Mapping Immigrant Communities through Their Tombstones in Archaic and Classical Athens

My dissertation, “Mapping Immigrant Communities through Their Tombstones in Classical Athens,” seeks to rescue the history of these foreigner residents by studying how they represented themselves on grave markers and how they integrated themselves into the city and its cemeteries. By analyzing the findspots of tombstones of foreign residents, I reconstruct where in the city and alongside whom foreigners were buried.

My dissertation has two main objectives. The first is to show that foreigners were among the few individuals in the mid-5th century whose burials were marked by permanent tombstones. Second, I argue that immigrant communities buried their dead in groups, with immigrants coming from the same place burying together. Moreover, people from different regions of the Aegean tended to bury in different cemeteries in Athens. Though egalitarian on its face, the Athenian democracy was still extremely exclusive, and immigrant communities residing in Athens responded by preserving traditions and promoting their citizenship in other poleis within cemeteries.