RELUCTANT REFUGE: TAKING AN ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPROACH TO SITES OF TEMPORARY REFUGEE SHELTER IN ATHENS
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2021-01-21

1 in every 113 people on the planet is now a displaced person (UNHCR 2016). A key concern for those forced to flee their homes is where to find shelter, a safe place to sleep, eat, rest and socialise. Media images focus on large camps but in truth migrants journey through (and get ‘stuck’ in) cities - making shelter, taking shelter in squats and abandoned buildings, sleeping rough on unfamiliar streets - transforming them.
This paper draws on recent archaeological fieldwork undertaken in the city of Athens (Greece) for ‘Architectures of Displacement’, a joint research project between the Pitt-Rivers Museum and the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford. Taking the concept of ‘shelter’ to encompass a range of qualities and approaching the ‘problem’ of the current refugee crisis using archaeological and cultural heritage methodologies, I document the city of Athens as a landscape of ‘reluctant refuge’. What emerges is a palimpsest of complex and, at times, conflicting social memory, where the city is transformed through multi-temporal notions of ‘past-as-present’ and ‘time-as-crisis’. I show how, through imaginatively re/using and adapting the limited materials and technologies available to them, forced and undocumented migrants (and others working in solidarity) create diverse spaces that offer some of the intangible features of ‘home’ (such as privacy, autonomy, community and relative safety), too often lacking from conventional forms of emergency shelter. I position this paper against the polarising discourses of humanitarianism and securitisation, familiar within Refugee Studies, to produce ‘new’, ‘authentic’, more nuanced understandings of experiences of temporary shelter. Through this activist archaeological work, it is hoped that problematic configurations of ‘the refugee’ as dependent victim may be countered. Rather, by looking at the city as a socially evolving urban setting, we highlight the new skills and knowledge that migrants bring.


Kiddey, Rachael (University of Oxford)