May 15
Greece without Demeter: The End of Cereal Agriculture in Greece - Christopher Witmore, Professor in Archaeology and Classics, Texas Tech University
Cereals—wheat, barley, rye—have grounded Greek agriculture for millennia, both before and alongside the vine and the olive, which together structured modes of life in Greece until recently. From the curb of an abandoned threshing floor on the island of Samothrace this lecture sets out to contemplate the ramifications of the end of common agriculture in Greece. Weighing the importance of cereals—something so precious, so immediate, so necessary to those formerly pervasive agrarians, that they were sheltered by their own god, Demeter—it takes measure of the passing of agricultural activity from the helm of Greek life in terms of culture, animal companionship, genetic erosion, and fragility, with the loss of local cereal varieties. Through meditations on memory and ruin, this lecture aims to provoke us into thinking about time and contemporary Greek relations to that erstwhile world of common agrarianism in utterly distinct ways.
Christopher Witmore is the President’s Excellence in Research Professor of Archaeology and Classics in the Department of Classics & Modern Languages & Literatures at Texas Tech University. Holding a PhD from Stanford University (2005) and an MA from the University of Sheffield (1998), he is known for blending in-depth engagements alongside archaeological objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence. Chris is among a few practitioners who have been instrumental in reorienting archaeology from an exclusive focus on a distant past, to a field of interventions into the present, past, and future. As an active field archaeologist, he has worked on archaeological projects in Greece, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Pizza and sparkling water will be provided by the Classics Department and Archaeology Program.
from Classics