Sara Eriksson

How can unfree labor be rendered visible in the archaeological record? How can archaeological traces of labor be mobilized to answer questions about asymmetrical dependencies? Starting from a ceramic assemblage from the archaeological site known as the Sanctuary of Poseidon at ancient Kalaureia (modern Poros), I explore how labor conditions structured daily life in ancient Greece during the Hellenistic period (323 BC–31 BC). My research aims to refocus the archaeological gaze from presuming that the free body is the normative body, and instead centers enslavement as a normative experience in ancient Greek society. Bridging the gap between anthropological and classical archaeology, I draw upon theoretical and methodological approaches that have been developed in studies of transatlantic slavery. Although Hellenistic Greece represents a different temporality, theories of racialization and Black feminist thought provide tools for understanding how some groups become constructed as less-than-human and therefore come to occupy spaces of inequality, as well as how these spaces are differentially experienced depending on intersecting factors such as gender, skill, age, and ethnicity. My project contributes to current development of theories of agency, practice and assemblages, which posit that humans, non-human animals, objects, time and place come together and interact as an assemblage to produce what we see as continuity and change in historical time scales.

2019–2021
M.A. in Anthropology, University of California, Berkeley, US

2014–2018
B.A. in Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University, Sweden