Collaborative Research Center 1070: ResourceCultures

The interdisciplinary Collaborative Research Center 1070 “ResourceCultures”, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) since 2013, explores the question of what societies from prehistorical times to the present-day require in order to develop, maintain themselves and change. The scholars of the CRC are studying how different societies define, assess, appropriate and use resources. They also question how something becomes a resource for social development and how social dynamics can elicit the need for and the use of these resources.

The topics of the different project groups cover a wide temporal and spatial scope ranging from spatial exploitation through the use of resources among the Neanderthals and the prehistoric ore extraction on the Iberian Peninsula to the destruction of resources by the Vikings and the significance of material resources in religious contexts in modern India. Click here to go to the homepage of CRC 1070.

C 05: Inselökonomien – Eine vergleichende Studie von Insel-Gesellschaften im späten Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit (Island Economies: A Comparative Study of Island Societies in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period)

Project Leaders: Prof. Dr. Jörn Staecker, Prof. Dr. Renate Dürr
Research Staff: Laura Dierksmeier (Postdoc)

This sub-project investigates the ways in which island societies coped with foreignness and diversity on the basis of a comparative study of the late medieval and early modern social history of Scandinavia and Spain. As a consequence of their topography, island societies were economically dependent on trading with distant partners to a much greater extent than continental polities. The resulting necessity to promote pragmatic world views gave rise to intriguing processes of cultural formation within the highly heterogeneous island populations, which is marked by a complex interplay between references to "the self" and "the other." Accordingly, this sub-project examines the specific mechanisms of social and cultural inclusion and exclusion operating within island port cities, the balancing of conflict and cooperation, as well as the intermingling and segregation of different ethnic and cultural groups.