Affiliation: American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science and Technology Policy Fellow
Anne Duray is a Greek archaeologist and intellectual historian. She completed her PhD at Stanford University in 2020, and is currently a Science and Technology Policy Fellow with the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Previously, she has taught at Stanford and the University of Colorado Boulder on topics relating to Greek archaeology and history, race and ethnicity, cultural heritage politics, and legacies of colonialism in archaeology. She has also held a postdoctoral fellowship at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA), and was the Editorial Assistant for the American Journal of Archaeology from 2020–24.
Her research focuses on the interplay between ideologies, archaeological practices, and knowledge production from the late 19th century to the present, particularly in the study of Aegean prehistory and the Early Iron Age. Some of her recently-published and in-progress work examines how archaeological understandings of culture were racialized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and the broader implications, including legacies into the present. She has over a decade of archaeological fieldwork experience in Greece (including at the Athenian Agora, Malthi, and Stelida), and her research draws extensively from archival collections at the ASCSA, British School at Athens, Cambridge University, and the University of Thessaly (Volos). Through her scholarship and teaching she seeks to reframe disciplinary history as not just something rooted in the past, but a vehicle to analyze and contextualize engagements with the past-in-present by scholarly and non-scholarly actors over time and ultimately a way to chart a more inclusive future.
“This talk navigates ancient and modern understandings of “ethnicity” and implications for archaeological interpretation through the specific case study of the Dorians. While there is much archaeological work today that explores mobility in the Mediterranean at the end of the Bronze Age, the idea that a single invasion (Dorian or otherwise) led to the “collapse” of Bronze Age civilization in Greece is no longer held. I argue, however, that tracing modern (i.e., late 19th – 20th century) archaeological understandings of the Dorians are important for illuminating how archaeological and historical notions of cultural continuity and discontinuity developed in the case of Greek archaeology.
Interpretations of the Dorians (and/or Dorian Invasion) over the course of the 20th century reveal how the conceptual entanglement between linguistic groups, race or ethnicity, and identifiable material culture signatures permeated framings of the LBA – EIA transition. Some archaeologists took the ancient source treatments of the Dorian migration or invasion at face value and attributed changes in material culture or even the dating of destruction phases on sites to the Dorians (e.g., Blegen at Pylos). More broadly, an understanding of ethnic differentiation based on descent or genealogy—as some have argued is the lens through which certain ancient sources present the Dorians—finds analogy in modern attempts to identify “descendants” of the Dorians (in Crete), or associate them with a “Nordic race” that invaded Greece at the end of the Bronze Age who brought about not only Classical civilization but later (Northern) European civilization. While the above interpretations were largely confined to the 19th and first half of the 20th century, I argue that both migration models and the association of material culture traits with populations were foundational to the formation of archaeological understandings of cultural continuity and discontinuity in Greece, and that this dichotomy is a framework that still informs the study of the Bronze Age – Early Iron Age transition today.”
“On site and in the lab, archaeologists take pains to meticulously record not only the objects of study (artifacts, architecture, faunal remains, etc.) but processes by which these objects are obtained and studied. This recording produces its own material record—documents, photographs, labels—that is preserved but also often disappears from circulation and study after publication of sites and material. Likewise, for decades archaeologists have created a material record of correspondence about their ideas, research, and struggles. These archaeological archives are not only a rich resource for revisiting old excavations and debates, but they are fundamental for understanding how communities of scholars have produced archaeological knowledge over time, including illuminating perspectives that do not make it into the publication record.
This talk leverages archival materials (excavation diaries, personal correspondence, preliminary reports, photographs) from the Vincent Desborough Personal Papers, Nichoria Excavations, and others, in concert with publications, to outline key developments in archaeological research concerning one of the major questions in Greek archaeology since the late 19th century: what is the relationship between Aegean prehistory and later Greek civilization? I show how 1) the Late Bronze Age (LBA)–Early Iron Age (EIA) transition (c. 1200–1000 BCE) came to represent the focal point of this question; 2) the development of certain empirical archaeological methods (e.g., stratigraphy, ceramic typologies) intersected with interpretations of the LBA–EIA transition; and 3) a specific archaeological understanding of “cultural continuity” came to emerge, and how this understanding broke down in the second half of the 20th century. Archives underline how archaeology is always practiced in the present, and to this end the talk will also contextualize the above developments in the broader social and political contexts of the late 19th and 20th centuries.”
“Shortly after initiating excavations at Knossos in 1900, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans reported unearthing fragments of a fresco depicting “a life-sized figure of a youth,” which subsequently came to be known as the Cupbearer Fresco. As this was the first fresco at Knossos to fully preserve the head of a human figure, it was characterized by Evans and others as the “first real portraiture” of the “race” of Bronze Age Crete. Drawing from contemporary publications, media pieces, and reports of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), this talk contextualizes the initial discourse surrounding this fresco in light of the research agendas about the origins of the “races” of the prehistoric Aegean and traditions of racial science current in late Victorian Britain.
During the late 19th century, the BAAS launched the Ethnographic Survey of the United Kingdom, and several prominent archaeologists of the time, including Arthur Evans, served on its organizing committee. The Ethnographic Survey was concerned with tracing and typologizing so-called “races” over time in the United Kingdom, and used methods such as head measurement (craniometry) and photography to do so. Early commentary on the Cupbearer’s head touched upon not only its craniometric type, but its similarity to Classical Greek art, and value in terms of accurate portraiture. In the case of the fresco, I argue, the supposed scientific-ness of photographic portraiture intersected with notions of artistic production—that is, Cupbearer gained a dual status as a racial portrait comparable to past and present human populations, but also as a work of art that prefigured the later achievements of Classical Greece. This interpretation demonstrates how late 19th century racial ideologies provided a motivation, framework, and language for identifying and evaluating early Aegean populations in relation to “Europeans” and/or “Greeks.” Finally, this talk concludes by connecting some of the late 19th and early 20th century rhetoric about race to more recent framings of “populations” in analyses and commentary concerning ancient DNA.”
