Classical Archaeology in Context

Donald Haggis, Carla Antonaccio

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781614519980
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book compiles a series of case studies derived from archaeological excavation in Greek cultural contexts in the Mediterranean (ca. 800-100 B.C), addressing the current state of the field, the goals and direction of Greek archaeology, and its place in archaeological thought and practice. Overviews of archaeological sites and analyses of assemblages and contexts explore how new forms of data; methods of data recovery and analysis; and sampling strategies have affected the discourse in classical archaeology and the range of research questions and strategies at our disposal. Recent excavations and field practices are steering the way that we approach Greek cultural landscapes and form broader theoretical perspectives, while generating new research questions and interpretive frameworks that in turn affect how we sample sites, collect and study material remains, and ultimately construct the archaeological record. The book confronts the implications of an integrated dialogue between realms of data and interpretive methodologies, addressing how reengagement with the site, assemblage, or artifact, from the excavation context can structure the way that we link archaeological and systemic contexts in classical archaeology.

Donald C. Haggis and Carla M. Antonaccio

1 A Contextual Archaeology of Ancient Greece

The Definition of Greek Archaeology

This book began as a conversation developing out of an advanced graduate seminar on the archaeology of Early Iron Age Greece that we occasionally co-teach, drawing students from departments of art history, religion and classics at both Duke and Chapel Hill. The class afforded us several opportunities to reflect on how we understand, define, and teach Greek archaeology. In particular, we have become increasingly conscious of the difficulties in trying to introduce to our students a rapidly expanding body of data, and a constantly changing archaeological landscape, when textbooks and synthetic studies are still ensconced in sites, material, and even research problems defined initially in the first half of the twentieth century. Another problem was the apparent lack of critical evaluation of the material and contextual basis for applications of current theory. That is to say, we could teach standard works and current theoretical and quantitative studies, but we found that a deconstruction of field methods and contexts, and even the study of new material, tended to transform, if not utterly undermine, the dominant narratives that have somehow codified our research questions. The better we understood archaeological contexts, the more complicated and open-ended the questions became, and the more difficult it was to stay with both traditional and current narratives. Although this proved endlessly satisfying for our students, who are learning to read critically, it also revealed an increasing conceptual distance between narrative and context in classical archaeology.

Thus, our frustration was not with the lack of quantifiable data, or the inherent limitations and constraints of new theory or old-fashioned research questions—both are valid and interesting—but with an apparent lack of a cognizance of field practices and the process of constructing archaeological contexts. That is, we have become aware of the “theoretical fragmentation” of the field of Greek archaeology—in Lucas’s sense, the disconnection between various components of the archaeological process (Lucas 2012, 17). We have also noticed in publications only a tacit acknowledgment of the potential impact of the full range of material components comprising those archaeological contexts. It seemed to us that classical archaeologists have become more comfortable with ideas, and strands of discussion and debates, than with the material itself, while in effect teaching a new generation of students that theory is more important than field practices. In short, we end up training students to think that material patterns deductively derived from publication are more important than a critical understanding of what those data actually are or where they came from. Our conclusion was that classical archaeologists have gradually become complacent about notional and finite datasets, and our largely conceptual understanding of them, while acquiescing to the idea that large-scale excavation—or studying thousands of potsherds—is simply too difficult, time-consuming, expensive, or of negligible intellectual importance or professional benefit. The mantra of the twenty-first century is that we have done enough fieldwork, found enough stuff, know what it is, and now we simply need to sit back and think about what it all means, while dissuading our students from taking on ambitious fieldwork and the study of primary assemblages for dissertations and field research. It may be important to note that this new pragmatic consensus ironically originates with a generation that actually did a lot of fieldwork, studied a lot of artifacts, and introduced a new range of contexts and assemblages at our disposal. Furthermore, while the modern socioeconomic context of archaeological practice has now directly affected how we work in the field, the trend leading us away from the archaeology itself has many causes, including a dearth of funding for significant fieldwork; the complexities getting permits; reporting requirements of granting bodies and universities; and constraints on the labor expected of students.

As archaeological theory has become more firmly rooted in a variety of discourses in classical archaeology, we find a noticeable shift from established master narratives to more fluid and rapidly changing interpretive structures (cf. Small; Whitley, this volume). Even so, we have also begun to center our critical discussions on the intellectual history and merits of various theoretical applications, while being less concerned really with the material itself, or the critical interrogation of the material patterns we construct from publications. As a result, students in many programs are no longer obliged to do fieldwork; to learn, study, document, and publish actual artifacts and stratigraphy (especially from recent or current excavations or surveys); or even to consider that the material basis of our interpretations consists of limited and biased samples, a product of the unique conditions of cultural processes, taphonomy, and methods of recovery, study and publication. At the same time, publishers in North America eschew dense, complicated, heavily illustrated, and costly excavation reports, while tenure and promotion committees in universities give weight to monographs instead of complicated multiple-authored final publications of field projects, or even descriptive studies of landscapes, sites, assemblages, or artifacts—sometimes called derisively, “catalog dissertations.” As a consequence, our students (and we as archaeologists) are becoming intellectually distanced from the actual material components of archaeological context, and the implications of the archaeological record itself. Even the commonplace use of digital technology for spatial analysis, documentation, “visualization,” and reconstruction, though increasing speed and accuracy of recording and illustrating, has inadvertently separated us from the physical, intimate, and immediate experience of the excavation process itself (Huxley 2006, 3).

The prevalent ambivalence about archaeological context—the critical study of artifacts and ecofacts, matrices, features, and their unique spatial and temporal associations—may also stem from yet a bigger problem in defining classical Greek archaeology as a coherent discipline. Lacking a unified intellectual mission, or even a reasonably discrete set of goals, methods, and generally accepted principles, Greek archaeology as field of study also has no neatly definable methodological, chronological, geographical, cultural, and material boundaries. (We find precisely the same problem in shaping graduate curricula and dissertation research as we do with characterizing archaeological research). At the 16^th International Congress of Classical Archaeology (Mattusch, Donohue, and Brauer, eds., 2006), George Huxley (2006) presented an eloquent and compelling vision for the field, one that embraces intellectual diversity and a sensitivity to archaeological landscapes, while eschewing overspecialization. Whether or not the 140 papers in the proceedings of that particular conference—its title (Common Ground: Archaeology, Art, Science, and Humanities) notwithstanding—reflect any kind of unifying humanistic vision that Huxley would advocate, they certainly represent the complex and diverse directions of the discipline.

Indeed in this era of “summing things up,” various attempts to define the current disposition of the field end up, as we would expect, presenting not-quite-overlapping and sometimes conflicting perspectives on what classical Greek archaeology actually is (e.g., Osborne 2004; Huxley 2006; Snodgrass 2007; Voutsaki 2008; and see Antonaccio; Whitley; and Hodos, this volume). Moreover, it is interesting that in the current avalanche of reductive handbooks and companions produced over the past decade, there has been no attempt to devote an entire volume to Greek archaeology—though archaeologists have contributed to works focusing on various classical themes or culture-periods (e.g., Whitley 2009). There is but one English-language field archaeology handbook written by classical archaeologists (Bowkett et al. 2001). And perhaps more to the point, outside of Greece, there is still no mainstream academic journal devoted exclusively to Greek archaeology—as archaeology, rather than history, epigraphy, art history, or something in between (Haggis 2008).

The recent collaborative effort, Classical Archaeology (Alcock and Osborne, eds., 2007), comes closest to an overview of the field in a single book. In its attempts to be concise and comprehensive (and comprehensible to students, evidently its original audience), it constructs a paratactic arrangement of idiosyncratic views of Greek and Roman topics, derived from interesting snippets of current discourses—diverse individual voices rather than unified threads or approaches. What this could mean is that unlike cognate fields of Greek history, Greek art, and Greek literature, whose practitioners are comfortable with their intellectual identity, goals, methods and directions—indeed also confidently inserting archaeological material into social- or culture-history narratives (e.g., Morris 1998, 2000; Scott 2010; Neer 2010; Hall 2014)-for field archaeologists, the discipline defies such easy integration of data, and reductive material and intellectual definition. Finally, a comparison of the most recent English-language undergraduate textbooks on Greek archaeology (Whitley 2001; Mee 2011; Bintliff 2012; Neer 2012) is a study in contrasts, demonstrating little uniformity in methods, theory, perspective, or even chronology or datasets (cf. Snodgrass 2007, 17), which many students find perplexing to say the least. One wonders, in this context, about the influence of Aegean prehistory (actually included in some of these textbooks, but not all), which is today similarly unconstrained methodologically and materially (Terrenato 2002, 1107; Whitley 2009; cf. Snodgrass 2007; Voutsaki 2008). In North America, because of the cultural and regional proximity (and departmental location in classics), Aegean prehistory may have had the effect of tugging classical Greek archaeologists away from traditional paradigms of classical studies and ancient history, moving the field into the realm of archaeology as a transcultural endeavor—that is, to put it simply, posing archaeological questions and using archaeological data and methods to answer them. The success of these various textbooks, however, may in fact be the very diversity of approaches that make them seem so different—one way of defining Greek archaeology could, therefore, be in these intellectual divergences, encouraging numerous parallel and sometimes overlapping discourses. Snodgrass’s (2007, 17) observation of the common criticism of the field is somewhat different: because Greek archaeology was for most of its history a study of objects and classes of material, it had “become a self-contained, even hermetically sealed, branch of scholarship ...” Though his conclusion on what the field has become actually emphasizes this diversity of perspectives and approaches to wide-ranging problems (14; cf. Terrenato 2002).

Parallel Discourses

If it still hard to define Greek archaeology in a way that everyone can agree on, we can identify two strands of work that are still going strong. One is the continuing practice of excavation and publication, a lot of which appears digested annually in the Chronique des fouilles en ligne (Ecole Française d’Athènes) combining compilation efforts of the British School and French School at Athens and the Greek Archaeological Service. While engendering its own conversations on typology, context, and regional if not site-specific site histories, fieldwork in Greece over the past two decades has progressed at an alarming pace and produced remarkable new data, while encouraging broad international participation (e.g., Stamatopoulou and Yeroulanou 2002). The proliferation of periodic regional conferences emphasizes the volume of this activity and the continuing commitment to speedy publication (e.g.,

[Thessaloniki];

[Ioannina];

[Athens];

[Rethymnon]). The second strand is equally international in origin, but fueled in large part by Anglo-American theoretical and methodological work moving in a variety of important directions (e.g., Morris, ed., 1994; Spencer, ed., 1995; Shanks 1999; Alcock 2002; Marconi 2007; Owen and Preston, eds., 2009). The former participants are ensconced in the recovery, description, documentation, and definition of new sites and new forms of archaeological material, while the latter are asking new questions mostly (but not entirely) of old material, requiring their readers to rethink the ways that we normally use established datasets and a circumscribed research universe. If the present collection of papers has any methodological prescript or implicit agenda it is that we need to re-center our focus on context as a means of reconnecting these two thriving but divergent directions in the field, and shift our analytical focus to materialization as a process of context formation (Lucas 2012).

Within the past two decades new surveys of the classical world have been written mostly by historians and classicists, drawing heavily on archaeology, and unfortunately co-opting and reaffirming the temporal, geographical, and methodological boundaries of the field (e.g., Fisher and van Wees, eds., 1998, ix), while the archaeologists themselves may be moving in other directions entirely. Similarly, as already mentioned above, numerous handbooks, companions, and edited volumes in classical studies have tried on occasion to summarize the state of classical archaeology, focusing by and large on broad research questions, the application of theory, and the implications of recent trends in the study of specific kinds of sites or cultural contexts. To be sure, such overviews show useful and sophisticated approaches to Greek society in various systemic contexts (complexity, gender, identity, ethnicity, political economy, and colonization, and so on). But our compulsion to sum up the state of things has become somewhat reductive, and also a bit presumptuous. In the very least, the tendency to privilege certain research questions engenders a kind of complacency in our understanding of the material and contextual basis of those questions, and in the end, deemphasizes entire fields in our broader frame of reference—such as geoarchaeology, bioarchaeology, archaeobotany and palaeoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, and historical ecology (e.g., Morris, ed., 1994; cf. Foxhall, Jones, and H. Forbes 2007)—which are now at the core of our interpretation of mortuary, domestic, and cult contexts in the classical Mediterranean (see e.g., Haggis; Lagia; Margaritis; Mylona; Stefanakis et al., this volume).

Osborne and Alcock (...

Table of contents

• Titel
• Impressum
• Inhaltsverzeichnis
• Übersicht der Zeichnungen
• Übersicht der Tabellen
• List of Contributors
• 1 A Contextual Archaeology of Ancient Greece
• Historical Contexts and Intellectual Traditions
• Mortuary Contexts
• Urban and Rural Contexts
• Sanctuary Contexts
• Index