Classical Archaeology

Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne, Susan E. Alcock, Robin Osborne

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118255162
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The fully revised second edition of this successful volume includes updates on the latest archaeological research in all chapters, and two new essays on Greek and Roman art. It retains its unique, paired essay format, as well as key contributions from leading archaeologists and historians of the classical world.

• Second edition is updated and revised throughout, showcasing the latest research and fresh theoretical approaches in classical archaeology
• Includes brand new essays on ancient Greek and Roman art in a modern context
• Designed to encourage critical thinking about the interpretation of ancient material culture and the role of modern perceptions in shaping the study of art and archaeology
• Features paired essays – one covering the Greek world, the other, the Roman – to stimulate a dialogue not only between the two ancient cultures, but between scholars from different historiographic and methodological traditions
• Includes maps, chronologies, diagrams, photographs, and short editorial introductions to each chapter

1

What is Classical Archaeology?

Introduction

More than any other branch of archaeology, classical archaeology has a history. It is not simply that people have been concerned with the material culture of Greek and Roman antiquity for a very long time now, and that attempts to put the remains of Greek and Roman sculpture and architecture into some sort of order go back to the 18th century. It is also that what scholars do with that material culture today is in dialogue not just with the Greek and Roman past but with the history of its own scholarship.

It is for this reason that this volume opens with two discussions of the nature and tradition of classical archaeology that have a strongly historical focus. Understanding what questions classical archaeologists have asked, why they have asked these questions, and why some questions have raised and continue to raise particular scholarly sensitivities depends upon understanding the history of the discipline.

Part of the peculiar position of classical archaeology arises from the way in which it is both a branch of archaeology and a branch of Classics. Interest in the material culture of Greek and Roman antiquity has arisen not simply through the intrinsic interest of the material but through interest in the relationship between the material world and the world of classical texts. At the same time, the wealth of classical texts offers classical archaeologists a resource not available to prehistoric archaeology. Yet the way in which the questions asked by classical archaeologists, and the sites which they investigate, have been determined by classical texts has often been seen as a weakness, rather than a strength. Archaeologists working in prehistory have frequently found themselves impatient with what they see as the reduction of material culture to providing illustration to texts. They have been impatient too with classical archaeology’s tendency to pay attention to certain classes of artifact (above all to “works of art”) and to ignore other classes of artifact. For them, classical archaeology has too often seemed to be a treasure hunt where the clues are provided entirely by texts, in the tradition of Schliemann digging at Troy with Homer in hand.

Our two discussions of the nature of the subject are drawn from scholars who come from the opposite ends of classical archaeology. One is a specialist in Greek and the other a specialist in Roman archaeology. Yet more importantly in this context, one is a scholar whose primary training was in Classics, whose first publication was an artifact study (of arms and armor), and whose university positions were always associated with departments of Classics. The other is a scholar whose training was in archaeology and who until recently had held positions entirely in archaeology departments. The very different perspectives offered from these different backgrounds offer a comprehensive foundation for understanding the classical archaeology to which they and the rest of this volume serve as a guide.

1 (a)
What is Classical Archaeology?
Greek Archaeology

Anthony Snodgrass

A book like this, and especially a chapter like this, must have it as its prime aim to describe and not to prescribe, however strong the temptation to become prescriptive may be. This is all the harder when disagreement prevails, as we shall see that it does today, over any final definition of classical archaeology. The task of this first contribution is to address the question from the point of view of Greek archaeology: it will incorporate certain approaches that are not explicitly confined to ancient Greece, but which would be quite differently formulated in a Roman context.

The first task might be to set out, in simplified outline, some different and rival positions taken today on this issue of definition. The positions are not as mutually incompatible as this simplified form may suggest; they have already co-existed for some years, and direct confrontations between them do not happen that often—thanks partly to the fact that in many cases they prove to divide along the boundaries of nationality and language. Yet we can take the analysis one step further by trying to identify the (often implicit) issues which divide the groups from each other. In first putting together a list of specimen answers to the question “What is classical archaeology?” and concentrating on those approaches that are essentially characteristic of the Greek branch of the subject, I hope we can give a fair spectrum of the views commanding the most support among the practitioners of Greek archaeology, without excluding the beliefs, accurate or distorted, of the educated general public. The list should be not merely an abstract, but also an operational or behavioral one, in the sense of conforming to what classical archaeologists actually do. With this preamble, we can attempt our listing:

1. Classical archaeology is by definition a branch of archaeology. It is the term used to denote that branch of the subject which concerns itself with ancient Greece and Rome; it can employ not only the entire range of methods used in archaeology at large, but also some additional ones of its own.

2. Classical archaeology is a branch of Classical studies; its objective is to use material evidence to throw light on the other, non-material cultural achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans, preserved for us mainly through the medium of written texts. For this reason, it can hardly participate in the aims, the theories or the debates of archaeology as a whole, which cannot possibly share the same objective.

3. Classical archaeology is essentially a branch of art history, directed at discovering and establishing, in the arts of antiquity, a visual counterpart for the intellectual achievements of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Because its subject matter is more fragmentary than that of many later periods of art history, it must use certain peculiar techniques of discovery and reconstruction; but its aims are not essentially different.

4. Classical archaeology is none of the above. It is an autonomous discipline operating according to its own principles, and pursuing aims which are palpably different from those of non-classical archaeology, non-archaeological Classics, post-Classical art history, or indeed any other discipline. Its over-riding concern is the purely internal one of imposing order on the vast body of material with which it must deal. One has only to look at its output to see the truth of this.

The first three of these are more “idealist” positions than the fourth, though their supporters usually turn out to practice what they preach. No. 1, in particular, purports at the outset to be little more than a tautology; but it may prove to conceal at least as strong a prescriptive element as Nos. 2 and 3. The latter more openly embody an agenda, each presenting the Greeks and Romans as readily separable from all other prehistoric or ancient peoples, with cultural and especially artistic achievements that require special treatment (less obviously, they are also responses much more likely to come from a Greek than from a Roman specialist). No. 4 differs in being a confessedly operational definition, derived from observation of actual practice and telling us nothing about the nature of the subject: as such, it can hardly be adopted as a program, but its supporters might argue that it is nevertheless tacitly accepted by the great majority of Greek archaeologists, even when they protest their allegiance to one of the other three. As already hinted, any suggestion of irreconcilable differences of outlook within Greek archaeology would be an exaggeration. In the end, these are indications of priorities rather than absolute positions: few if any classical archaeologists would embrace any one of them to the total exclusion of the others. But the modern history of the subject is the history of the reciprocal ebb and flow between these four fundamental viewpoints, or combinations of them.

There are certain key issues which tend to determine the individual’s choice of position and, explicitly or more often implicitly, to divide this position from the others. The most important of these relates to the surviving ancient texts, or “sources” as they are often called in historical circles—slightly misleadingly, since the majority of them date from centuries later than the events, or works, which they describe. The ancient texts explicitly lie at the heart of the argument of position No. 2 above: it is they which have preserved most of the “other … cultural achievements” of the Greeks and Romans, and according to this view, the function of classical archaeology is to supplement them with the evidence derived from material remains, on which the texts have much less to say. Even so, there is often some information to be found in the texts which has at least an indirect bearing on the material record: a statue may perhaps be connected with a known work, attributed by some ancient author to a known artist; a deposit at an identifiable site may perhaps be connected with a documented event in the history of that site. It will clearly be a source of satisfaction if the material evidence is found to be compatible with the textual account, and much ingenuity is spent, by the upholders of this view, in trying to reconcile them.

Less obviously, textual evidence is almost as important a factor for the supporters of position No. 3, who concentrate on the products of Classical (and especially Greek) artists. Although unaided archaeological discovery, at first haphazard and later systematic, would in due course have brought to light the magnitude of the Greek achievement in the visual arts, the historical fact is that, long before most such discoveries were actually made, they were confidently anticipated on the basis of the ancient texts. The pioneering work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in the mid-18th century (see below, p. 17) was directly inspired by his knowledge of the ancient (especially the Latin) sources for Greek art, and characterized by his deference to them; his model for the phases of development of Greek art was directly based on a pattern much earlier adopted for Greek poetry. Many of Winckelmann’s most illustrious successors have retained similar attitudes, and almost all later narratives of Greek art have accepted (though with a very different terminology) the skeleton of his outline for its development.

As a consequence, this general position can reasonably be claimed as the “founding definition” for Greek (but only for Greek) archaeology. Already while Winckelmann was studying the collections of ancient art works in Rome, excavations at the Italian provincial sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii were actively under way; but Winckelmann took a disparaging view of these and their potential value. Greek art history had been pointed on a course which it was long to follow: one which distanced it from field archaeology and assimilated it to philological scholarship. More importantly, this approach was to prove so fruitful and so satisfying that, for many of its exponents, Greek archaeology became Greek art history, and nothing more.

This discussion of texts may be briefly extended in a different direction. Ancient writings survive not only in the manuscripts of authors, but in the lettering which may occur on the material objects revealed by archaeology, often in association with works of art: on the pedestals of statues, beside painted figure- or relief-scenes in ceramics, very commonly on coins and occasionally on buildings, but above all on stones which have been inscribed in their own right, as records of events or transactions. The study of such writings belongs mainly to two sub-disciplines, epigraphy and numismatics, which are often distinguished from archaeology, though occasionally subsumed within it. Here, the former alternative will be followed: partly on pragmatic grounds (many distinguished archaeologists do not possess these skills, while most of their own exponents do not also practice archaeology), partly on theoretical: the raw material for these disciplines may often be brought to light by archaeological discovery, but their training and methods, their interests and goals, from that point on proceed according to quite separate principles.

If attitudes to the ancient Greek texts do not create a clear division between positions Nos. 2 and 3 above, then nor does the valuation of Greek art. Its primacy may be made explicit in position No. 3, but study of actual practice suggests that its pre-eminence may equally be taken for granted by No. 2. Throughout the universities of the western world, Classical courses have existed for a century and more in which the study of Greek literature, history, and thought is combined with that of art, but not of any other aspect of Greek archaeology. Book-length studies of Greek art abound, ranging from simple text-books to high-level works of synthesis (Robertson 1975 still stands out among these for its combination of broader insight and close detail); whereas comparable treatments of Greek archaeology as a whole have been few and recent (Etienne and Etienne 1992[1990] is invaluable as an historical summary; Snodgrass 1987 and Whitley 2001 analyze current positions). All this suggests a strong belief in the educational value of Greek art, to supplement if not to match that of literature—just as a brief study of Renaissance art has featured in many a course devoted to early modern European history. What distinguishes position No. 2 is that it does not explicitly privilege art history: for the purposes of research at least, if not of teaching, it keeps its door open to the whole range of material culture. The guiding principle here is one dictated by the accompanying study of history: material discoveries, of a non-artistic kind, have repeatedly been used to throw light on historical events, or to reflect the processes of documented history. Thus, no account of the Persian Wars would be complete without mention of the archaeological discoveries made at Marathon or in the destruction deposit on the Athenian Acropolis; the monuments of the Periclean building program could hardly be omitted from a narrative of the growing centralization of the Athenian Confederacy, or the tombs at Vergina from the study of the rise of Macedon. The status of positions Nos. 2 and 3 can be summed up as embracing, between them, the more traditional approaches to Greek archaeology.

The “operational” definition of classical archaeology in position No. 4, by its rejection of all such high-sounding programmatic pronouncements, keeps both these approaches at arm’s length. The risk is that, in doing so, it lapses into cynicism: from focusing on the activities of the army of solitary scholars producing a corpus of brick-stamps or terracotta revetments, bronze safety pins or iron weapons, or assembling and publishing the undecorated pottery, the lamps or lead weights from a given excavation, it reaches the ostensibly reasonable conclusion that classical archaeologists are making no measurable contribution either to Classical studies or to the history of art. Nor do their activities any longer have a true counterpart in world archaeology as practiced today, as position No.1 might seem to imply. They are simply “doing their own thing.” This argument ignores the pedagogical and instrumental function of these apparently mundane activities, as a training for higher things. Many of those undertaking such research would rather be dealing with broader issues, and have every intention of moving on to such activity; those who are in university posts must already do so in their teaching.

But this position has the merit of having incidentally uncovered a more profound truth about classical archaeology: that it is a discipline devoted to the archaeology of objects, one which is traditionally governed and organized, not by competing objectives or theories, approaches or models, but by classes of material. Individual practitioners have for long made their reputations as experts on a given class of artifact, sometimes more than one. Any large library of classical archaeology proclaims this, if not by its subject-headings, then by the titles of the books within them: monographs devoted to categories and sub-categories of arms,...