Grace Erny, "Traditionalism and emulation in Archaic Crete"

Talk Description: Crete has historically been overlooked in discussions of ancient Greek state formation, but new archaeological evidence is shifting a text-based image of an isolationist and culturally backward island. In this paper, I focus on east Crete, now one of the most intensively archaeologically explored regions in the Early Iron Age and Archaic Greek world. I discuss several case studies of engagement with older landscape features and ways of life, including the construction of megalithic rural estates, the use and display of “Eteocretan” inscriptions, and open-air ritual practice at significant locations. I argue that material engagements 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.

Short Bio: Grace Erny is an assistant professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her current book project investigates economic inequality, social differentiation, and rural communities in Early Iron Age, Archaic, and Classical Crete. Other published work includes contributions on statistical approaches to survey data, Crete in the Homeric epics, the contemporary archaeology of the Greek countryside, and the gender sociology of Mediterranean survey archaeology. She has served as staff on three archaeological projects in Greece -- the Western Argolid Regional Project, the Bays of East Attica Regional Survey, and the Anavlochos Project -- and has conducted archaeological fieldwork in Israel, Cyprus, and the American Southwest.

This talk will not be available on zoom and will not be recorded.