Founded in 1986, the Center for Anthropology of the Ancient World (AMA) has promoted scientific collaboration between classicists, historians, anthropologists, semiologists, and scholars of cultural theory. It has established its research perspectives in the field of classical studies in Italy, Europe, and the United States.
The Center is now expanding and renewing its structure in the form of an interuniversity center, born from the synergy between the University of Siena, the University for Foreigners of Siena, the University of Sannio in Benevento and the University of Milan, with the arrival of new professors and research perspectives. The disciplines represented in the new center cover classical antiquity in all its aspects, from history and literature to linguistics, philology, and Roman law, all of which are developed in a unified manner from an anthropological and comparative perspective.
The Center addresses several main topics, including myth as a fundamental narrative category of ancient culture, kinship and family, identity, nature, and problems, animal studies, iconography and iconology from an anthropological perspective, gender studies, ancient and modern folklore, oral culture, ancient economics, Roman law from an anthropological perspective, war and its cultural models, ancient religion, the reception of classical culture and the history of ideas, and the "sustainable" teaching of classical languages in high school.
Director
Maurizio Bettini