The 17th meeting of the quinquennial conference of the Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica will be held in Rome in September 2008 on the theme of ‘Meetings between Cultures in the Ancient Mediterranean’. This represents the 50th anniversary of the first conference organised by AIAC in Rome in 1958, and for half a century the AIAC conference has constituted a vital opportunity for international scholars to gather and exchange ideas and insights.

Although the Rome & Naples conference of 1958 was nominally the VII International Congress of Classical Archaeology, it was the first to be organized by the newly formed AIAC body, which had been founded in Rome in 1946. Prior to the Second World War the earlier conferences had been partially affected by political issues, culminating in the 1939 Berlin International Conference of Archaeology, where much
emphasis was placed on issues of Germanic identity. The creation of AIAC and the refounding of the conference was intended to further international scholarly collaboration independently of political, social, and cultural constraints.

In the last half century the conference has met ten times in major cities, embracing Northern Europe, the
Mediterranean, the Middle East and North America, each with a specific theme and a research focus. Often the conference has been directed towards the study of particular regions in the classical world, as was the case at Damascus (IX International Congress/1969 – Orient, Grèce et Rome), Ankara & Izmir (X/1973 – Anatolia in classical antiquity), London (XI/1978 – Greece and Italy in the classical world), Athens (XII/1983– La Grèce classique (5e et 4e s. avant J.C.) et le monde antique) and Berlin (XIII/1988 – Hellenismus); twice the focus has been on specific topics related to the classical world, at Paris (VIII/1963 – Le rayonnement des civilisations grecque et romaine sur les cultures périphériques) and at Tarragona (XIV/1993 – La ciudad en el mundo romano); and methodological and theoretical issues have been at the core of the conference on three occasions, at Rome & Naples (VII/1958 – Technical problems and new methodologies for archaeological research), at Amsterdam (XV/1998 – Classical archaeology towards the third millennium: reflections and perspectives) and at Boston (XVI/2003 – Common ground: archaeology, art, science and humanities).

Since the first meeting in Rome & Naples, the conference has attracted a substantial number of delegates from all over the world (beginning strongly with 728 delegates at the 1958 Rome & Naples congress, attracting over 800 attendees at Ankara, and upwards of 1200 at Tarragona in 1993), and since the 1969 meeting in Damascus has offered travel bursaries to help international students to attend, with a strong belief in the importance of young scholars’ participation.

An important element in every AIAC conference has been a programme of pre- and post-congressional visits to significant sites of archaeological interest in the main context of the classical world. The 1958 conference saw an impressive number of events running alongside the congress itself, with the formal opening of important exhibitions, including exhibitions in Rome itself on restoration techniques and aerial photography, as well as a separate exhibition in Naples on excavations at Pompeii, and others at Bologna, Gela, Brindisi and Fiesole. A post-congressional tour to Sicily was organized and took in sites at Lipari, Palermo, Segesta, Erice, Selinunte, Agrigento, Gela, Piazza Armerina, and Siracusa, amongst others.
Over the years, other highlights have included trips to Bosra, Palmyra, Hama, Apamea, Aleppo, and St. Siméon at the Damascus congress; two tours of Western (Pergamon, Ephesus, Magnesia, Priene, Miletus, Dydima) and Eastern (Aphrodisias, Hierapolis, Antalya, Perge, Side, Aspendos) Anatolia during the Ankara & Izmir congress; pre- and post-congressional fieldtrips at the London conference, the former a tour around collections of classical sculpture in English country-houses and the latter to Hadrian’s Wall; and museum and site visits during the Berlin congress which included trips into the DDR.