressed that isolated remains, from ceramic sherds to architecture, sculpture or inscriptions, could only really be understood in their context, a guideline he himself always followed in his academic work. As such, Stephen initiated the Pisidia Survey Project, which enabled him to approach an under-researched region in an holistic way, to embed the epigraphic remains in their archaeological context, but also to reveal a network of poleis which acted as the defining entities in the Hellenistic, Roman imperial and late antique / early Christian period. He had already taken the same approach for his PhD, ‘The History and Archaeology of Galatia’, combining epigraphic, numismatic as well as written sources and a comprehensive archaeological survey and covered a wide timespan. Throughout his career, Stephen returned to these regions and continued working on them, from a variety of angles.

Apart from regional and time-specific studies within Asia Minor Stephen wrote works of much wider scope, including the widely praised and continuously cited ‘Anatolia, Land, Men and Gods’ (1993, 2 vols) and the ambitious sweeping historical survey of the Roman Empire from the accession of Diocletian in AD 284 to the death of Heraclius in 641 (2007; 2015, expanded edition with Greatrex 2023).

With the conference, we would like to celebrate Stephen’s commitment to and deep interest in a holistic approach to understanding ancient societies and their landscapes.

Organizers: Lutgarde Vandeput (BIAA), Anna Collar (University of Southampton), Turhan Kaçar (University of Muğla), Museum of Anatolia Civilisations

This is a two-day event, simultaneous translation will be provided.

To access the programme, please click here

To access the booklet of abstracts in English and Turkish, please click here