The last few decades have seen renewed efforts by source countries to reclaim ancient objects illicitly excavated and exported from their territory, matched by a growing commitment among institutions across the globe to investigate the provenance and authenticity of their collections. Yet despite this interest, discussions of the antiquities trade – licit or illicit – remain object-centred. This talk shifts the focus to people: the diggers, dealers, and recipients who unearthed, moved, and acquired ancient objects in Greece during the second half of the nineteenth century. Who were they? How did they organise their trade, and what motivated them?
By returning to the protagonists of this story and situating them within the antiquities legislation then in force in Greece, this talk offers a glimpse into a little-known world: a social history of the antiquities trade in which people and their actions take centre stage, and ancient objects become active agents within competing social and political agendas. A valuable source of insight into these questions is the personal office diary of Panagiotis Eustratiadis, chief superintendent of antiquities of Greece at the time (1864–1884). Using this as a reference point, and drawing from a wider range of archival sources, this lecture reconstructs the complex web that made up not only the antiquities trade but also the modern practice of classical archaeology in the country. By bringing to light the tensions, contradictions, and personal agendas, the lecture provides a framework for better understanding the measures ultimately taken for protecting, curating, and regulating the trade in ancient objects – measures whose legacies still shape how we think about ownership, provenance, and cultural heritage today.
Presented with support of the Nicholas Anthony Aroney Trust Greek Cultural Fund.
Light refreshments will be served after the lecture.
Dr Yannis Galanakis is Associate Professor in Classics (Classical Art & Archaeology) and Director of Archives as well as Fellow and Director of Studies at Sidney Sussex College, The University of Cambridge.
He is an archaeologist focusing on the Bronze Age Aegean with a particular interest in examining the role of burials and mortuary rituals in Minoan and Mycenaean societies through fieldwork and the study of past excavations. Yannis’ work focuses on examining how and why the social dimensions of human life shape archaeological remains in funerary contexts and for this reason he is keen in integrating systematically skeletal and faunal remains with objects and geoarchaeological data to better understand site formation processes and how tombs were constructed, used and reused. He co-directed the excavation of a monumental Mycenaean chamber tomb at Prosilio near Orchomenos in central Greece, a collaborative project between the British School at Athens and the Ephorate of Antiquities of Boeotia/Hellenic Ministry of Culture & Sports. He is also responsible for the publication of a number of Late Bronze Age tombs from earlier excavations in Thessaly, Messenia and Crete.
The guiding thread of Yannis work is a contextualized Aegean archaeology that transcends traditional categories and recognizes that the study and interpretation of the past are inseparable from the discipline’s history. For this reason, he regularly integrate archaeological and archival/historical data in my publications in order both to question and to understand better how knowledge is produced. While working as Curator for the Aegean collections and the Sir Arthur Evans Archive at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford (2007-2012), he became interested in understanding the factors – aesthetic, economic and political – that shaped the collections that museums house today. He is currently working on various aspects of the antiquities trade from ca, 1850 to 1900, as a social, political and economic phenomenon.
Header image: Image: A family of tomb-hunters searching for antiquities near Corinth, Illustrated London News, 1877
