Mr Jack Hiscock
BA Archaeology (Sheffield), MA African Archaeology (University College London)
Overview
- Name:
- Mr Jack Hiscock
- Email address:
- j_hiscock@soas.ac.uk
- Thesis title:
- World-Systems Analysis in the Horn of Africa: Trade systems and social changes in Ethiopia 600AD – 1300AD
- Year of Study:
- 2011/2012
- Website:
- http://soas.academia.edu/JackHiscock
Internal Supervisors
Biography
I have studied archaeology for nearly a decade and have taken part in a number of excavations around the world, notably in South Africa working on contract surveys and an excavation at Bedford Shelter 2 (with UMLANDO), and in Peru with the University of Warsaw. I began studying archaeology at the University of Sheffield in 2006 and after gaining a distinction (with a dissertation on Aksum and the Roman World-Systems under Prof Mike Parker Pearson). I subsequently went on to study for a Masters in African Archaeology at University College London with a dissertation on social and economic implications and technological processes of metalworking and glassworking in the Aksumite Empire under Dr Andrew Reid. During my academic education I took part in excavations and the outreach program at Stonehenge (part of the Stonehenge Riverside Project), Ecton Hill, and as a contract archaeologist with ARCUS (now Oxford North).
PhD Research
My primary research focus will concentrate on the key position that trade held amongst cultures in the Horn as part of a diachronic perspective, beginning with the trade routes that can most comprehensively be identified – those utilised by the Roman empire, which I believe led to the establishment and collapse of the Aksumite empire. The importance of the widespread regional trade routes or ‘world-system’ will also become clear during discussion pertaining to the collapse of large-scale political control in the Horn, which I see as being a result of the rise of Islam in the area in a very similar way to that hypothesised by Henri Pirenne for the fall of the Western Roman empire. I will then move onto the later Zagwe and Amharic Solomonic periods, in which this collapse of trade seems to have led to a ‘dark age’ in a similar way to that identified by Chew for early Medieval Europe. The later shift from the Zagwe to the Solomonic will also be investigated as the differential regional growth (north vs south) led to a southern takeover that I hypothesise to be due to a form of economic domination. For this research, I shall use the framework given by Wallerstein in his work on World-Systems analysis, a research direction that is yet to be implemented in African archaeology, to show the influence that the trade networks have had on the development and collapse of cultures in the Horn of Africa region; for my research to be successful I intend to use similar lines of enquiry to those followed in research into the Roman empire by Woolf and Wells. This research strand will highlight the importance of the core and peripheral regions in the world-system with the economic domination and subsequent culture changes upon incorporation or negotiation between the areas in question. In the case of this work I would currently hypothesise that the core of the world-system during the Aksumite period would be that of Rome and Byzantium and it later moving to either a negotiated periphery or a core area in its own right.
I also intend to pursue a secondary line of enquiry into the way in which political control was held by the Aksumite and Medieval periods in Ethiopia over surrounding areas, since it has been hypothesised that Aksumite control spread over much of the Horn of Africa itself and into Yemen. I would hypothesise that the domination of the empire was carried out through economic control empire over the regional trade routes in a core-semi periphery-periphery relationship, in much the same way as Woolf has shown for the Roman empire, and is likely to be the cause for the expansion of the Solomonic dynasty northwards in the 12th/13th century AD.
PhD Affiliations
Member of The British Institute in Eastern Africa
