Project description
Better understanding of migration through ancient Greece
In the ancient Greek world, migration played an important role. While the world at the time was geographically dispersed with communities scattered across the Mediterranean and Black Sea, it was culturally integrated. The EU-funded MIGMAG project aims to understand local and intraregional mobilities, breaking existing stalemates. It plans to use an interdisciplinary methodology that combines theories from human geography and migration studies, archaeological survey data on environment and new settlements, and ancient literary sources. By conceptualising the true nature of the ancient Greek world, it will help open up new horizons within the disciplines of ancient cultural and political history. This, in turn, will help set new agendas for research into past mobilities and the archaeology of migration.
Objective
This project proposes a radical new model for the formation of the ancient Greek world through multi-scalar migration and the later development of Greek identity. By c.550 BCE, the Greek world was a culturally integrated but geographically dispersed entity, comprising over a thousand autonomous communities scattered across the Mediterranean and Black Sea. Migration was a crucial factor in its formation. Yet the nature and scale of this migration remain poorly understood, and there is much heated debate over whether it should be termed ‘colonisation’. This project attempts to break the stalemate, using an interdisciplinary methodology that combines theories from human geography and migration studies, new settlement and environmental data from archaeological survey, and the testimony of ancient literary sources. Scholarship to date has focused on inter-regional immigration, investigating long-distance mobilities through studies of artefacts, style, social practices, stable isotopes and aDNA. In contrast, in this project I will present a new body of data that allows us to understand local and intra-regional mobilities, developing for the first time a fully comprehensive view of the complex, multi-scalar migration of this period. I will also investigate why some settlements developed into ‘Greek’ communities rather than others, and the processes by which this occurred. This project will have implications for how we conceptualise the fundamental nature of the ancient Greek world, opening up new horizons within the disciplines of ancient cultural and political history. It will also set new agendas for research into past mobilities and the archaeology of migration.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
1010 Wien
Austria