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The “ESF-JSPS Frontier Science Conference for Young Researchers 2010” will provide early career researchers from Europe and Japan with opportunities to explore jointly an emerging field of research. Through lecture sessions and working groups they can interact with some of the leading international experts in the field. Participants will sharpen their perception of future prospects for advances in the field, while building peer networks.

The 2010 conference will allow participants, both lecturers and early career scholars, to explore the theoretical and methodological frontiers of the field and to chart cutting- edge findings in a forward-looking manner, aimed at sketching new horizons for joint research. The conference will focus on the potential for developing comparative perspectives with explicit guiding theories and methodologies.

This conference seeks new approaches to common topics concerning social, cultural and political complexity on the fringes of empires in Europe and East Asia, namely, the Hellenistic and Roman, and successive Chinese empires. A special focus of the conference will be on interactions between empires and their peripheries, ad on contact zones. The temporal coverage spans from the formative phase of the earliest empires in the concerned regions up to A.D. 1,000. The purpose of the conference is to seek new avenues for research collaboration in cutting-edge research, which is why early career researchers are particularly welcome. The conference will bring together archaeologists and anthropologists, philologists and linguists, art historians and historians, specialists of material culture and religion, experts on historical climate change and commercial exchange and many more. An underlying, unifying feature of presentations, discussions and follow-up will be the methodological challenges of interdisciplinary research in the Humanities, which is moving towards a global research enterprise.

The late 20th century had witnessed increased sophistication in theory and methodology when dealing with the emergence and development of civilisations and empires and their relations with surrounding communities. Whether in Europe or in East Asia, notably in Japan, the study of symbiotic relationships between empires and surrounding communities has been prominent. With the rich archaeological and written record to be examined many important case studies have been produced. Data on various environmental factors has increasingly informed our understanding of the forces underlying trajectories of socio-cultural, economic, and political development. This conference aims at synthesising these strands of research, aiming at a comprehensive reconstruction of the processes and causes of the emergence and development of social complexity and state-formation on the fringes of the empires, thereby setting the research agenda for collaborative research for the future.

The vast range of topics will be presented in a number of theme-based sessions. The lectures concerning each subtopic will chart its theoretical, methodological and factual frontiers; the discussions will explore possible trajectories for future research; the forward look session will tackle some of the major methodological challenges that will require large-scale collaborative research projects in the future.