Naoise Mac Sweeney
Professor of Greek Archeology, University of Vienna
I am a professor of Greek archeology at the University of Vienna. My research focuses on the construction of identity and cultural interaction. I am especially interested in the making of communities in their physical formation through landscape and architecture, their social formation through cultural practice and their conceptual formation through the construction of identity. I was a 2015 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner. My work to date has focused on these topics from the Iron Age to the classical period in the ancient Greek world and Anatolia, in particular the Greek cities of Ionia and Cilicia but also Troy and the myths of the Trojan War. My current project expands the geographic frame, considering migration and mobility around the Mediterranean in the Iron Age.
EXPs by Naoise Mac Sweeney
Migration is a crucial part of what made the ancient Greek world. It must have been crucial in the way this world came together, but it also must have been crucial in keeping this world linked and connected.
How Greekness could coexist alongside and be interconnected with other types of identities and other kinds of cultural traits is a central question.
We in the modern West still look back to ancient Greece as our imagined origin. We are still obsessed with ancient Greece.