Matessi, Alvise

Italian State Middle School

Research Topic: Route Connections Across The Taurus From The Late Bronze Age Through The Iron Age (17th-7th Bce)

Dr. Matessi holds a PhD degree in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, obtained in 2014 at the University of Pavia with a dissertation on the political geography of South-Central Anatolia during the Hittite period. The core topics of his research are emic perceptions of political spaces, spatial reproduction of authority and effects of spatial constraints on political action. His work has touched upon many different contexts of the Eastern Mediterranean, dealing with datasets pertaining to several periods, but his main focus is on the 2nd millennium BCE in Anatolia and Syria. He pursues a holistic approach to history, integrating the interpretation of relevant textual sources with the analysis of archaeological landscapes. In 2014–15, Alvise was appointed Visiting Professor at the Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, Northeast Normal University (Changchun, China) and has been research fellow at the Instituto Italiano per la Storia Antica (Rome, Italy) in 2016 and 2017.
As a KHI-ANAMED fellow at ANAMED, Alvise will investigate in an interdisciplinary approach transformation in Eastern Mediterranean route networks from the beginning of the Late Bronze Age through the Iron Age (17th–7th BCE). His focus will be on routes across the Taurus mountains, that played a crucial role in the interactions between Central Anatolia and the Levant. Through the combined analysis of both written sources and archaeological data, Alvise’s research will contribute shedding new light on the formation and disaggregation of regional and cross-regional socio-cultural identities between Anatolia and Syria during the Late Bronze and Iron Ages.