Lecture: Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver

"Hidden Lives: Social Marginalization in the Ancient Greek World," Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver.

Abstract: Studies of the ancient Greek world have typically focused on the life histories of elite males as they have made the most distinct mark on ancient Greek literature, art, and material culture. As a result, the voices of non-Greeks, the physically impaired, the impoverished, and the generally disenfranchised have been silent, which has substantially complicated the creation of a historical narrative of these marginalized groups.

In order to reconstruct societal attitudes toward marginalized peoples, my broader project considers the skeletal remains and burial contexts of the individuals themselves and interprets them within the context of contemporary literary, visual, and material evidence. Using this approach, new light is shed on groups of individuals who were typically relegated to the periphery of Greek society in the Late Archaic and Classical periods. 

Focusing on evidence pertaining to disabled and physically impaired individuals, this talk argues that intersectionality was the driving factor behind social marginalisation in the Late Archaic and Classical Greek world.

Bio: Carrie L. Sulosky Weaver is a Mediterranean archaeologist and a Teaching Adjunct Professor in Classics (research affiliate) at the University of Pittsburgh. Her area of specialization is the art, architecture, and archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean world, with an emphasis on funerary art and architecture, burial practices, and the analysis of human bone. She has excavated in Pompeii and Sicily, and analyzed human remains from Rome, Sicily, Turkey, and the UK. Carrie is the author of The Bioarchaeology of Classical Kamarina: Life and Death in Greek Sicily (University Press of Florida, 2015) and Marginalised Populations in the Ancient Greek World: The Bioarchaeology of the Other (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and the co-editor of The Ancient Art of Transformation: Case Studies from Mediterranean Contexts (Oxbow Books, 2019).