Rheba Macha was born and raised in Newcastle, England, where she presently resides. She holds an MSt in Classical Archaeology from the University of Oxford and a BA in Classical Archaeology from King’s College London. She is currently a PhD candidate at Durham University, where she is researching how representations of Black people in Greco-Roman art have been curated in Western collections.
Our understanding of ethnic diversity within the classical world owes much to how museums have curated their Greco-Roman antiquities. These collections were strongly influenced by the interests and values of the original collectors themselves, many of whom were antiquarians living and working in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This article raises the question of whether their traditions have had an impact on how we understand and curate Black bodies in Greco-Roman galleries today.