The Archaeology of Late Bronze Age Interaction and Mobility at the Gates of Europe

People, Things and Networks around the Southern Adriatic Sea

Francesco Iacono

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350171060
• eBook ISBN: 9781350036161
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: Social Sciences

Interaction and mobility have attracted much interest in research within scholarly fields as different as archaeology, history, and more broadly the humanities. Critically assessing some of the most widespread views on interaction and its social impact, this book proposes an innovative perspective which combines radical social theory and currently burgeoning network methodologies. Through an in-depth analysis of a wealth of data often difficult to access, and illustrated by many diagrams and maps, the book highlights connections and their social implications at different scales ranging from the individual settlement to the Mediterranean. The resulting diachronic narrative explores social and economic trajectories over some seven centuries and sheds new light on the broad historical trends affecting the life of people living around the Middle Sea. The Bronze Age is the first period of intense interaction between early state societies of the Eastern Mediterranean and the small-scale communities to the west of Greece, with people and goods moving at a scale previously unprecedented. This encounter is explored from the vantage point of one of its main foci: Apulia, located in the southern Adriatic, at the junction between East and West and the entryway of one of the major routes for the resource-rich European continent.

1

An Archaeology of Interaction and Mobility

A changing sea: Social differentiation and the Mediterranean through the lens of later globalization

Geographical scale, environmental diversity and demography, all conspire to turn the ancient Mediterranean into a roiling cauldron in which the encounter and clash between different peoples is the principal ingredient. It is principally because of these noisy meetings that the Middle Sea has obtained its premier position as a point of reference in our contemporary globalized era (Hodos 2016).

Until recently, the metaphor of a globalized Mediterranean was a predominantly positive one, and seldom openly challenged. Mediterranean history from prehistory to the beginning of the modern era was all in all – save the odd parentheses of ‘dark ages’ – an ineluctable march forwards, leading to a greater interconnectedness and increased relations between people. The ‘globalized’ Mediterranean, the locus of commercial and political empires and koinai of different sorts, represented the perfect antecedent to what was to become contemporary capitalism. Although geographically the Mediterranean was only a facet of this broader phenomenon, it was also an archetype, as it represented beyond any reasonable doubt one of the areas where connections had blossomed and borne fruit. Yet, to fast-forward to the present, the current crisis across the globe has weakened the faith in unfettered capitalism as an effective system (e.g. Piketty 2014). Such scepticism has instead come to affect the perception of globalization itself. If global capitalism is not this perfect system to aim at, then perhaps the connectivity that seems to be so intimately related to it is also to be judged negatively. This, in turn, spawned a renewed tension, resulting in the fragmentation of supranational identities whose integrity was once held as particularly important as they represented, institutionally and economically, the global domain (such as the EU), ultimately producing a return to the local (Friedman 2008).

The idea of ‘Mediterraneanism’ (Harris 2005; Herzfeld 2005; Morris 2003) or of a possible common Mediterranean identity has to a degree resisted this trend towards fragmentation: its resilience is in its position, halfway between the globalized and localized discourses of micro-identity (Licciardello and Damigella 2014). This helped to soften straightforward nationalism into something which was more palatable and less exclusionary. At the same time, it was the product of the globalized dynamics of capital that exploited its ideological value through mass tourism.

Archaeology, like other fields of the humanities, was quick to seek to interpret the fragmentation of the recent globalization, not least because such actions resonated well with the increasing importance given to local trajectories and multivocality within the discipline, starting from the second part of the 1990s onwards (Kristiansen and Larsson 2005: 8–9). Because of this, within archaeology the awareness of the specificity of the Mediterranean domain has been inextricably connected more to the idea of fragmentation and diversity than to a set of homogenizing features. Within this diversity, and as a result of a general trend recognizable also in anthropology (Carrier 2015: 37), with some notable exceptions (e.g. Broodbank’s global prehistory; see Broodbank 2013), specific attention to societal differentiation has gradually disappeared from programmatic declarations of more theoretically aware practitioners of Mediterranean Archaeology, despite still ranking very high among the interests pursued in international research (Flannery and Marcus 2012; Jung and Risch 2016; Kintigh et al. 2014; Price and Feinman 2010). It is possible to follow the gradual sidestepping away from issues of societal differentiation by comparing the guidelines offered by Blake and Knapp (2005) in the introduction of their very influential edited book with the guidance offered in the premise of the book Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean (Knapp and Van Dommelen 2014). Despite no specific attention being drawn to societal differentiation in the former, social change is addressed in almost all of the sub-themes identified within the key areas of enquiry explored. In contrast, in the latter book (Knapp and Van Dommelen 2014: 5), ‘society’ and ‘exchange’ are themes deemed to be ‘too generic to be useful’: and this too, even though social inequality and disparity resulting from patterns of exchange are topics even more critical now than they were back in 2005, before the global financial crisis which so much affected both countries on the rim of the Mediterranean and more broadly the globalized world.¹

It is not that concerns about power are not present in Mediterranean archaeology. Far from it, this continues to be crucial in archaeological endeavour and is normally filtered through general categories like ‘elites’. We could even make a case that because of the ubiquity of such labels in archaeology, we derive the impression that the discussion of power features much more prominently than it actually does (Kienlin 2012; Legarra Herrero 2016). Indeed, so strong is this impression that the introduction of alternative ways of exploring social articulation, such as those represented by concepts like heterarchy and resistance, developed in contexts elsewhere around the world, cannot be welcomed enough (Crumley 1995; Given 2004; Gonzales Ruibal 2012; Kienlin and Zimmerman 2012; Scott 2009). Moreover, discussing the powerful within ancient societies (i.e. elites, nobles and so on) does not necessarily equate with an analysis of the way social differentiation works. Rather, in order to achieve the latter goal, it is vital to comparatively assess the whole spectrum of social realities (Bernbeck 2009). From a systematic perspective, unfortunately, the tools used for accomplishing such an assessment are often those, blunt by now, of the usual social typologies (e.g. tribes, chiefdom and the like) that despite undergoing extensive criticism over the decades have remained deeply entrenched in the explanatory vocabulary of archaeology (Pauketat 2011; Robb and Pauketat 2013).

The lack of theoretical tools and systematic discussion on social differentiation is all the more frustrating in regard to one of the most obvious dimensions of life in the Mediterranean (and certainly the one that granted this area its exemplary role in the modern world), that is, inter-societal interaction, the meeting of different peoples and groups and, hence, of different forms of power. In order to assess this, to the classical World-System approaches very popular in the previous decades (on which more will be said later; see Sherratt 1993; Wilkinson et al. 2011), it is possible to now add an alternative that has acquired considerable weight, namely postcolonial theory (Dietler and Lopez Ruiz 2009; Gosden 2004; Van Dommelen 1997, 1998, 2005; Liebman and Rivzi 2008; Van Pelt 2013; Vives-Ferrándiz 2009). The latter, i.e. Postcolonial theory, is undoubtedly appealing as it comes with many conceptual tools that can be fruitfully adapted to the analysis of cultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean. But it is not without its caveats too, the most notable of which is the inherent risk of crystallizing perceived categories of colonizer and colonized found in this broad set of approaches (see the subsequent text and Chibber 2012). Is the colonizer–colonized relationship sufficient to enable an understanding of any sort of cultural encounter and, above all, the way these encounters affect processes of surplus accumulation and societal differentiation?

Summing up, the relationship between inter-societal interaction/trade and social differentiation/inequality in the Mediterranean is interpreted either (a) through the world-system or postcolonial lens or (b) somewhat tacitly through common-sense categories like elites or the ‘usual’ social typologies ‘directionally’ ordered into an evolutionary trajectory of growing complexity (Chapman 2003), or (c) (and this is increasingly the case) it simply is not discussed. To be clear, once more, archaeologists do consider issues of social differentiation and hierarchy in the Mediterranean. Many have looked at these issues, through different lenses, integrating also the role of external relations (e.g. Broodbank 2013; Gorogianni et al. 2016; Lis 2017). What lacks, however, is a general theoretical model able to analytically make sense of the complexity of the real, accommodating in a systematic way, the role of external influence in different social and historical contexts.

If we do not assess the relationship between these two aspects (i.e. social differentiation and interaction) through a general theoretical approach, we lose our ability to make apt comparisons with the present (i.e. comparisons that are not only evoking the past but that analytically gauge similarities and differences). What happened in past social realities will then be intuitively interpreted through the lens of our modern common sense (i.e. we would assume that things worked exactly as they do today). In turn, accepting this means that any analysis of the past we can produce does nothing but restate the way societies work in the present. The most critical feature in archaeological and historical enquiry, however, resides exactly in the ability to distinguish between the different and the similar, what was like us and what was different and, most critically, why this is so.

The past in archaeology, as is the ‘different’ of anthropology, is a reservoir of social imagination (for a similar point, see Appadurai 2013; Graeber 2007). It defines the boundaries of possibility for human collectives today. If we want to use the past in such a way, we will need to effect a complete revolution, focusing our attention once again on an analytical approach to social differentiation, using explicit models to explore the social logic of encounters in the past.

It goes without saying that in order to accomplish such a task, context will be key. This will force us to take a route in analysing Mediterranean dynamics that is rather unusual. We will need to observe and interpret localized specificities, which from a sea-wide scale can be glimpsed only in the most general fashion. A regional perspective can allow us to do this, but it must be remembered that the region encompasses not only the land and the sea, but also the chain of connections that spring from the same. Before addressing this regional perspective, it is absolutely necessary to clarify what inter-societal interaction and mobility actually are and what impact they have on human collectives.

What is interaction in archaeology?

Interaction can be defined as ‘reciprocal action; action or influence of persons or things on each other’.² The obvious prerequisite for interaction is therefore the existence of two or more entities (either persons or things). These entities, however, need to be really distinct, for example, spatially segregated. Therefore, the key element that leads to the identification of interaction in the archaeological record is the existence of a ‘gap’ between the entities involved, an empty zone (in terms of the things being analysed) that needs to be crossed. The size of this gap may vary so that we can speak of long-range, regional or local interaction. When this gap is reasonably short, interaction can often be automatically inferred, even in the absence of direct evidence for it. This kind of approach is the one adopted by some network approaches (e.g. point proximal analysis or some example of transportation network analysis, Broodbank 2000; Fulminante 2012; Terrell 1988), where a dense web of connection is drawn on the basis of physical contiguity. This is also the perspective of what will be termed the ‘micro-ecological’ approach (Broodbank 2013; Horden and Purcell 2000; Knapp and Van Dommelen 2014: 7–8), where connectivity is considered a fundamental feature of the relations between people and the environment. At the other end of the geographical spectrum, long-range interaction is conceived of by World-System theorists (Chase Dunn and Hall 1997; Frank 1993; Wilkinson et al. 2011) as a worldwide universal affecting the development of every human society in some form. For all these approaches, interaction is an immanent property of social life (but see Dawson 2014: 45–47).

The nature of what happens to the interacting parts is profoundly ambivalent. Interaction is, at the same time, action (from the Latin for ‘to act’) and influence (‘to flow into’, originally an astronomical term). Much of the attention previously devoted to the topic of interaction in archaeology has been actually dedicated to the nature of the action (see the next section), ironically an aspect that is inevitably beyond the sphere of direct observation by archaeologists.

Influence – a quite abstract concept in itself – has received, in comparison, far less attention and, although there have been some attempts to investigate it (Renfrew and Level 1979), evades explicit definitions, perhaps because it potentially encompasses an endless variety of social practices, even more so than action. In the broadest possible social terms, it may be thought of as the results of the action, its effects. Indeed, it is only this last element of the overall semantic field of the word ‘interaction’ that is directly represented in material culture assemblages. These effects can manifest themselves in a variety of ways. They can be tangible items and/or raw materials which are moved across space (e.g. Cline 1994; Tykot 1996). They can be information (either technological or stylistic) regarding those items (Kristiansen and Larsson 2006), which implies a certain familiarity with the original objects (as in the case of local imitations of exogenous objects; see, for example, Nakou 1995: 13–15; Sherratt 2000). Finally, they can be as immaterial as the reproduction of a practice attested in another locale.

The effects of the actions, therefore, are not limited to their direct material outcome. It is necessary to retranslate the pattern recognized in the archaeological domain again into social terms, trying to assess the more profound effects of the actions on the everyday life of the communities involved. This, of course, constitutes a further level of interpretation. It is at this level that elements that at first sight may appear not to be consistent as a trace of interaction may acquire a renewed importance. This consideration is the basis of World-System approaches, where differential trends in the increase and decrease of various (mainly economic) indicators in archaeological sites can be understood in relation with large-scale dynamics.

In brief, from these considerations, it is possible to argue that the word ‘interaction’ has been used by archaeologists to represent a number of different meanings, usually solidifying around the ‘action’ and its influence/repercussions in the social domain. At an immediate material level, it is possible to define interaction in the broadest possible sense as the discontinuous spatial displacement of similar materials and/or remains of actions archaeologically traceable to an exogenous origin. Albeit operationally useful, this definition does not account for other deeper social effects of interaction that are, in the end, what really matters.

Interaction and/vs. Mobility

As mentioned earlier, the identification of the nature of an action has been the object of much attention in past theoretical debate. The aim of Renfrew’s (1969, 1975) systematization, for instance, was to reconstruct the various possible actions behind the effects identified at an archaeological level by means of a number of different models of ‘trade’. The validity of this approach has long ago been questioned, and many alternative models with the same aim (although sometimes not equally formalized in their archaeological expectations) have been formulated (Hodder and Orton 1976: 99–154; Ibanez et al. 2016; Stein 1999). Besides pinning down the characteristics of different kinds of trade, as suggested by Bevan (2007), it is important to consider that trade itself is only one possibility in a range of potential different actions which may well include coerced or voluntary movement of people, looting and theft. There is an immense literature of case studies and broader theoretical interventions aimed at exploring the distinction between these different possibilities. This often presents arguments whose strength is variable and is often influenced by specific agendas (Middleton 2015). While many researchers had usually preferred explanations highlighting the importance of broad social and economic processes, somewhat downplaying mobility, in the early 2010s matters changed dramatically and it was simply no longer possible to rule out this latter aspect. The sheer amount of people crossing the Mediterranean sea in search of shelter and/or fortune produced an extremely tangible evidence of what mobility might mean and entails. Of more impact than developments in ancient DNA and stable isotope analysis (that also played a chief role in reviving mobility as a theme, see Heyd 2017; Kristiansen et al. 2017), and more than the influence of ‘pre-existing interests in connectivity’ (Van Dommelen 2014: 480), were the social and historical conditions pertaining in the Middle Sea in the aftermath of the Arab Spring and Syrian War (Hamilakis 2017a) that had the power to U-turn research agendas. As suggested by Kristiansen (2014), ‘everything that was “forbidden” research 10–15 years ago are now among the hottest themes’.³

Despite representing a radical departure from previous theoretical ‘taboos’, it is doubtful that mobility in reality could function as a paradigm shift (Sørensen 2015), as, rather than being an explanation it is something to be explained through the analysis of past societies (Van Dommelen 2014). It is new scientific developments and the broader cultural trends within and beyond archaeology, as well as dramatic events occurring today in the Mediterranean, that have made us aware that the layered processes that archaeologists are often engaged in interpreting are actually the cumulative effect of ‘everyday’ events in which mobility (and, alas, related potential tragedy) can play a role, even an important one. But alongside these, other kinds of actions occurred too.

Interaction and networks

One of the general approaches that has tried to grapple with the phenomenon of ‘effect’ in interaction is the network approach. By this, I have in mind a broad umbrella of perspectives that made use of a specific mathematical construct, that of graphs: the connection of different nodes through edges showing peculiar properties, either as a formal methodology or as a broad metaphor through which to examine human relations (Collar et al. 2015). Networks, however, are chiefly a method, unless combined with other forms of theory – and for some, this actually constitutes an advantage (e.g. Knappett [2013] discusses this in comparison to cladistics and other forms of networks available in evolutionary archaeology).

What can be noted in this approach, however, is that, as is often the case, there is a lack of explicit perspectives and interest towards the issues of power and inequality rather than a lack of theoretical assumptions, tout court. Indeed, one of the most widely diffused approaches to the use of networks in archaeology is the one that borrows ‘ready-made’ social explanations from Social Network Analysis (henceforth SNA, what Schortman [2014: 169] defines as ‘structural perspectives’), the branch of sociology that first developed a graph-based and theoretical approach to the study of soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents 
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. An Archaeology of Interaction and Mobility
• 2. The Southern Adriatic: Social Geography, Previous Studies and Prelude to Late Bronze Age Interaction
• 3. Early Encounters
• 4. From Direct Contact to Brownian Motion: The Southern Adriatic during the Recent Bronze Age (1300–1100 BC)
• 5. Old Connections and New Equilibria at the End of the Southern Adriatic Bronze Age (1100–1000 BC)
• 6. The Southern Adriatic and the Social Logic of Interaction
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint