Chapter 7 concludes by reiterating the invisible ontologies that haunt current assessments of black skin. The fluid construction of black skin in ancient Greek literature and art aims to confront limiting treatment of race in the modern academy. A final glimpse at the poetry of Langston Hughes (1931) and Gwendolyn Brooks (1980) offers a suggestive model for revamping the ancient Greek archive in the twenty-first century.

Chapter 1 situates the reader within the landscape of Blackness in the twenty-first century. In addition to laying out the task at hand (untangling representations of blackness in Greek antiquity), this chapter underlines the dangerous consequences that occur when scholars conflate modern tropes with ancient material.

Animal remains, particularly skulls, have been interpreted as sacrificial ever since the beginnings of Minoan archaeology in the nineteenth century. This chapter argues that these remains can better be understood in terms of butchery and the consumption of animals at commensal feasts. Animal-head rhyta show that heads were used as trophies to commemorate such events.

As a result of its history of discovery, the archaeology of Bronze Age Crete is largely understood through a modernist view of nature and culture. This book provides an alternative framework derived from anthropology and human-animal studies. It introduces the ideas of animal practices, animal things and domestic/palatial collectives which will be used throughout the book.

Depictions of hunting are largely confined to sealstones in Bronze Age Crete and as a result the importance of hunting has been downplayed. This chapter argues that it was instead central to the organisation of territory in palatial Crete and was an animal practice which defined membership of the palatial collective. Large-scale depictions associated elaborately dressed women with hunted animals as a means to bring them into the palatial collective.

Marine-style pottery is emblematic of Bronze Age Crete but its origins in relations with marine animals have been downplayed by art historical approaches. This chapter revives Arthur Evans’s ideas of nature-moulding and nature-printing to broaden the definition of Marine style and link it to fishing and voyaging, and their importance to the palatial collective of Knossos.

Using John Berger’s famous essay ‘Why look at animals?’ as a starting point, this chapter sets out the theoretical basis for the book, replacing an art historical framework in which animal art reflects a love of nature with a relational approach focusing on the interactions between humans, animals and things. An ontological approach is used to identify modern ways of looking at animals/objects and opening up new ways of understanding them.

Chapter 6 continues to upend the limiting Greek–foreigner binary model. Heliodorus’s novel Aithiopika (c. fourth century CE) traces the peripatetic journey of Charicleia, an Aithiopian princess exposed at birth because of the dissonance between her white skin and her parents’ black skin. During Charicleia’s travels, skin color remains a volatile element: she exploits it as a disguise (Heliod. Aeth. 6.11.3–4), her companion Theagenes uses skin color as a marker of trustworthiness (7.7.6–7), and a prophecy destabilizes both perspectives (2.35.5). Throughout the novel, Heliodorus wields skin color as a negotiable ethnographic tool that does not necessarily correspond to identity. This flexibility underscores Charicleia’s own fluidity between several performative categories. She can be a beggar and a princess, a docile woman and the leader of her entourage, the daughter of a Greek man and an Aithiopian man. Readers are forced to be patient as Heliodorus masterfully manipulates time to create a gap between what his characters know and what his readers have already grasped.