Incarceration, Exile, and Everyday Life in the Roman Cyclades | Evan Levine | 6 December 2024

Far from Roman cultural centers like Delos, ancient authors and modern scholars paint the small islands, bays, and rural hinterlands of the Cyclades as spaces filled with pirates, exiles, and bandits. Recent scholarship has complicated this narrative, raising new questions concerning the extent to which bodily control, criminality, and exile can be detected in the archaeological record. In this lecture, Evan Levine shares results from the Small Cycladic Islands Project (2019-2024) and the Paros Palaiopyrgos Archaeological Project (2024-) to explore how current archaeological fieldwork in the Cyclades is fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the region’s most remote landscapes. By placing these results in dialogue with historical and literary scholarship on the region’s Roman period, he interrogates how we might fruitfully engage with archaeologies of exile and bodily control on island landscapes. After the lecture, there is a discussion with Kristina Winther-Jacobsen, associate professor at the University of Copenhagen.