Affiliation: UC Irvine
Camille Reiko Acosta is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of California, Irvine. She holds degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles (PhD), and University of Oxford, and University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include Greek art and archaeology, Greek-Egyptian interactions, craft production and ceramics, and migration and colonialism. In addition to experience as a researcher and teacher, she also has extensive museum experience at institutions such as the Getty Villa (Los Angeles, CA), the British Museum, the Women’s Library, and the Type Archive. She also is actively participating in multiple fieldwork projects in Egypt and Greece. Sher has a forthcoming publication, “A death out of place: identity, migration and burial in Ancient Greece” to be published in The Materiality of Ancient Greek Identities, 9th to 2nd Centuries BCE (E. Gooch and J. Ruddick (eds.); Bloomsbury Academic).
Nearly 300 years before the establishment of Alexandria, Egypt was home to communities of Greeks, as well as Carians, Cypriots, and Phoenicians, who settled in the Nile Delta. Some would have arrived as mercenaries in the services of the Egyptian Pharaoh, while others arrived as traders who took advantage of the Nile Delta as a gateway between Egypt and the wider Mediterranean world. This talk explores these communities at sites including Memphis, Naukratis, and Tell Defenneh, where these migrants lived, traded, worshipped, and buried their dead. The archaeological evidence reveals how individuals from different cultures around the Mediterranean fused seemingly different traditions and practices to negotiate these multicultural spaces.
Classical Athens is widely known for being the birthplace of democracy, a political system in which any free male could participate in the governing of the city-state. Yet this democratic system excluded a range of individuals from citizenship, including women, slaves, and immigrants. This talk will explore the archaeological evidence for one of these groups: immigrants, including both Greeks from other city-states and non-Greeks such as Phoenicians or Egyptians. Despite coming from a range of places around the Mediterranean and Black Seas, all of these immigrants all died in Athens and were laid to rest in one of the city’s cemeteries. The archaeological evidence of these burials will be used to tell the stories of some of these immigrants, including a man from the island of Chios, a young girl from the island of Lesbos, and a community from the region of Messenia. By re-creating these ancient funerals, this talk sheds light on the lived experience of migrants and centers them as agents rather than “victims” of the Athenian state.
