Materiality and Consumption in the Bronze Age Mediterranean

Louise Steel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136274817
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la antigua Grecia

The importance of cultural contacts in the East Mediterranean has long been recognized and is the focus of ongoing international research. Fieldwork in the Aegean, Egypt, Cyprus, and the Levant continues to add to our understanding of the nature of this contact and its social and economic significance, particularly to the cultures of the Aegean. Despite sophisticated discussion of the archaeological evidence, in particular on the part of Aegean and Mediterranean archaeologists, there has been little systematic attempt to incorporate anthropological perspectives on materiality and exchange into archaeological narratives of this material. This book addresses that gap and integrates anthropological discourse on contact, examining exchange systems, the gift, notions of geographical distance and power, colonization, and hybridization. Furthermore, it develops a social narrative of culture contact in the Mediterranean context, illustrating the reasons communities chose to engage in international exchange, and how this impacted the construction of identities throughout the region.

While traditional archaeologies in the East Mediterranean have tended to be reductive in their approach to material culture and how it was produced, used, and exchanged, this book reviews current research on material culture, focusing on issues such as the biography of objects, inalienable possessions, and hybridization – exploring how these issues can further illuminate the material world of the communities of the Bronze Age Mediterranean.

1 Introduction

Connected Worlds

Over the millennia it has proved impossible for Mediterranean people to ignore each other. They have conquered, colonized, converted … the contacts are perpetual and inescapable.

—J.H.R. Davis (1977: 48)

The Mediterranean is a melting pot of cultures and provides us with evidence for maritime trade and interactions amongst different peoples of the region stretching back to the beginning of the Bronze Age, if not earlier; it can be defined as a connected world. Accordingly, the intention of this book is to explore cultural encounters around the eastern shores of the Mediterranean through a detailed examination of the objects made and exchanged by peoples and to assess how the patterning of this material elucidates our understanding of social interactions. This chapter sets out to examine the connectivity of the Mediterranean world as a backdrop to the social worlds discussed throughout the book and outlines the theoretical basis surrounding cultural contact and materiality.

CONNECTIVITY IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN

The Mediterranean potentially provided an exceptional space of connectivity.

—Bresson (2005: 95)

Since Braudel’s seminal study ([1966] 1972) there have been myriad appraisals of how the Mediterranean has shaped the diverse cultures around its shores, with a particular focus on its connectivity (Broodbank 2000; Harris 2005; Horden and Purcell 2000; Knapp and Blake 2005). Braudel placed considerable emphasis on the physical geography of the Mediterranean, believing that this shaped human behaviour throughout the region and hence moulded the civilizations of the Mediterranean. Whereas Braudel’s basic premise was the unity of the sea, in their detailed micro-regional study Horden and Purcell (2000) instead emphasized its heterogeneity. There are several aspects which physically and conceptually might link together the cultures of the Mediterranean, for example, its shared landscapes, especially within the similar geographical zones of the north Mediterranean; its similar climate; and its comparable ways of life (Boissevain 1979: 83; Knapp and Blake 2005). These parallels are exemplified by the olive (Gilmore 1982; Knapp and Blake 2005: 6–7), the cultivation of which shaped the habitus of the communities in the East Mediterranean throughout the Bronze Age, not just in terms of diet but perhaps more importantly in the widespread consumption and exchange of oil-based unguents during the later second millennium BC (see Chapter 5, this volume). The Mediterranean as an entity, therefore, might be defined through its geography. Despite the seeming similarities, however, there was undoubtedly rich diversity in peoples’ interaction with their landscape, which resulted in a colourful tapestry of cultures. It has been suggested that this regional variation was the stimulus for the development of the maritime routes which brought the different Mediterranean communities together (Abulafia 2005: 68). Accordingly, the Mediterranean comprises a plurality of cultures within a homogeneous environment which are interlinked by varied patterns of interaction.

Figure 1.1 Map of the East Mediterranean showing major Bronze Age sites mentioned in text

The Mediterranean is more than simply the empty, watery space between Europe, Asia and Africa. Instead, it was (and continues to be) an important communication route east–west and north–south. Indeed, perhaps the single most significant defining characteristic of the ancient Mediterranean cultures explored in this book is their interrelatedness, providing ease of mutual contact. Rather than separating the inhabitants scattered around its shores, there is a sense that the waters of the Mediterranean connected them, facilitating the movement of goods, people and ideas and creating ties between disparate communities (Abulafia 2005). The Mediterranean was essentially a space through which people and their goods traversed and was central to communication between peoples (Horden and Purcell 2000: 13). The Mediterranean Sea, however, was more than just a means of communication—important though this was; it was also an experiential space through which people moved whilst their engagement with the physicality of the sea helped them to craft their distinctive identities, simultaneously shaping their perception of the world around them.

The geography of the area is fragmented; it is made up of distinct maritime regions within the wider east and west Mediterranean basins with different levels of connectivity. The major routes circulating the entire Mediterranean and which connected communities from throughout the Mediterranean world were not established until the first millennium BC; prior to this, during the third and second millennia, navigation tended to keep to smaller channels of communication within or between the disparate micro-regions (Bresson 2005: 100; Horden and Purcell 2000: 20, 123–5). Understanding this interaction and how it was perceived is integral to understanding the connected worlds of the Bronze Age. Nonetheless, it is very difficult for us to understand and investigate how the ancient peoples of the Mediterranean conceptualized their world; perceptions of space would be culturally constructed and were based around very different experiential or cognitive understandings of embodied movement through space to those of our own map-based view of the world. Broodbank’s evocative description of travelling by sea through the Cyclades cleverly educes a very different cognitive space experienced by seafarers from our own more empirically derived bird’s-eye representation of the seascape in maps and sea charts, instead stressing the importance of visibility and landmarks on the horizon.

The map states that a cluster of islands lies ahead, each named and plotted, but the eye’s testimony is different: part of one island’s coast passes close on the left, another island is well defined as a solid grey block ahead, a scrap of something else lies further off at the edge of the haze (an island, or two islands, or maybe just a cloud?). (Broodbank 2000: 71)

Similarly, the most striking aspect of approaching southern Cyprus or the Levant by sea is perhaps the low-lying landscape which barely rises from the waters, despite the massive mountain ranges which dominate movement within the interior. The experience of movement at sea is grounded in visual perceptions of the seascape; an ever-changing kaleidoscope of land and coast, sky and horizon and, above all, the vast expanse of the sea. Certainly the earliest maritime movements were patterned by ties of mutual visibility (Horden and Purcell 2000: 133), as is most evident in the Early Bronze Age Cyclades. Scattered archipelagos provided potential stepping stones for early maritime movement around the Aegean, while from the first millennium BC the larger islands (Cyprus, Crete, Sicily and Sardinia) connected a more extended Mediterranean world. Even so, a maritime tradition of coastal navigation, tramping around from safe have to safe haven and only occasionally losing sight of land, persisted down to the Middle Ages (Braudel [1966] 1972). People navigated around the Mediterranean using very different cognitive maps built on shared memories and personal experience (Broodbank 2000: 23).

Our tendency to view island and mainland communities through modern eyes might well fail to take into account the many factors which shaped patterns of interaction. There might, for example, potentially be closer physical or social relationships amongst communities facing each other over a stretch of water (be it between islands or between an island and the mainland coast) than with other communities living on the same island, possibly separated by mountainous or rugged terrain (Broodbank 2000: 75). This is evident in Late Bronze Age Cyprus. The communities of the north coast, such as at Kazaphani, might well have been conceptually closer to the southern strip of Anatolia, which is easily visible on a clear day, than they were with the people south of the Kyrenia mountains, especially the inhabitants of the southern coastal towns. Likewise, we might note the very close relationship which developed between Enkomi and Ugarit, in part due to their physical proximity but also their shared outward-looking psyche (see Chapter 2, this volume), or the physical separation of the communities of south-west Cyprus from the rest of the island (Steel 2004a: 3). The navigable waterways feeding into the Mediterranean—including the wadi Gaza in the southern Levant, the Orontes in the north and the Pedieos in Cyprus, to name but a few—were also important for connecting peoples. They provided safe harbour not only for the seafaring merchants but also for the gateway communities, which grew up alongside the mouths of these rivers, and other coastal enclaves were vibrant places characterized by cultural mix and interaction amongst different peoples from across the seas and from the interior (see Chapter 2, this volume).

Despite the evident connectivity of the Mediterranean there is also a perception of the sea dividing and isolating communities, especially the seeming insularity of Mediterranean island societies (Broodbank 2000: 16–21; Knapp and Blake 2005: 9–10). The sea not only facilitated communication, but equally it divided the scattered communities around its shores. The long early prehistory of Cyprus stands out in particular for its apparent cultural and physical isolation (Steel 2004a: 19–21, 117), although more recent studies have highlighted the agency of the island’s inhabitants. Insularity and connectivity were also culturally constructed; in some parts of the Mediterranean there was a high degree of external interaction from early periods, exemplified by the international spirit of the Early Bronze Age Cyclades (Chapter 2 of this volume; Broodbank 2000). In the larger islands of the Mediterranean (Sicily, Sardinia and Cyprus), however, there is an apparent dichotomy between their insular prehistories and their role as intercultural crossroads in the late second and first millennia BC (Steel 2004a: 20; van Dommelen 1999: 249).

In the following chapters I focus on the connected communities of the East Mediterranean basin, largely during the second millennium BC; my aim is to explore how these people consciously shaped their social and material world and how that world was transformed through their interaction with other communities. The focus is the agency of these communities, their access to and taste for the exotic, how they manipulated these to transform their own social spaces and, equally, how they chose to structure their relationships with other communities across the waters of the Mediterranean.

CULTURE CONTACT

Diffusion and acculturation are the mechanisms of Mediterranean homogeneity.

—Gilmore (1982: 181)

Within the connected worlds of the ancient Mediterranean interaction amongst different peoples was a way of life, although their nature and extent was highly variable. Individuals travelled to distant lands in search of the strange or exotic (Chapter 5, this volume). Raw materials, goods and peoples were exchanged across cultural boundaries as both gifts and commodities (Chapters 4 and 5, this volume). Traders established overseas enclaves to further their economic gain and small groups of people chose to leave their parent communities in search of new lands to make their home (Chapter 2, this volume). State-sponsored settlements were established in territories acquired through military conquest and empire, as, for example, the Egyptian residencies and military establishments characteristic of the New Kingdom Empire in the Levant (Higginbotham 2000). This ferment of activity was inevitable; “culture contact is a basic human fact” (Gosden 2004: 5; see also Cusick 1998a: 4).

Interaction amongst different peoples will inexorably result in social change, as people are exposed to new ideas, new ways of doing things and novel items of material culture, but “contact between cultures is inherently disruptive, challenging people’s views of themselves and of others” (Cusick 1998a: 3). Peoples’ perceptions of the new and unusual are culturally constructed, and there are myriad reactions to the foreign or exotic; there might be ambiguity or even mistrust. Alternatively, the new and unknown might be eagerly adopted, reworked and incorporated in new creations of identity.

Traditionally, archaeological studies have viewed culture contact as acculturation, a “comprehensive assimilation of new cultural elements from a dominant donor with little difference remaining between donor and recipient and the end of the process” (S. Smith 1998: 258). Essentially, it is argued that certain elements of material culture and cultural activity will be emulated by the recipient, acculturated society and that this results in changes to the material assemblage in the archaeological record, reflecting changes in a society’s material world, their customs and beliefs, all of which constitute a people’s habitus. Social change therefore is inherent to culture contact. There is, moreover, a common assumption that this process is unidirectional and that a “higher” or more “complex” culture will influence one that is less advanced (Cusick 1998b: 132); however, cultural influence can move in the opposite direction (S. Smith 1998: 258; Steel 1997; van Dommelen 2006: 135). Cusick (1998a: 6; 1998b: 137) identifies directed and non-directed contact situations. The former is more typical of the colonial situation in which there will inevitably be a power relation with one of the parties effectively exerting control over the other. The patterns of contact closely adhere to the acculturation model and might involve violent encounters characterized by strategies of domination, marginalization and resistance (Silliman 2005). This unequal power relationship places acculturation firmly within the colonialism end of the spectrum of culture contact (Gosden 2004: 5). Alternatively, non-directed interaction implies that neither party is able to dominate the other, but instead that both are equal. This is analogous to postcolonial concepts of the middle ground and shared cultural milieu, which is explored in more detail in Chapter 2. In contrast to traditional acculturation models, these approaches highlight the agency of the communities involved in the movement of goods, peoples and ideas (see, for example, Berg 2007; Broodbank and Kiriatzi 2006; Knapp 2008; van Dommelen 1997; 2006; Voskos and Knapp 2008).

Examples of the movement of people and objects, encounters across cultural boundaries and the resulting culture change abound in the ancient Mediterranean (van Dommelen and Knapp 2010); for example, orientalization in the Greek world in the eighth and seventh centuries BC and the spread of the symposium; the impact of imported Greek pottery on Etruscan society; the spread of elements of Minoan culture to the adjacent islands of the southern Aegean during the second millennium BC, to name but a few. Throughout this book I explore numerous diverse examples of culture contact and myriad responses to the challenges that interaction across cultural boundaries brings, specifically focusing on social action and the agency of the communities involved.

MATERIALITY

Material culture forms a central connecting thread running throughout this book. Not only is there a clear relationship between culture contact, habitus and the material world (Cusick 1998a: 8; Gosden 2004), but for an archaeologist it is also the analysis of patterns in the material record which may reveal how people both created their social worlds and interacted with other communities. The Bronze Age Mediterranean is particularly rich in objects that were crafted from a variety of materials: prolific quantities of pottery, stone vessels, glyptic, items of personal adornment, metal artefacts and ivories, to list but a few (Chapter 6). The relationships between people and their material world are rich and complex; “[p]eople and objects are mutually entangled” (Gosden 2004: 36). Material culture is used to negotiate people’s place in their social world and to express their identities, both personal and as members of larger social groups. Social relations are expressed through objects which are used to mediate people’s relations with each other. There is, however, a perception within Mediterranean archaeology that the classificatory analysis of an object is an end in itself rather than a stepping stone towards exploring the social role of the artefact (Knapp and van Dommelen 2010: 4). In contrast, one of the aims of this book is to apply anthropological approaches to material culture of the Bronze Age, as a means of exploring how objects were socialized by the people who made, used and exchanged them. I question how objects were used, how they shaped the material and social world and how they were manipulated to construct identities, for example, the accommodation of the exotic in new social practices (Chapters 2 and 3, this volume), as well as how and why certain objects were considered appropriate for gifting or other forms of exchange (Chapters 4 and 5, this volume). The physical encounters between people and things lead us inexorably to the life story of the object (Kopytoff 1986), from its physical creation, its transactions across cultural boundaries; in particular how it accumulated its own histories (Chapters 4–7, this volume; Hoskins 1998).

Anthropological studies of materiality offer an interesting conceptual tool through which we can examine the diverse relationships which develop between people and the things they make and use in daily life. Objects play an active role in social life; they are embedded in the creation and mediation of social relatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Connected Worlds
• 2 Colonies in the Bronze Age Mediterranean
• 3 Entangled Worlds: Hybridization and an International Style
• 4 Greeting Gifts and Competitive Gift Exchange
• 5 Commodities, Luxuries and the Creation of Desire
• 6 Technologies of Enchantment
• 7 Materiality and the Biography of Objects
• 8 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index