Session: #597

Content:

The ancient Greek world by 500 BCE was a culturally integrated but geographically dispersed entity, comprising over a thousand autonomous communities scattered across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Migration was evidently crucial in its formation. But what was the nature and the scale of this migration? Who was moving, over what kinds of distances, and how often? To date, these questions been usually been approached either from the perspective of ‘Greek colonisation’, or from a perspective based on trade and cultural interaction. Both approaches, however, focus long distance movements, privileging inter-regional migration as key for understanding cultural and social change.

In contrast, this session considers to the role of local and regional migration in the making of the ancient Greek world, arguing that these smaller scale mobilities were much more important than has hitherto been assumed. In particular, it presents the work of MIGMAG (Migration and the Making of the Ancient Greek World), a project based at the University of Vienna and funded by the European Research Council, 2020-25. The project assesses evidence from five case-study regions: three traditionally associated with Greek ‘colonisation’, each of which developed along its own unique trajectory (Ionia, Cilicia, and Calabria); one on the Greek mainland that diverged from traditional models of polis formation (East Lokris); and one usually associated with Phoenician colonisation (western Sardinia). In some of these regions, long-distance migration has been used to explain urbanisation and state formation, while in others the same phenomena have traditionally been explained as internal developments involving regional mobilities. The work of the MIGMAG project demonstrates that in each case, a complex mix of multi-scalar mobilities was responsible for community formation.

Session: #597

Theme & Session Format

Title & Content

Organisers