Department Colloquium: Sarah Murray (University of Toronto) “Gender and the Economy in Early Iron Age Greece”

Speaker: Sarah Murray, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Toronto

Title: “Gender and the Economy in Early Iron Age Greece”

Abstract: "The Early Iron Age (ca. 1100–700 BCE) in the Aegean is characterized by a great deal of economic diversity and change. Facing challenging institutional, political, and climatic conditions following the demise of palatial states at the end of the preceding Bronze Age, communities on the Greek mainland and neighboring islands devised new strategies for pursuing wealth and well-being in sectors ranging from craft production to the agricultural economy. While the structure and pace of economic developments across this period have been thoroughly discussed in the relevant scholarship, their impact on the relative roles of men and women as economic actors remains underanalyzed. This is unfortunate, because major reorganizations in the structure and scale of economic systems are often attended by new configurations of personnel along gendered lines, as attested in numerous historical and ethnoarchaeological case studies. In this lecture, I present a preliminary reconstruction of gender dynamics within the Early Iron Age Aegean economy. The focus is on archaeological and iconographic evidence, especially from sanctuaries and burials. This evidence makes clear that women played numerous, novel, important economic roles during the Early Iron age in ways that have not been fully explored in existing scholarly discussions."