Of Odysseys and Oddities

Scales and Modes of Interaction Between Prehistoric Aegean Societies and their Neighbours

Barry Molloy

• Publisher: Oxbow Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785702327
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Of Odysseys and Oddities is about scales and modes of interaction in prehistory, specifically between societies on both sides of the Aegean and with their nearest neighbors overland to the north and east. The 17 contributions reflect on tensions at the core of how we consider interaction in archaeology, particularly the motivations and mechanisms leading to social and material encounters or displacements. Linked to this are the ways we conceptualize spatial and social entities in past societies (scales) and how we learn about who was actively engaged in interaction and how and why they were (modes). The papers provide a broad chronological, spatial and material range but, taken together, they critically address many of the ways that scales and modes of interaction are considered in archaeological discourse. Ultimately, the intention is to foreground material culture analysis in the development of the arguments presented within this volume, informed, but not driven, by theoretical positions.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Thinking of Scales and Modes of Interaction in Prehistory

Barry P.C. Molloy

Introduction¹

Anton Adner died in 1822 when he was 112 years old. He had become something of a legend in his time in Bavaria because of his unique way to circumvent local taxation laws. A carpenter by trade, strict regulations meant that he could produce one specific product for local markets, and should he transport his goods across borders, a tax must be paid. That is unless the items were carried on him personally. Adner chose to manufacture wooden boxes. In his spare time he produced other craft items – from toys to woollen socks. He then placed his items in the wooden boxes, attached these to himself, and proceeded to walk not only across local borders, but throughout Bavaria, Austria and as far afield as Switzerland (Kastner 2015).

This volume is about scales and modes of interaction in prehistory, specifically between societies on both sides of the Aegean and with their nearest neighbours overland to the north and east. The story of Adner may be far removed in time and space, but it speaks of the quirks of a person’s place in the world – how their knowledge is moulded by society yet how their choices can shape that society in return. To excavate his home, we may expect to find the sparse belongings of a Bavarian peasant craftsman, but his knowledge of the world was far broader than we might ascribe to his humble dwelling. We may invoke the individual agency of such a person who acted at his own behest to explain his particular case, yet it was the social and economic structures within which he operated and did business that drove his decision making. This reflects tensions at the very core of how we consider interaction in archaeology, particularly the motivations and mechanisms leading to social and material encounters or displacements. Linked to this are the ways we conceptualise spatial and social entities in past societies (scales) and how we learn about who was actively engaged in interaction and how and why they were (modes).

The Aegean has long been considered a powerful testing ground for evaluating the nature of connectivity in prehistory. This is to no small degree due to the wealth of material culture and high-standards of publication in this area. It provides an ideal environment for researching how we think about scales and modes of interaction there and in archaeology more generally. The ability to maintain connections with other, often distant, groups can be seen as a defining characteristic of the social dynamics of the peoples living around the Aegean. We find cultural practices and objects that have currency throughout areas that are distinguished by diverse land- and sea-scapes that range from enabling to dramatically restricting mobility. Our objective in this book has therefore been to evaluate practical approaches for recognising material correlates for connectivity within their local and regional contexts. Contributors take account of variable scales of both past interactions and contemporary analyses, along with a parallel consideration of functional and social elements influencing modes of interaction.

When we speak of scale, this is typically related to the component parts of ancient societies, from the intimate scale of the ground beneath the individual through to the land they inhabited and on to the world they lived in (Parkinson and Galaty 2010: 11–18; Knappett 2011: 28–36; 2012: 393–396). As we move through these scales, we progress from the local environment that was familiar to most individuals up to a wider world that becomes incrementally less familiar the farther they moved from home (Helms 1988; Barrett 1998). For the archaeologist, this question of boundaries and familiarity relates at once to the geographical scope of a case-study but also to the pragmatic issue of the volume and character of materials to be utilised in research (Roberts and Vander Linden 2011). We are also concerned with temporalities, and so scale further relates to the chronological parameters we select as appropriate for a given study. For these reasons, contributors were invited that covered a wide range of materials, places and prehistoric periods.

In relation to modes of interaction, we may simply define these as the ways in which people engage with each other and with their material and cosmological worlds (Kristiansen 2004; Knappett 2011: 3–36; Earle 2013; Fontijn 2013; Hahn and Weiss 2013a). The movement of people beyond their communities is commonly explored through the lens of trade and exchange, though interaction between people can include travel for religious reasons, political purposes, family reasons, exploration, violence, health and many more (Renfrew 1993; Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 40). By taking a diachronic set of case-studies, the book is concerned with the longevity, resilience of character, and intensities of networks of connectivity and the ways these can be visible in the material record. With regard to exploring such pathways, contributors incorporated analyses of restricted circulation/elite objects alongside those representing practices intrinsic to the daily rhythms of life. This promoted a critical approach to various forms of interaction to account for stability and changes alike. The range of case studies is intended to better understand how global traditions shape local practices, while building from these heterogeneous arrays of local practices to contribute to less model-driven and therefore at times ‘messy’ bigger-scale narratives. This brings us to the ‘Odysseys and Oddities’ of the title, which is intended to reflect at once the diversity of purpose of ancient journeys alongside those often select array of objects we archaeologists invoke to characterise connectivity. For this reason we were as much interested in interaction within and between groups in their geographic and social environment as with the influences of interaction of an intercultural nature.

Figure 1.1: General timeline for the subject matter of this book (there is considerable diversity in the naming of periods throughout the region, and in the date ranges allocated by different scholars within regions, and so these are for general orientation).

We begin in the Neolithic, a time when the place and permanency of settlements took on increased importance and visibility, as the growth of agriculture went hand-in-hand with evidence for greater mobility and transfers of cultural ideas and know-how. Beginning c. 8000 BC (in Anatolia, 7000 BC in Crete, and 6500 BC in the rest of Greece and the Balkans) and lasting broadly until c. 3500 BC (in Greece, c. 4500 BC the Balkans but until c. 5500 BC in Anatolia), there is considerable diversity in the dating and nomenclature of the phases of the Neolithic in the wider region. Following this, there are variable Final Neolithic, Chalcolithic and Eneolithic phases (Figure 1.1). While terminology and dating differ, the beginning of the Early Bronze Age leads us to a time with greater agreement in terms of its broad chronological boundaries amongst scholars, with an early Bronze Age lasting from around 3500/3000 BC through to c. 2000 BC, followed by a notably short Middle Bronze Age until around 1600–1500 BC and a Late Bronze Age lasting until around 1000 BC in many parts, or as late as 800 BC in more northern areas (Figure 1.1). The major urban centres of Crete emerged during the Middle Bronze Age, and the Mycenaean centres of the Greek mainland emerged at the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in southern Greece, while more modest villages dominate elsewhere. The romantically titled ‘Dark Age’ or Early Iron Age lasted into the second quarter of the first millennium to be followed by a series of more tightly bounded and regionally significant/employed phases from the seventh century BC onwards (Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic). It is in the Early Iron Age that connectivity is believed to have increased exponentially, with migrations of colonists and the adoption of closely linked forms of material culture and related practices throughout the Aegean.

For the periods in question, when looking at the larger spatial and temporal scales, we commonly consider how Neolithisation impacts upon Neolithic societies (Hadjikoumis et al., 2011), the ‘spread’ of metalworking in the Early Bronze Age (Doonan and Day 2007), the development of complex trade systems of the Middle-Late Bronze Age (Broodbank 2013: 345–444; Sherratt 203; 2010), mobility and reform at the end of the Bronze Age and Early Iron Age (Drews 1993; Dickinson 2006; Kristiansen and Larsson 2007; Jung 2009; Molloy, in press), and colonisation in the developed Iron Age (Tsetskhladze 2006; Mac Sweeney 2013). While somewhat simplified, these themes are nonetheless preeminent in larger scale studies and are here intended to reflect varying prioritisations dependent on the period in question. We might even see a difference in our willingness to accept certain ideas (e.g. migration) in research for each period. How these varying priorities affect our approaches to the material record was a reason behind the wide chronological scale of this volume with the intention to stimulate dialogue between different material, geographic and temporal specialisms in discussion at the Round Table event in Sheffield in 2013 and in this volume.

Scales of interaction

Early in the history of archaeology, there was a marked concern with how big the ancient world was. This was seen as a function of defining what things were ‘diffusing’ and there was a significant interest in tracing such mobility between areas with defined cultural characteristics. The paragon of this perspective was V. Gordon Childe (e.g. Childe 1930), the great synthesiser who sought to explain where and when cultural traits spread across Europe and Asia (Halstead). The issue of how was of some concern, but that of why was perhaps not on centre stage at that point. In our globalising world today, we may reasonably invert the above question, with a similar objective, and ask how small was the ancient world? In this sense, connectivity is not seen as a euphemism for generalised links between cultural blocks or zones. It reflects our more general concern with what may be seen as overlapping configurations of connectedness defined by practices and identities (including their material correlates) at various social scales.

If the opening story of Adner tells us anything, it is that mobility can happen at all levels of society, its scale need not be technologically confined, and that motivations and mechanisms are subject to the vagaries of historical circumstances. As archaeologists, our bird’s-eye perspective reveals the disposition of societies on spatial scales of our choosing (Barrett 1998: 22–23). The linkages we seek in material culture (in its broadest sense) can in turn reveal scales of social interaction that we can reasonably believe range from the familiar to the wholly unfamiliar in relation to the minds of past people. This is not to say that past peoples were ignorant of distant things, but that these were understood “through combined experience and myth” (Kristiansen 1993: 143; see also Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 39–50). Knowledge of individual experiences may have been relayed to ‘home’ communities with the objective of making experiences relevant to their particular forms of cultural understanding – that is tailored to suit the audience (and speaker). It is this local context of receptivity and (re-)interpretation that is of particular interest to many contributions in this volume, alongside considering the capacity of materials to reveal participation in transcultural practices and networks.

When we think of connectivity between entities, a point of reference is of necessity boundaries, or perhaps more aptly boundedness (Shanks and Tilley 1987: 170–172). What were the sizes, not only of social units, but of social worlds and cultural phenomena? For example, the home itself was no doubt intimately known by a person, as was their village/town and local hinterlands. Beyond this, the land of the social unit was part of both a spatial and conceptual entity (e.g. territory or ethnicity) known to occupants in different ways (e.g. a farmer versus a king). From this known environment, we proceed in asymmetrically increasing degrees of unfamiliarity in relation to the ways that different people made sense of distant people and places.

The scale of our ‘question’, the material (and contexts) selected and the methodology to define datasets (e.g. typology and/or chemistry) can be seen to link up any person or group in more than one way. That is less a philosophical platitude and more a recurrent issue in practical research infrastructures which are predicated upon finding material correlates for interacting entities. Parkinson and Galaty (2010: 11–18; see also Knappett 2011: 61–148, 2012: 394–396) have recently highlighted the complex interweaving of scales of past organisation and scales intrinsic to archaeological analyses, ranging from the micro-, through meso- and up to the macro-scale. With a clear debt to Braudel’s (1973) temporal framework, this multi-scalar perspective also plays a pragmatic role for defining suitable datasets for particular issues (Molloy 2012: 94; Molloy et al. 2014a: 2–3). Any such discussion of scale we may define has to be flexible because it is relative to specific research environments (e.g. studying the context of a household in a settlement or the settlement in the context of a cultural entity). A broad set of definitions for heuristic purposes, following the above cited scholars, may therefore be:

1. Macro-scale – Typically associated with the supra-regional scale and long-term, though it may be construed as the level at which cultural differences between entities are pronounced. The time-frame of studies operating at this scale is typically extensive.

2. Meso-scale – This lies at the level of interaction between...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction: Thinking of Scales and Modes of Interaction in Prehistory
• 2. An Elite-Infested Sea: Interaction and Change in Mediterranean Paradigms
• 3. Scales and Modes of Interaction in and beyond the Earlier Neolithic of Greece: Building Barriers and Making Connections
• 4. Impressed Pottery as a Proxy for Connectivity in the Neolithic Aegean and Eastern Mediterranean
• 5. A Question of Scale? Connecting Communities through Obsidian Exchange in the Neolithic Aegean, Anatolia and Balkans
• 6. Salting the Roads: Connectivity in the Neolithic Balkans
• 7. Aspects of Connectivity on the Centre of the Anatolian Aegean Coast in 7th Millennium BC
• 8. Kanlıgeçit – Selimpaşa – Mikhalich and the Question of Anatolian Colonies in Early Bronze Age Southeast Europe
• 9. The Built Environment and Cultural Connectivity in the Aegean Early Bronze Age
• 10. Emerging Economic Complexity in the Aegean and Western Anatolia during Earlier Third Millennium BC
• 11. Trade and Weighing Systems in the Southern Aegean from the Early Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age: How Changing Circuits Influenced Changing ‘Glocal’ Measures
• 12. ‘Brave New Worlds’: Islands, Place-making and Connectivity in the Bronze Age Mediterranean
• 13. Nought may Endure but Mutability: Eclectic Encounters and Material Change in the 13th to 11th Centuries BC Aegean
• 14. Distributed Practice and Cultural Identities in the ‘Mycenaean’ Period
• 15. Anatolian-Aegean interactions in the Early Iron Age: Migration, Mobility, and the Movement of People
• 16. Komai, Colonies and Cities in Epirus and Southern Albania: The Failure of the Polis and the Rise of Urbanism on the Fringes of the Greek World