The aim of this plenary is to showcase new research in the emergent field of “global antiquity” and to advocate for a broad reorientation of how we study and teach it. The session has been designed as one part of a series of panels on this new approach to ancient history, including a session on evidence (“Archives of Ancient History”) and a roundtable (“Are We Still Ancient?”) that will engage with Walter Scheidel’s 2025 manifesto, What is Ancient History? Together, these complementary sessions will illustrate that ancient history is a lively and vital field of inquiry – far from being “ancient history” in the colloquial sense of the term that denotes irrelevance and obsolescence.

The dismissal of antiquity as marginal to world history or to modernity and the de facto equation of “ancient history” with Greek and Roman (and at best also Egyptian and early West Asian) history have endured for generations. But ancient historians today are increasingly reckoning with a “global antiquity” that encompasses not only the Mediterranean basin and its continental hinterlands, but the whole of Afro-Eurasia, and, in its widest conception, the worlds of the Americas and Oceania as well. If we understand “ancient history” not as a specific period, but rather as a distinctive phase of human history, then both its planetary scope and enduring relevance to the making of the modern world become manifest. This session will provide some concrete examples of how ancient historical cases can be contextualized within global analytical and developmental frameworks and how they connect with one another and contribute to our understanding of later periods, right up to the present.

After a very brief introduction that sets out our agenda, three substantive papers which examine cases ranging from Europe and West Asia to East Asia and the Americas, will offer a few big “takeaways” for historians of later periods. First, they underscore how archaeological discovery and scientific methods are dramatically enhancing our understanding of the deep past, showing that data-driven and deeply contextualized work on the basis of new evidence is possible without the sorts of archives more familiar to most of the discipline. Second, the papers reveal some striking similarities and shared features across the globe – in contexts where there was no direct (or even indirect) contact –, pointing to underlying structures and dynamics of human social and political organization. And third, the papers illustrate some profound continuities between ancient and subsequent periods of history, which highlights the relevance of ancient history to even self-consciously presentist concerns.

A concluding paper will make the case for an institutional and professional reconfiguration of the study of ancient history, arguing that this new global antiquity can speak compellingly to the interests of today’s diverse student bodies, university administrators, and the general public.