Visualising War and Peace
How do war stories work? And what do they do to us? Join University of St Andrews historian Alice König and colleagues as they explore how war and peace get presented in art, text, film and music. With the help of expert guests, they unpick conflict stories from all sorts of different periods and places. And they ask how the tales we tell and the pictures we paint of peace and war influence us as individuals and shape the societies we live in.
Visualising War and Peace
Visualising Troy beyond the warfighting
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In this episode Alice interviews Dr Stephan Blum, a Research Associate at the Institute for Prehistory, Early History and Medieval Archaeology, at the University of Tübingen. Stephan is a member of the Troy Project, a long-running archaeological collaboration between the universities of Cincinnati and Tübingen, designed to shed more light on the physical remains and social history of one of the ancient world’s most evocative places. Stephan is also a member of the Ancient Peace Studies Network, based at the University of St Andrews, and he has been bringing his expertise in ethnoarchaeology to the project, helping to uncover aspects of ancient peace history which have not been excavated in much depth until now.
Troy is famous for the ten-year siege which Homer wrote about in The Iliad and The Odyssey - but this is only a fraction of the city's 3000-year old story. In this episode, we discuss how Homer's famous war stories have distorted our vision of ancient Troy and we consider what we can learn from its wider history. Stephan explains the challenges of looking for peace in the archaeological record, but he also underlines how much evidence we can find at Troy of conflict prevention, conflict resilience and post-conflict transformation. The result is a very different picture of a place that is almost synonymous with war in popular culture. Contextualising Troy's war-torn reputation by excavating more of its peace history teaches us a lot about the dominance of conflict narratives as well as the value of looking for evidence of local, everyday and personal peace across antiquity.
We hope you enjoy the episode. For a version of our podcast with close captions, please use this link. For more information about individuals and their projects, please visit the University of St Andrews' Visualising War website and the Ancient Peace Studies Network. You can read more about Stephan's work on Rethinking Troy here.
Music composed by Jonathan Young
Sound mixing by Zofia Guertin