The Archaeology Lecture Series Presents: Anne Duray

Duray's lecture is titled, "Racial Thought and Early Greece: The Dorian Invasion and Other Problems." Their abstract readers:

This talk explores how interpretations of the Dorians (and Dorian Invasion) illuminate the conceptual entanglement between linguistic groups, race, and identifiable material culture signatures that permeated framings of the Late Bronze Age (LBA) – Early Iron Age (EIA) transition in Greece. Some archaeologists took ancient source references to the Dorian migration or invasion at face value and attributed changes in material culture or even the dating of destruction phases on sites to the Dorians (e.g., Blegen at Pylos). Such interpretations were predicated on theories of cultural (and racial) change becoming embedded in seemingly empirical archaeological methods, such as vertical stratigraphy and evolutionary ceramic typologies. Additionally, treatments of the Dorians as a discrete, racialized population are found in attempts to identify “modern descendants” of the Dorians (in Crete), or to associate the Dorians with a “Nordic race” that invaded Greece at the end of the Bronze Age which brought about not only Classical civilization but later Northern European civilization. While the above interpretations were largely confined to the late 19th and first half of the 20th century, I argue that both migration models and the association of material culture traits with populations were foundational to the formation of archaeological understandings of cultural continuity and discontinuity in Greece, and that this dichotomy is a framework that still informs the study of the LBA – EIA transition and early Greece.