About

Brice Erickson is a Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas in 2000. He has taught at Dartmouth and DePauw before joining UCSB in 2003. His specialization is archaeology of ancient Greece, with a focus on Archaic and Classical ceramic sequences from around 600 to 400 B.C.E. His research interests include ancient Greek history, religion, and identity. Erickson's scholarly work includes a study of post-Minoan Cretan archaeology and history, published in 2010, and a detailed examination of the Geometric through Hellenistic remains from Lerna in central Greece, published in 2018. His current project is a book on the Athenian Empire, emphasizing archaeological and economic perspectives. Erickson continues to work on Crete, contributing articles on Cretan pottery and regional history, and has published extensively on topics related to ancient Greek archaeology and material culture.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Archaeology
• Political Science
• History
• Geography
• Social Science
• Ancient history
• Economy
• Aesthetics
• Art
• Economics
• Law
• Keynesian economics
• Demography

Selected publications

• Austerity, Communal Feasts, and the Emergence of the Cretan Polis

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Social Science

  Recent excavations and research projects are bringing Crete to the center of debates about state formation in ancient Greece. Civic feasting in the Archaic period, correlating in epigraphic terms to the andreion institution known on Crete, has emerged with greater clarity in the archaeological record. These feasts took place in the public mess halls where food and drink were served to citizens. Feasting buildings at Azoria help establish criteria for distinguishing andreion-style feasts from other forms as a more regular and inclusive practice emerging at the end of the seventh century BCE. Ceramic assemblages also provide clues to the defining characteristics of such feasting, with the standardization in the cup line best expressing a communalistic ideology. The frequency of the high-necked cup in addition to volumetric studies presented here point to a standard Cretan cup, implying uniform practices. In a broader sense, the cups themselves and their austere style contributed to a new ideology and defined citizenship in performative terms, the social glue underpinning the early Cretan polis.1

  PublisherDOI

• Conceptualizing Southeastern Crete in the Archaic Through Hellenistic Periods

  Archaeopress Publishing Ltd eBooks · 2022

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Archaeology
  • Ancient history
  • History
  PublisherDOI

• Ben Akrigg. <i>Population and Economy in Classical Athens</i>

  Mouseion Journal of the Classical Association of Canada · 2021 · 1 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Economy
  • Economics
  PublisherDOI

• Book Review of The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States, by Alain Bresson

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2018-03-19

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Historical Greek Village

  American School of Classical Studies at Athens eBooks · 2018-10-22 · 14 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Appendix F.

  INSTAP Academic Press (Institute for Aegean Prehistory) eBooks · 2017-07-31 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Cretan Pottery in the Levant in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries B.C.E. and Its Historical Implications

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2017-09-13 · 16 citations

  article

  Among the painted pottery types in the Levant during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C.E., the “East Greek” class is especially conspicuous and usually assumed to have been produced in Ionia. This pottery is the subject of a comprehensive research project, examining it from typological, analytical, and other perspectives. Our conclusion is that the “East Greek” class comprises in fact several subgroups from various other parts of the Mediterranean. Here we discuss one of these groups, including mainly hydriai, table amphoras, and jugs, which we suggest were produced on Crete, specifically in the central part of the island. These are the first Cretan ceramics of this period attested anywhere off the island, and they provide the first hint that maritime routes then linked Crete with various eastern Mediterranean regions. This pottery can perhaps be understood as a proxy for the exchange of a wider array of commodities, a possibility addressed in the concluding section of this article. Since the conventional wisdom is that Crete was largely disconnected from the rest of the Mediterranean in the Classical period, both commercially and culturally, this discovery has important implications for Cretan history and more generally for tracing ancient Mediterranean interconnections. It also adds to our understanding of the ceramic repertoire of fifth- and fourth-century B.C.E. Crete, which is still rather poorly known. This article is also available as open access on AJA Online.

  PublisherDOI

• Mind the Gap: Knossos and Cretan Archaeology of the 6th Century

  2014-08-29 · 4 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Book Review of The Archaeology of Tomb A1K1 of Orthi Petra in Eleutherna: The Early Iron Age Pottery, by Antonis Kotsonas

  American Journal of Archaeology · 2011-04-01 · 1 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Public Feasts and Private Symposia in the Archaic and Classical Periods

  American School of Classical Studies at Athens eBooks · 2011-06-15 · 10 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Yiftah Shalev

  1 shared

• Hans Mommsen

  1 shared

• Gunnar Lehmann

  1 shared

• Eleni Nodarou

  1 shared

• David Ben‐Shlomo

  1 shared

• Ayelet Gilboa

  1 shared