Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology

Bridging the 'Great Divide'

Nigel Spencer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415114127
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134683970
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: History of Ancient Art
• Index: Social Sciences

Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology is an innovative volume which examines the relevance of archaeological theory to classical archaeology. It offers a wideranging overview of classical archaeology, from the Bronze Age to the Classical period and from mainland Greece to Cyprus. Within this framework Spencer examines many of the issues which have become important in the study of archaeology in recent years - time, the `past', gender, ideology, social structure and group identity. The papers in this collection cover such diverse topics as the rural landscape, classical art and scientific methodologies.
Over the last century the study of classical archaeology has been orthodox and static. The essays in this collection examine it in the light of current theoretical archaeology and anthropology, making it more relevant and valuable to the study of archaeology in the 1990s. This is a diverse and topical collection, of great value to classicists, ancient historians, anthropologists and everyone interested in new approaches to archaeology.

CHAPTER ONE

APPROACHES TO ETHNICITY IN THE EARLY IRON AGE OF GREECE¹

Jonathan M. Hall

A literary tradition which persists for approximately a millennium appears to offer clear traces of ethnic consciousness among various Greek-speaking groups inhabiting the Aegean. The subject was of topical appeal to Classical scholars in the nineteenth century but was jettisoned in the era immediately subsequent to the Second World War, when the antipluralist philosophy of the ‘melting-pot’ prevailed. By espousing an explicitly social (rather than biological) definition of ethnicity and informed by more recent research in anthropology and social psychology, this chapter attempts to demonstrate that ethnic identity probably was an important component within social and political negotiation. It then goes on to explore briefly how material and non-material symbols were actively manipulated in the marking of ethnic boundaries by examining the literary, archaeological and linguistic evidence for the Argolid region of Greece.

The study of ethnic consciousness in Classical antiquity is not in itself a novelty. While research interests are to a large degree focused by contemporary issues and concerns, the conceptual genesis of the topic is to be situated not among the ethnic resurgences of the 1990s but in the process of European nation-building at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. Most characteristic of this new concern was the publication, in 1824, of Karl Otfried Müllers Die Dorier. Influenced by scholars such as Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich von Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, as well as the Norwegian natural philosopher Henrik Steffens, Müller sought to identify the specific character or Volksgeist of the various Hellenic ethnic groups – the Minyans of Orkhomenos and the Dorians occupied the first three volumes of a never-completed series on the Hellenic Stämme und Städte (Müller 1824; Rawson 1969: 318–20; Wittenburg 1984; Musti 1986a: xii-xv). So potent was interest in this new facet of antiquity that the symbolism of ancient ethnicity became inscribed in the contemporary conflict between Prussia and France, in which conservative, militaristic Prussia was likened to Dorian Sparta and liberal, ‘enlightened’ France to Ionian Athens (Fustel de Coulanges 1893; Hartog 1988: 386; Will 1956: 11–12; Schnapp-Gourbeillon 1979: 2–3).

Conversely, by the middle of the twentieth century, Edouard Will was able to proclaim that there was no such thing as ethnic consciousness in Ancient Greece (Will 1956), and this view has received further support from attempts to remove the chimerical Dorians from having played any part in the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial systems – most notably by Klaus Kilian in archaeology and by John Chadwick in linguistics (Kilian 1980; 1986; 1987–8; Chadwick 1976; 1986). This difference in stance is not simply one of individual expression. Rather, the two directly opposed viewpoints are trace elements in a ‘sociology of knowledge’ which inevitably reflects and restructures an intellectual paradigm contex- tualised in geographical space and historical time.

Schlegel and Muller were propelled by a German romantic ideology in which the three themes of environmental determinism, consanguinity and social evolutionism combined to determine the spirit of a specific community (Gellner 1987: 86–7; Collingwood 1946: 90, 129; Banton 1977: 90f.). It is, however, the very immutability of these three supposed determinants that allowed German romanticism to lay the foundation stone for the scientifically justified racism of the Comte de Gobineau and ultimately Nazism. In the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust, the validity of ethnicity as a vehicle for social praxis in Ancient Greece has been challenged either directly, as by Will, or indirectly by means of a studied circumspection. The shift in attitude parallels the now-discredited dichotomy between a primordialist view of ethnicity, which takes ethnic identity to be innate, inescapable and deterministic, and an instrumentalist view, which regards ethnicity as a transient strategy adopted by groups for purposes ulterior to the cultural goals ostensibly central to their identity – these may often be economic (A.D. Smith 1986: 9–12, 32; Fishman 1983: 134; O. Patterson 1975; Bentley 1987).

Reacting against the primordialist standpoint of the German romantics, most classicists today would find themselves within the instrumentalist camp. So it is that, when forced to make reference to collectivities such as the Dorians, Ionians or Aiolians, scholars attempt to demote them to the status of linguistic groups which simply share some common social customs (e.g. Murray 1980: 17). Our earliest literary testimony for these groups, however, does not really support such embarrassed reticence. In a pseudo-Hesiodic fragment, consigned to writing in the sixth century BC but containing elements that reach back to at least the ninth or eighth centuries (West 1985: 130, 144), we read that ‘The sons of the war-loving King Hellen [the eponym for the Hellenes, or Greeks] were Doros, Xouthos [the father of Ion] and the charioteer Aiolos’ (Fragment 9 Merkelbach/West). Quite apart from the fact that the use of such genealogies is a typically ethnic strategy, the fragment cannot refer solely to linguistic divisions for the simple reason that the complex combinations of phonological and morphological distinctions which would give rise to this particular tripartite division could hardly be apprehended or classified without recourse to either a formal grammar or a Standard Greek Dialect – both necessarily absent in this early stage of literacy (Hainsworth 1967: 64–5; Morpurgo-Davies 1987). The point is that a speaker of Argolic and a speaker of Korinthian (both regional dialects belonging to the Doric supradialectal group) would recognise each others speech as at once distant though similar, but if they were also to recognise that Megarian, Rhodian, Theran and Syracusan were likewise part of the same Doric dialect group, this would be due to the proclamation of a shared Doric ethnicity among these areas rather than to the recognition of a specific linguistic group (Hainsworth 1967: 66).

In fact, in a literary tradition which spans almost a millennium from Hesiod to Pausanias, and in which the essential details retain a remarkably persistent durability, the well-known groups such as Dorians, Ionians, Aiolians and Akhaians as well as lesser-known groups like the Dryopes are described as both ethne and gene. The word ethnos is not as precise as the English word which is derived from it and normally refers to groups whose identity need only be predicated on shared function or territory. Genos, on the other hand, describes a collectivity which identifies itself in terms of shared descent (however fictive). Faced with a situation in which groups define themselves in terms of territory and shared ancestry, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that there was at least the potential for ethnic consciousness in Ancient Greece.

The problem with the nineteenth-century treatment of Greek ethnic groups was that its racial model entailed a view of biologically determined, static and monolithic categories whose boundaries were impermeable – indeed, elements of this doctrine still prevail in some current works on Greek history which apply the term ‘race’ to the Dorians or Ionians. Had classics maintained, on the other hand, the close relationship with anthropology that was so characteristic of the early decades of this century, then the more dynamic models of ethnicity developed by social anthropologists over the last thirty years might have prevented the cold-shouldering of ancient ethnicity.

Today it is generally recognised that an ethnic group is neither static nor monolithic. Boundary transition is neither impossible nor infrequent, occurring often as a result of marriage, as with the passing of Irish and Polish brides in the United States to an Italian ethnicity (Parsons 1975: 57, 64), but also as a result of migration – for instance, the gradual assimilation of Albanian Arvanites in the Greek villages of Attiki and Viotia (Trudgill and Tzavaras 1977: 179; see also Barth 1969; Koster 1977: 43; Capozza, Bonaldo and di Maggio 1982: 299; Fandetti and Gelfand 1983: 125). The ethnic group as a collectivity is itself subject to processes of fission – for example, the continuing profilation and eventual separation of Gipsy groups, or the proliferation out of Hinduism of a Sikh identity – as well as to processes of fusion, such as the incorporation of the Franks in France or the Etruscans in Italy (Horowitz 1975: 115; Haarmann 1986: 41). Furthermore, ethnic identity is not always an important channel of expression but is subject to varying degrees of salience according to external circumstances; this is true not only at a collective level but also at the level of individuals, who – in theory at any rate – have the potential to decide whether to regard their membership of an ethnic group as a meaningful component of their social persona (Eidheim 1969; O. Patterson 1975; Deschamps 1982).

Most important, however, is the fact that the ethnic group is a social construction rather than an objective and inherently determined category. Genetic, linguistic, religious or common cultural factors cannot act as an objective and universal definition of an ethnic group (Wade 1993; Haaland 1969: 59; Hobsbawm 1992: 63; A.D. Smith 1986: 23–7; Forsythe 1989: 141–3; Karpat 1985: 96; Geary 1983: 20; Anderson 1991: 133; Horowitz 1985: 50; Gellner 1983: 71–2; Simic 1991: 19; Das Gupta 1975: 471; Just 1989: 81; Leach 1954: 281). They are instead indicia, or the operational sets of distinguishing attributes which tend to be associated with ethnic groups once the socially determined criteria have been created and set in place (Horowitz 1975: 119–20). What distinguishes the ethnic group from other social collectivities is its myth of shared descent and its supposed association with a primordial territory (A.D. Smith 1986: 22–30) – in other words, the two concepts embraced by the Greek words genos and ethnos respectively.

It is the socially constructed, fluid and dynamic nature of ethnic identity, rather than blind allegiance to the theoretical tenets of post-processualism, that enjoins a view of the archaeological material as a purposive consequence of active signalling rather than as a passive trace element of unconscious behaviour. The ‘settlement archaeological’ method of Gustaf Kossina, which equated sharply defined archaeological culture areas with specific peoples (see e.g. Veit 1989: 37–9), can detect only static or slowly evolving assemblages. Furthermore, it is predicated on two erroneous assumptions. The first is that an ‘archaeological culture’ is simply the material corollary of what social psychologists used to term the Basic Personality Structure of a culture – a concept whose heuristic value is now doubted Qahoda 1978: 81–2). The second treats artefacts as defining criteria of ethnicity instead of as indicia. Events over the past few years, however, have illustrated graphically the short time scale in which the salience of ethnic identity may ebb and flow, or in which ethnic assimilation and profilation may occur.

In fact, it is far more likely that the overall character of an archaeological assemblage will be a consequence of factors such as technology, climate or access to resources rather than ethnicity (Arnold 1978: 58; Collett 1987: 106; DeCorse 1989: 137). What an ethnic group does is actively and consciously to select certain artefacts from within the overall repertoire; these then act as emblemic indicators of ethnic boundaries in situations where behaviour in terms of group (rather than individual) identity is activated (see Wiessner 1983; 1989: 59–60; 1990: 109). Such situations are often triggered by a perceived threat to group identity – for instance, the denial by an outgroup of an ingroup’s ethnicity – and occasion a convergence of individual behaviour by means of the internalisation of group values within individual members of that group (Turner 1982: 31). There is, however, no necessary reason for such boundaries to be permanently marked, nor for the choice of artefact to remain constant. Under these expectations, it is easy to see why the endless debate waged within Classical archaeology as to the diagnostically Doric nature of artefacts such as the violin-bow fibula, the Griffzungenschwert or the Hockmann Type K spearhead is, to say the least, sterile (Desborough 1972: 21; S. Hiller 1986: 138–9; Hockmann 1980: 64f., 146f.; Snodgrass 1971: 307–9; Van Soesbergen 1981: 39).

Given both the acute amount of ‘information loss’ which intrudes between predepositional behaviour and archaeological retrieval, as well as the subtle and nuanced nature of ethnicity, any attempt to trace archaeologically the expression of ethnic identity needs to be somewhat robust. Firstly, it is necessary to demonstrate that certain settlements, or areas within settlements, actively used a range of artefacts to signal either similarity with or difference from other areas. This is no easy task to establish, since the theoretical trend towards active archaeological behaviour has in the first place been derived from ethnoarchaeology, in which predepositional behaviour is directly observable. In practice, one must inevitably proceed initially from a passive viewpoint in which it is the artefact rather than the social actor which is encountered directly. I would suggest that we are witnessing active signalling when communities appear to differentiate themselves through the use of symbols whose diacritical value appears to be short- rather than long-term and which coincide with further shortterm symbols from different fields of evidence. This dictates that the search for ethnicity cannot be conducted according to just one type of evidence (O’Shea 1984: 301; DeCorse 1989: 138) but must extend both across the differing classes of archaeological evidence as well as including other non-archaeological media of expression: for instance, language, ritual practices and mythic structures. This in itself would only identify the expression of corporate group solidarity. For the phenomenon to be ethnic, it is necessary to determine whether the communities thus identified seek to endow such behavioural differences with an ancestral legitimation. If this methodology is accepted, then it is germane to note that Classical archaeology is in a particularly privileged position within the wider field of archaeology, not only owing to its wealth of non-archaeological material but also because – unlike archaeologies of long-term history (Hodder 1987) – it is capable of tracking short-term variation.

The Argolid region of southern Greece (see fig. 1.1) is an appropriate area in which to study ethnic identity for two reasons. Firstly, the documentary and archaeological material is relatively well-known. Secondly, the literary tradition consistently attributes a number of cohabiting ethnic groups to the area (table 1.1) and ethnicity is much more likely to be a salient dimension of identity when there is a plurality of ethnic groups all competing for the same resources and able to define themselves through intergroup comparison (Hodder 1979: 446; 1982: 27–31; Osborn 1989: 153–4). Constraints of space dictate that the treatment of this case-study can be presented here only in summary form.

Figure 1.1 The Argolid. Contours marked at 200 m and 600 m

Table 1.1 The distribution of ethnic groups throughout the Argolid according to the literary tradition

ARGOS	Dorians; Herakleidai (Akhaians); Pelasgians
ASINE	Dryopes
EPIDAUROS	Dorians; Herakleidai (Akhaians); Ionians; Karians
HALIEIS	Dryopes
HERMIONE	Dorians; Dryopes; Ionians; Karians
MIDEA	Herakleidai (Akhaians)
MYKENAI	Herakleidai (Akhaians)
TIRYNS	Herakleidai (Akhaians)
TROIZEN	Dorians; Dryopes; Ionians

It has been observed by many scholars that the behaviour of the eastern Argolid (or Akti peninsula) can in many cases be distinguished from that of the communities of the Argive plain (most recently in Foley 1988). We are badly informed as to the nature of mortuary practices in the eastern Argolid for the Early Iron Age, though the instance of a seventh-century cremation at Halieis (Dengate 1976: 314) is in stark contrast to the overwhelming preference for inhumation in the plain. Apart from a funerary pyre in the Pronoia suburb of Nauplia (Charitonidis 1953: 194), the only certain site for which there is some limited evidence for the practice of cremation is coastal Asine, where some instances have been noted on the Barbouna Hill (Hägg 1965; Fossey 1989). It is interesting to note that, in the literary tradition, Asine is supposed to have been home to an exclusively Dryopean population, since it does appear to differentiate itself from the Argive plain in most material and non-material respects.

With regard to religious practices, there is some evidence that the eastern Argolid articulated its pantheon in a slightly different way from the plain. Without resorting to the totemistic approach of Muller, who sought to make Apollo an exclusively Dorian god (Muller 1824: 199f.; see also Adshead 1986: 35; Eder 1990: 208), a number of scholars are now coming to the conclusion that the relative status of deities within the pantheon may be articulated differentially according to region: by way of example, one might point to the fact that the considerable importance attached to the cult of the Dioskouroi in the Peloponnese generally, and Sparta in particular, was not uniformly consistent throughout the rest of Greece. In the eastern Argolid, an early importance appears to be attached to Poseidon on Kalaureia (Wide and Kjellberg 1895; Wel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Contributors
• General Editor's Preface
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Note on transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 Approaches to ethnicity in the Early Iron Age of Greece1
• 2 Challenging Preconceptions of Oriental ‘barbarity' and Greek ‘humanity' Human sacrifice in the ancient world
• 3 Multi-dimensional group definition in the Landscape of rural Greece1
• 4 Tomb cult and hero cult The uses of the past in Archaic Greece1
• 5 Present-Day Chora on Amorgos and prehistoric Thermi on Lesbo Alternative views of communities in transition1
• 6 The organisation of space in Classical and Hellenistic houses from mainland Greece and the western colonies1
• 7 Dead women's society Constructing female gender in Classical Athenian funerary sculpture1
• 8 Monumental ambitions The significance of posterity in Greece1
• Bibliography
• Index