UCLA

Throughout history, individuals, families, and entire communities have made the decision to leave home and settle in a foreign land. Classical Athens was home to a large and diverse migrant population of both Greek and non-Greek migrants, many of whom recorded their place of origin on their gravestones. These migrants have traditionally been studied through the lens of the status of metic, the legal designation given to the non-citizen foreign residents of Athens, even though these individuals do not use this term on their own grave monuments. Rather than studying migrants through the perspective of the Athenian citizen, this dissertation aims to center the experience of migrants themselves through their material culture of their burials.To this end, this dissertation analyzes three burials of migrants who died in Athens: a man from the island of Chios, a family from the island of Lesbos, and an entire community from the region of Messenia. Each of these case-studies preserves a gravestone naming the place of origin of the deceased as well as archaeological evidence of the entire funerary process. These burials are first compared with a database of over 1,100 graves in Classical Athens that I have created, as well as the contemporary burial practices which were used in the migrants’ homelands, to identify which foreign attitudes or approaches to burial were maintained, altered, or abandoned. These changes in funerary practice are then considered in their broader context to understand how the circumstances of the migration event affected the burials. Contemporary anthropological and sociological studies suggest that the size, makeup, and wealth of the migrating group, as well as the reason for migration, play an important role in how its members are buried, and that burial practices are more complicated than a simple differentiation between locals and outsiders. Building on these insights, each ancient case-study is then placed in its historical context, considering why the migrants may have moved, how they would have been perceived once they arrived in Athens, and how other aspects of their identity, such as their age or gender, could have impacted the form their burial took.