The 35th Annual Thomas E. Leontis and Anna P. Leontis Memorial Lecture in Modern Greek Studies

Guest Speaker Portrait
April 10, 2025
4:00PM - 6:00PM
Ohio Union - Interfaith Prayer & Reflection Room 1739 N. High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210

Date Range
2025-04-10 16:00:00 2025-04-10 18:00:00 The 35th Annual Thomas E. Leontis and Anna P. Leontis Memorial Lecture in Modern Greek Studies Date: April 10, 2025Time: 4:00 pmThe Speaker:Christopher Witmore, Professor in Archaeology and Classics, Texas Tech UniversityThe Lecture:Greece Without Demeter: Some Lessons Amidst the Ruins of Common Agrarianism AbstractCereals—wheat, barley, rye—have grounded Greek agriculture for millennia, both before and alongside the vine and the olive, which together structured modes of life in Greece until recently. From the curb of an abandoned threshing floor on the island of Samothrace this lecture sets out to contemplate the ramifications of the end of common agriculture in Greece. Weighing the importance of cereals—something so precious, so immediate, so necessary to those formerly pervasive agrarians, that they were sheltered by their own god, Demeter—it takes measure of the passing of agricultural activity from the helm of Greek life in terms of culture, animal companionship, genetic erosion, and fragility, with the loss of local cereal varieties. Through meditations on memory and ruin, this lecture aims to provoke us into thinking about time and contemporary Greek relations to that erstwhile world of common agrarianism in utterly distinct ways.  Bio Christopher Witmore is the President’s Excellence in Research Professor of Archaeology and Classics in the Department of Classics & Modern Languages & Literatures at Texas Tech University. Known for blending in-depth engagements alongside archaeological objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence, he is among a few practitioners who have been instrumental in reorienting archaeology from an exclusive focus on a distant past, to a field of interventions into the present, past, and future. As an active field archaeologist, he has worked on archaeological projects in Greece, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is the author of Old Lands. A Chorography of the Eastern Morea, Greece (Routledge, 2020), co-author of Pasts Otherwise: The Archaeology of War in Arctic Norway (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025, with B. Olsen), Objects Untimely: Object-oriented Philosophy and Archaeology (Polity, 2023, with G. Harman), and Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (University of California Press, 2012, with B. Olsen, M. Shanks and T. Webmoor), co-editor of Archaeology in the Making (Routledge, 2013, paperback 2017, with W. Rathje and M. Shanks), and the Routledge Archaeological Orientations series (with G. Lucas). His book Objects Untimely was recently translated into Spanish as Objetos intempestivos (Materia Oscura, 2024), with forthcoming translations in Korean (2025) and Chinese (2025).  Visit the Leontis Memorial Lecture page for more information about the lecture series. Ohio Union - Interfaith Prayer & Reflection Room 1739 N. High Street, Columbus, Ohio 43210 America/New_York public

Date: April 10, 2025

Time: 4:00 pm

The Speaker:
Christopher Witmore, Professor in Archaeology and Classics, Texas Tech University

The Lecture:
Greece Without Demeter: Some Lessons Amidst the Ruins of Common Agrarianism

 

Abstract

Cereals—wheat, barley, rye—have grounded Greek agriculture for millennia, both before and alongside the vine and the olive, which together structured modes of life in Greece until recently. From the curb of an abandoned threshing floor on the island of Samothrace this lecture sets out to contemplate the ramifications of the end of common agriculture in Greece. Weighing the importance of cereals—something so precious, so immediate, so necessary to those formerly pervasive agrarians, that they were sheltered by their own god, Demeter—it takes measure of the passing of agricultural activity from the helm of Greek life in terms of culture, animal companionship, genetic erosion, and fragility, with the loss of local cereal varieties. Through meditations on memory and ruin, this lecture aims to provoke us into thinking about time and contemporary Greek relations to that erstwhile world of common agrarianism in utterly distinct ways. 

 

Bio 

Christopher Witmore is the President’s Excellence in Research Professor of Archaeology and Classics in the Department of Classics & Modern Languages & Literatures at Texas Tech University. Known for blending in-depth engagements alongside archaeological objects with longstanding and pressing questions of human and nonhuman existence, he is among a few practitioners who have been instrumental in reorienting archaeology from an exclusive focus on a distant past, to a field of interventions into the present, past, and future. As an active field archaeologist, he has worked on archaeological projects in Greece, Iceland, Italy, Norway, Romania, the United Kingdom, and the United States. He is the author of Old Lands. A Chorography of the Eastern Morea, Greece (Routledge, 2020), co-author of Pasts Otherwise: The Archaeology of War in Arctic Norway (Rowman & Littlefield, 2025, with B. Olsen), Objects Untimely: Object-oriented Philosophy and Archaeology (Polity, 2023, with G. Harman), and Archaeology: The Discipline of Things (University of California Press, 2012, with B. Olsen, M. Shanks and T. Webmoor), co-editor of Archaeology in the Making (Routledge, 2013, paperback 2017, with W. Rathje and M. Shanks), and the Routledge Archaeological Orientations series (with G. Lucas). His book Objects Untimely was recently translated into Spanish as Objetos intempestivos (Materia Oscura, 2024), with forthcoming translations in Korean (2025) and Chinese (2025). 

 

Visit the Leontis Memorial Lecture page for more information about the lecture series.