Affiliation: UC Berkeley
Grace Erny is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. She holds degrees from the Stanford University (PhD); and University of Colorado, Boulder; and Macalester College. She also attended the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. Her research interests include the archaeology and history of Greece and the Aegean in the first millennium BCE, inequality in the ancient world, ceramics, and archaeological ethics. She has conducted extensive field projects in Greece, the Middle East, and the American Southwest. Her current publications include “Archaic Knossos, Archaeological Narratives, and Conservatism in Cretan Material Culture” published in Annual of the British School at Athens.
This talk focus on how ancient Greek communities on the island of Crete thought about their island’s past. I discuss several case studies of engagement with older landscape features and ways of life, including the construction of megalithic buildings in the countryside, the use and display of non-Greek inscriptions, and open-air ritual practice at significant locations. Material interactions with real or imagined pasts were key strategies for consolidating power during a period of demographic growth, competition for resources, and emerging forms of social inequality in the seventh through the fifth centuries BCE.
This talk explores emerging forms of inequality and social difference on the Mediterranean island of Crete from the seventh through the fourth centuries BCE, a time of profound political and cultural change in the ancient Greek world. Instead of focusing on urban settlements, I look outward to the countryside, drawing on evidence collected by archaeological surface surveys. Though small rural sites in Greece are often interpreted as simple farmsteads, I argue that these sites served many different functions and made up distinct social places in the landscape. I conclude with a new analysis of architecture and pottery from rural settlements in East Crete. This evidence provides valuable information about the daily lives of ancient people.
