British School at Athens

March 10, 2026

BSA Friends’ lecture – Professor Cyprian Broodbank (University of Cambridge), ‘The Emergence of Civilisation’, and the Maghreb

The ‘long’ third millennium BC is recognised as a crucial period of social change across much of the Mediterranean. In 1972 Colin Renfrew’s magisterial The Emergence of Civilisation: The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium BC highlighted the importance of this ‘pre-palatial’ millennium for understanding the origins of the Minoan and Mycenaean societies that followed. It also offered…

February 19, 2026

The Work of the BSA: 2026 Annual Open Lecture Athens

Colin Renfrew, professor at the University of Cambridge, famed internationally as an archaeologist with a special interest in Greek prehistory and a profound affection for Greece, died in Cambridge on 24 November 2024. A former Chair of the British School at Athens…

January 19, 2026

Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters – Book presentation

The event features three talks presenting the book Victorians and Modern Greece: Literary and Cultural Encounters recently published by Routledge in the British School at Athens—Modern Greek and Byzantine Studies Series. The volume examines the representation and interpretation of nineteenth century Greece in Victorian magazines, popular fiction, poetry, and travel writing, revealing the cultural affiliations between Britain and Modern Greece in this period. It reflects…

January 13, 2026

Professor Lin Foxhall (University of Liverpool), “Re-imagining ancient Greek landscapes“

Ancient Greek landscapes were both like and unlike those we see today. Landscapes are dynamic and change over time, sometimes very rapidly. The human relationships within local communities linked together a variety of urban and rural spaces and locations. Survey archaeology…

December 15, 2025

Dr Lorenzo Calvelli (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice), “A View from Athens. Reassessing Cyriac of Ancona’s Vita and Commentaria”

This lecture will explore the manuscript tradition and the discoveries of Cyriac of Ancona, the fifteenth-century Italian humanist, merchant and traveller who is often regarded as the earliest pioneer of modern epigraphy and archaeology. It will first trace the history of Cyriac’s Commentaria de rebus antiquis — a vast corpus…

December 9, 2025

Professor Edward Harris (Durham University), “A New Approach to the Attic Countryside: Markets in the Demes”

In Aristophanes’ Acharnians (33-36), Dikaiopolis expresses his nostalgia for the good old days in the Attic countryside when no one ever used the word ‘buy’ and the land produced everything he needed. This passage has been used by several scholars as evidence that the market played only a peripheral role in the lives of Greek farmers. This assumption has also led scholars like Möller and Osborne to assert that there is no evidence for…

December 8, 2025

Archaeology in the Ottoman Aegean: Consuls – Culture – Commerce

How did local communities contribute to archaeology in the 19th and early 20th centuries? What were the connections between Ottoman officials, international diplomats, and competing curators? And what was the role of the antiquities market in stimulating intellectual developments? These are some of the questions this panel discussion will explore, bringing together historians and archaeologists to discuss the relationship between…

December 1, 2025

Ben Cassell (BSA/King’s College London), “The Aiora and Thesmophoria: Cognitve, embodied and psychological approaches”

Recent years have seen an increasing application of models derived from the cognitive sciences to the study of ancient religious experience. In particular, specific models are being drawn from the theoretically pluralist field of the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR) in order…

November 21, 2025

Remembering Colin Renfrew: a life’s work on the Cyclades and beyond

November 10, 2025

Professor Nicoletta Momigliano (University of Bristol), “Mal d’Archive/Archive Fever (some reflections on Sinclair Hood’s archive at the British School at Athens)”

This lecture presents some reflections stemming from current research on the Royal Road excavations that were carried out by Sinclair Hood at Knossos between 1957 and 1961. The focus is on the rich Hood Archive, which was recently moved from his home in Oxford…

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