Chapter 10. House Archaeology: Ethnographies of Forced Migration in Modern Greece
Kostis KourelisABSTRACT
What is a house in a nation of immigrants? Since its foundation, modern Greece has witnessed many episodes of inward and outward displacement, including the most recent 2016 refugee crisis. As a discipline, archaeology has focused on an idealized classical antiquity and ignored the recent past. Picking up on the radical project that ethnoarchaeology set into motion in the 1970s, we focus on the modern Greek house as an archaeological object of migration studies. In modernity, domestic instabilities have changed the existential mode of dwelling. House biographies (the sequence of occupants in a single house) and house careers (the sequence of houses occupied by a single individual) are used to reconstruct the materialities of the modern Greek home.