Settlements, Networks, and Change in Bronze Age Western Asia

The session examines Bronze Age Western Asia as a dynamic arena of human-environment interaction, where settlements, networks, and social transformations unfolded across diverse landscapes. We invite contributions that explore how communities organized and reshaped their territories through patterns of mobility, resource management, and connectivity. With an expanding array of tools - from remote sensing and geophysical survey to GIS analysis and palaeoenvironmental proxies - the field faces an increasing need to refine its interpretive frameworks. This session encourages papers and posters that critically engage with the practical challenges of data acquisition, processing, and integration, prioritizing workflow, calibration, and multi-scalar analysis to develop robust, reproducible strategies for understanding long-term societal change.

Public spaces played a central role in shaping the political, social, and ideological landscapes of Bronze Age Western Asia. From palaces and administrative complexes to temples, sacred precincts, and other multifunctional buildings, these spaces, both inside and outside cities, actively constructed and negotiated authority, collective identities, and community life. This session explores how public architecture mediated the relationship between cult, power, and society, asking how it functioned not only as an expression of authority but also as a catalyst for settlement development, institutional organisation, interregional connectivity, and long-term social change. At its core lies a central research question: how do public spaces reflect and stimulate social transformation and changes in community life? Interdisciplinary approaches addressing how the built environment not only reflected authority but also actively created and sustained it are especially encouraged.

Trade and exchange - in all their forms - played a central role in ancient Western Asia, yet their definition and archaeological visibility remain far from straightforward. This session invites contributions that explore how forms of trade and exchange can be identified through material culture and textual evidence, and the markers that distinguish them. We welcome papers and posters addressing their role in the development of ancient complex societies, the reconstruction of production and distribution networks, the roles of institutions, private actors and intermediaries, and the function of mobility as a system shaped by interactions between people, animals, routes, and places. We also encourage critical reflections on interpretative models, and on the applicability of modern concepts such as value, price, and globalisation to ancient Western Asia.

The word nexus derives from the Latin nexus, the past participle of nectere, meaning to bind, weave together, or connect. Its etymology conveys the idea of a bond or interweaving. In archaeology and the social sciences, nexuses refer not simply to connections between elements, but to points of convergence where multiple relations, processes, people, objects, and practices intersect, interact, and generate change. A nexus is thus best understood as a dynamic node of interaction rather than a linear or static link. This session encourages the discussion from the point of view of periodization, material culture, ideas, technologies, settlements and cultural trajectories. Overall, the session aims to foster a critical dialogue on how innovation arises from the process of interaction and entanglement.

In a time marked by conflict, displacement, and the political instrumentalization of the past, cultural heritage is not only a fragile legacy to be protected, but also a space for ethical responsibility, dialogue, and shared knowledge. This session explores the role of heritage studies in documenting, preserving, and communicating the past of Western Asia. We welcome papers and posters on tangible and intangible heritage, from settlements, landscapes, and museum collections, to archives, digital records, and community memories. Contributions may discuss conservation, site monitoring, risk assessment, conflict-related damage, looting, museum narratives, repatriation, public engagement, or the use of digital tools, remote sensing, 3D documentation, and open-access data. The session encourages critical reflections on ethics, accessibility, sustainability, and collaborative approaches that connect academic research with local communities and wider audiences.