Margaret Miller specializes in the archaeology and material culture of the ancient Mediterranean. She publishes widely on cultural relations between first millennium BC Greece, Anatolia and the ancient Near East, especially relations within and with the Persian Empire. She has a long-standing interest in the exploitation of archaeology as a tool of social history, whether Greek drama or domestic life. Her fieldwork project focuses on the Geometric settlement of Zagora on the Cycladic island of Andros.

Research on east-west cultural exchange involves all forms of material and textual evidence. Iconographic study especially assists questions of social coding and practice as well as shifts in outlook. Recent research on the nature and extent of the Persian imperial presence in western Anatolia and matters relating to local Anatolian interculturation naturally emerged from grappling with the questions of the quality of information about Persians available to Greeks of the classical period. A new book on the representation of 'Persians' in Attic art assesses the changing modes of representation against an assessment of equipment and manners within the Persian Empire and in consideration of diachronic perspectives. A study on the 'Orientalization' of myth in Greek art uses the iconography of myth to track the patterns of Athenian representations of mythological figures as ethnically alien as well as the contradictions that allow insight into the ideology of this process of mythical 'alienation'.

Current projects include a program of fieldwork at the Geometric settlement at Zagora, initially excavated in the 1960s and 1970s under the direction of Alexander Cambitoglou. The ARC-funded three year program of research (2012-2014), co-directed with Dr. Lesley Beaumont and Dr. Stavros Paspalas, sought to investigate the economic and social structures of Zagora in order to address the problem of settlement sustainability in the face of widespread social and economic upheaval. The settlement profile and abandonment process provide an ideal opportunity to gain nuanced insight into the local economy and associated social structures.

Professor Miller studied classics at the University of British Columbia (BA) and Oxford University (BA), and classical archeology at Harvard University (AM, PhD) and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. She has excavated in England, Egypt, Greece and Turkey. Before each arrival at the University of Sydney she held positions at McMaster University and the University of Toronto.

research interests
Art and archeology of Greece, 1000-100 BC
Greek settlement and household archeology
Greek iconography
Cultural relations between ancient Greece and West Asia
Anatolia within the Achaemenid Persian Empire
Iconographic evidence for Persian-Greek relations