Dr. Alex Moskowitz – Breaking Bronze for Demeter: Indigenous Religion and the Making of Greek Sicily

Tuesday, March 24, at 5:30pm
Mount Holyoke College
Skinner Hall, Room 216

Alex Moskowitz is a classical archaeologist and historian interested in rewriting conventional narratives of colonization in the Archaic Mediterranean through the lens of the experiences of communities indigenous to the sites subject to Greek and Phoenician settlement. His current research focuses on Sicily and explores the development of metallurgical knowledge and craft communities throughout the first half of the first millennium BCE. With a theoretical perspective underpinned by postcolonial studies and anthropological approaches to the study of craft production and community, he investigates how metal tools and artisanal practices document the choices made by populations navigating changing social, political, and economic conditions. Alex is currently preparing a monograph based on his dissertation work, entitled The Origins of Greek Sicily: Communities, Metals, and Colonization. Beyond the material culture of Sicily and the Greek world, Alex is also interested in studying articulations of cultural identity within Archaic lyric poetry and Greek historiography.

Alex received a PhD in Classical Art and Archaeology at the University of Michigan. Before that, he completed an MA at the University of Georgia and a BA at Swarthmore College. Alex is an active field archaeologist who has conducted fieldwork with various projects in Greece, Italy, and Kosova. He is a long-time staff member of the American Excavations at Morgantina, where he co-directs the Khora of Archaic Morgantina Project and supervises fieldwork for the Agora Valley Project. He is excited to talk with students interested in learning about archaeology and participating in archaeological field projects.

This year’s Ellen and Charles S. La Follette Lecture is sponsored by the Western Massachusetts Society of the AIA and the Mt. Holyoke College Department of Classics and Italian.