Grace Erny is a Professor in the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies, and is affiliated with the Graduate Group in Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology and the Archaeological Research Facility. Dr. Erny’s research focuses mainly on Greece and the Aegean in the first millennium BCE. She received her PhD in Classics from Stanford University, with a specialization in Archeology.
To start, can you introduce yourself and speak about some of your research interests within the Department of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies?
My name is Grace Erny, and I am an assistant professor of Ancient Greek and Roman Studies here at Berkeley. I’m also affiliated with the Ancient History and Mediterranean Archaeology PhD program and the Archeological Research Facility. I study the archaeology and history of Greece and the Aegean, mostly in the first millennium BC. I’m especially interested in questions of social and economic inequality: how communities differentiate themselves and how they use material culture and artifacts to do that. I’m also really interested in rural populations, including topics like the organization of agricultural labor and the distribution of land and resources in different Greek communities. I’ve conducted archaeological fieldwork across the eastern Mediterranean, including in Cyprus and northern Israel, but mostly in Greece: in the Peloponnese, in Attica, in the Cyclades, and on Crete. Before starting my doctorate, I also worked as an archaeologist in the Southwestern United States.
Can you tell us more about your recent research projects or your current book?
My current book project focuses on the island of Crete during the Archaic and Classical periods (roughly the seventh to the fourth centuries BCE). This is a time when small Cretan city-states are starting to form. Crete is also the earliest place in the Greek world to have monumental inscribed laws. We see communities making new rules for themselves and organizing themselves in new ways, and this involved the creation of new forms of inequality. I look at this process from the vantage point of the countryside, relying on the evidence generated from archaeological surveys. When most people think about archaeology, they think about excavation — digging holes in the ground. Archaeological surveys document a larger landscape by systematically recording surface remains. This allows archaeologists to reconstruct changes in settlement patterns over long periods of time and then try to link these patterns to larger economic or political developments. My research analyzes the finds and architecture from some of these small rural Cretan sites. I argue that these places are highly differentiated, not just homogenous farmsteads, and that some of them have special functions. I also suggest that some of these communities strategically used older landscape locations and architectural styles to develop new identities in dialogue with Crete’s Bronze Age past. As I develop this project further, I’m working to incorporate more information from Archaic and Classical Cretan inscriptions. These texts give us a lot of (often confusing) information about different social statuses, the management of land and resources, and the role of real or fictive kinship groups in these early political communities.
What has been your experience with archaeological fieldwork? In Ancient Greek and Roman Studies undergraduates can study both archaeology and literature. Can you speak more about the relationship between these two courses of study?
I’ve always been drawn to archaeology because, for most of human history, only a small fraction of the population could read or write. Many more people, though, leave their mark in material culture. I’m also constantly grappling with archaeology’s grand epistemological challenge: how to connect the small traces and disparate samples that archaeologists recover to larger social and economic questions and processes. That’s the hardest part of what we do, and I find that work endlessly fascinating.
On my first archaeological project, I also fell in love with the process of doing archaeology. It’s often very hard work, and it can be boring. Sometimes you don’t find anything for a long time—but when you do, there’s the excitement of discovery and then there’s the excitement afterwards in the lab of trying to figure out how all the pieces fit together, both literally and metaphorically. We’re reconstructing broken objects, but we’re also trying to use those objects and our knowledge of their contexts to understand ancient people. From the beginning, I’ve been drawn to the collaborative nature of archaeology, which makes it different from many other humanistic disciplines. On the archaeological projects I’ve participated in, I’ve been able to work with and learn from colleagues who specialize in studying human remains or ancient plant remains or lithic tools. Together, we’re able to produce a more comprehensive picture of our site or region.
A department like Ancient Greek and Roman Studies is an area studies field, so it unites many different approaches. I would suggest that students take advantage of that breadth. Take classes that will teach you about material culture, and also ones that will teach you how to read literature or documents, because these are really complementary lines of evidence. One of the things that attracts me to studying the Greek world of the first millennium BCE is that we can put textual and material evidence together. We shouldn’t expect them to always correspond exactly with each other or tell the same story, but I think that each enriches the other.
Would you say that literature is a better way of accessing people’s minds? I think that might be the assumption, but Ancient literature is so formalized. I was wondering if you could speak more about that dynamic of trying to understand people’s minds, and the relationship of that in both literature and archaeology?
Archaeology and literature tell us different things. For example, some Classical Athenian literature portrays a world where citizen men and citizen women are expected to be kept extremely segregated. Women aren’t supposed to leave their house or be seen in public. That’s the ideology that is presented to us in the texts, but when we look at archaeology we see a different story. At sites where archaeologists have excavated many Classical Greek houses—for example, Olynthus in northern Greece —archaeologists have studied the patterning of artifacts related to women’s labor: things like textile tools for spinning and weaving. We can see that these objects are distributed across houses, not sequestered in one area. We have an image in literary sources of strictly enforced demarcation of gendered space, but when we look at the reality on the ground, we don’t see that so clearly. Maybe strict gender segregation was more ideal than real, maybe it depended on the social class of the women involved, or maybe it was temporal rather than spatial. Though archaeology can’t tell us directly what’s going on in people’s minds, there are many places where it provides information that’s not accessible in other ways—the specific ritual behaviors performed at particular sanctuaries; how communities choose to bury and commemorate their dead; or the ways that people build, organize, and abandon their houses and settlements. Our texts are representing a highly specific point of view most of the time, so interrogating the tensions with the material evidence can be very productive.
What has your experience been teaching Ancient Greek to undergraduates? Why would you recommend undergraduates take a foreign language course, and what is your advice to current language learners?
I have really enjoyed teaching Ancient Greek at Cal. The students who take Ancient Greek are smart and motivated. They care about the text and are attentive to the nuances of the language. I would encourage any student thinking about learning or studying an ancient language to give it a try! The ability to read these texts in the original language, with more direct access to ancient concepts and voices, is a gift that enriches your life along many dimensions.
Here at Berkeley, I’ve been lucky to teach Homer’s Iliad – my favorite work of ancient Greek literature, and one I can’t do justice to in a short interview! Last spring, I also taught a class on the historian Herodotus. He tells the story of the Greek and Persian Wars, but in doing so, he creates a bigger narrative about why the world is the way it is and why people have the customs they have; he’s a geographer and an anthropologist as well as a historian, and there are lots of fun meandering asides and scraps of important detail. This semester, I’m teaching a text from Classical Athens: a speech from a murder trial. An important feature of Classical Athenian democracy was that citizens could be tried before a jury of their peers. This speech is a defense speech written by a professional speechwriter named Lysias: the defendant, Lysias’ client, has killed a man because he supposedly caught him in bed with his wife. Killing someone for adultery in this way was permitted under Athenian law as long as the adulterer was caught in the act. So the speech is rich with spicy details, but it also gives fascinating insights into Classical Athenian society. This defendant is trying to convince an Athenian jury; our class is trying —if you want to use an archaeology metaphor— to excavate the different layers of the speech in order to understand Athenian male citizens’ attitudes about gender, daily life, the household, and enslaved people.
What book would you recommend to everyone reading this interview?
I’ve done much archaeological research on Crete, and I’ve also spent many weeks living in a small Cretan village each summer since 2017 as a member of the Anavlochos Project. As part of this experience, I’ve grown to appreciate the island’s distinctive culture and its more recent past. During World War II, there was an important Cretan resistance movement against Nazi Germany: German paratroopers were invading Crete in the 1940s, trying to capture the island because of its highly strategic location. British allied forces — many of them young men who had studied Classics, knew Ancient Greek, and were therefore believed to be capable of learning Modern Greek more quickly —were deployed to Crete to join the resistance. They worked closely with Cretan shepherds, who knew all of the routes through the mountains backwards and forwards. One of the Cretan shepherds who was a member of this resistance was a man named George Psychoundakis. He, with the help of a British officer named Patrick Leigh Fermor, wrote a memoir called The Cretan Runner, which is about his experience running messages between resistance fighters on these paths through the White Mountains. Not only did Psychoundakis write this riveting memoir, he was also a big aficionado of Cretan poetry. Cretans have a tradition of improvised oral poetics based on rhyming couplets, or mantinades. Someone will recite a line in meter, and then someone will respond in real time with an improvised rhyming second line. This “composition in performance” is very reminiscent of how the Homeric epics were created—this is the theory of Milman Parry and Albert Lord. Psychoundakis actually would go on to translate Homer’s Iliad and the Odyssey into Cretan dialect, so his work is also a testimony to what the history and literature of Greece meant to him.
Another book that I would recommend for people who want to learn more about the ethical and political dimensions of archaeology—issues of repatriation or of looting and forgery—is Chasing Aphrodite, which is by a couple of investigative journalists named Jason Felch and Ralph Framolino. They broke a series of stories for the LATimes in the 2000s about the Getty Museum and its acquisition of illegally looted artifacts, and the book grows out of that reporting. They trace the routes of these stolen antiquities through the international underworld and show how museums and curators engaged in this behavior are driving the destruction of the archeological record.
And finally, I’d recommend the novels of Mary Renault, an author who I think is underrated but who produced, I think, the best historical fiction about the ancient Greek world. Historical fiction is a very challenging genre to get right. The author needs to be deeply knowledgeable and to have full mastery of the sources without sounding like a textbook, and she has to be able to draw the reader into a world that feels compelling despite being very different from our own. Renault does all of this skilfully, without lapsing into anachronism. I can recommend The King Must Die, about the life of the mythical hero Theseus and his travels to Crete, as well as Renault’s most famous novel The Last of the Wine, set during the Peloponnesian War in Athens. Both these books portray the ancient Greek world in all of its strangeness— its occasional beauty and occasional horror— and most importantly, they are fun to read!