Yannis Hamilakis, archaeologist and professor of Archaeology and Modern Greek Studies at Brown University, sees archaeology as the study of how material things and time relate—whether in prehistory or the present. Besides the excavation of Koutroulou Magoula in Thessaly which he co-directs, he researches the “archaeology of the present,” including migration and border crossings on Lesvos.

One of his current major projects focuses on the Athenian Acropolis from the 1830s to the present. He shows how the site was “cleansed” to appear almost exclusively classical, erasing Ottoman, Muslim, African and other histories, such as the large Muslim cemetery on its western slope. Hamilakis links this to global histories of race, colonialism, and ideas of whiteness, highlighting figures like Leo von Klenze, who helped transform the Acropolis while theorising Aryan ties between Greeks and Germans.

Using visual representations preserved in the Benaki Museum, he argues that images shape Greek identity through a “double consciousness”, that is seeing oneself through Western eyes. He calls for new readings of the Acropolis that reconnect it to diverse communities and a genuinely multicultural Greece.