Alexander the Great’s conquests smashed empires and threw cultures together from Macedon to the Punjab, but historians have largely ignored what that upheaval looked like in the objects people actually used. This project will examine pottery, tools, jewellery, and other everyday items from the Hellenistic period—roughly the three centuries after Alexander’s death—to see how ordinary communities adapted, resisted, or blended with the new Graeco-Macedonian influences. The problem is that existing scholarship relies almost entirely on literary accounts written centuries later, which focus on rulers and battles, not on how daily life changed for the people Alexander conquered. By studying the British Museum’s vast collections, the researcher will build a material-culture-based narrative of the period. If successful, this work will reshape how museums display the Hellenistic world and feed directly into a major British Museum exhibition planned for 2030. The primary impact is scholarly and public understanding of ancient history, not a practical application. However, the methods developed here—using physical objects to recover the experiences of non-elite people in periods of violent disruption—could inform how archaeologists and historians approach other eras of conquest and cultural change.
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Alexander the Great’s twelve years of conquest, which took him from Macedon to the Punjab, have long been recognised as among the most disruptive periods in human history. On the one hand, Alexander’s campaigns led to significant destruction, not least of the Achaemenid Empire. On the other they brought about a period of intense interaction between Graeco-Macedonian and local cultures, known to modern scholars as the Hellenistic period. Scholarly attention has remained focused on Alexander the ruler and his campaigns, and only fitfully on the communities he encountered. Scholars have privileged literary sources produced centuries after Alexander’s death, with little attention paid to changes in the contemporary material culture. This project will ask how these dramatic political and cultural changes brought about by the campaigns of Alexander can be seen in the material culture of the period, using objects to study the changes felt in everyday life. The findings will contribute to an original reassessment of the period for both public and scholarly audiences, enhancing the British Museum’s collections, redisplay, and contributing to the narrative of a major exhibition on Alexander and the Hellenistic World in 2030. It will provide a unique opportunity for the student to become an expert in the material culture of this period. Because of the breadth of objects required, this project could only be undertaken at the British Museum and will be a showcase of the unique richness of the collections and the ability of material culture to tell important stories from the ancient world.
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