The project Local Dynamics of Globalization (LDG) investigates how local cultures in the pre-modern Levant adapted policies, trends, habits, and technologies that reached them through imperial and other globalizing channels, and also how local discourse fed back into trans-local dialogue. Local dynamics around global impulses were more complex than is usually perceived, and research on globalization over the last decades offers new conceptual tools to help form more precise understanding of similar past processes. Exploring conceptual tools and formulating an analytical framework for studying local dynamics of globalization are core targets for LDG.

    We aim to do so in a multidisciplinary exchange (theology, archaeology, history, social sciences): the project includes a number of merited colleagues and their earlier and ongoing projects.

    The archaeological site of Tall Hisban (or: Hesban; biblical Heshbon) in Jordan is central to our work, as the largest single provider of a continuous empirical record, and as the very metaphor for what we are studying: check it out here!

The LDG Project is promoted by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy for Sciences and Letters for the academic year 2014-2015.