Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece: Manipulating Material Culture

348 Pages·2017·5.37 MB·English

by  Lisa Nevett

Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient
Greece
Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of
Ancient Greece
Manipulating Material Culture
Lisa C. Nevett, editor
University of Michigan Press
Ann Arbor
Copyright © 2017 by Lisa C. Nevett All rights reserved
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the
public press), without written permission from the publisher.
Published in the United States of America by the University of Michigan Press
Manufactured in the United States of America A CIP catalog record for this book is available from the
British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data has been applied for.
ISBN: 978-0-472-13023-8 (hardback) ISBN: 978-0-472-12253-0 (e-book)
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part 1. Disciplinary Context
Chapter 1. A Theoretical or Atheoretical Greek Archaeology?
Chapter 2. Haus und Stadt im klassischen Griechenland
Chapter 3. Classical Archaeology Comes of Age
Part 2. Artifacts
Chapter 4. The Material Entanglements of Writing Things Down
Chapter 5. Chaîne Opératoire
Chapter 6. Reception, Intention, and Attic Vases
Chapter 7. Ethnicity and Greek Art History in Theory and Practice
Chapter 8. Material(ity) Girl
Part 3. Civic and Religious Landscapes
Chapter 9. Coordination Problems, Social Architecture, and Causal Efficacy
Chapter 10. Mapping the Religious Landscape
Chapter 11. The “Spatial Turn” in Ancient Greek Festival Research
Part 4. Funerary Landscapes
Chapter 12. Funerary Spatial Concepts and Spatial Practices in Southeastern
Sicily during the Eighth to Fifth Centuries BCE
Chapter 13. The Tomb Doth Protest Too Much?
Part 5. Responses
Chapter 14. Theory and Method in Greek Archaeology
Chapter 15. Does “Greek Archaeology” Matter?
Footnotes
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to thank here a number of people and institutional divisions who
have provided valuable support for the Theory in (Ancient) Greek Archaeology
Conference, for this volume, or for both. The planning of the conference was
undertaken with the assistance of a committee of students from the University of
Michigan’s Interdepartmental Program in Classical Art and Archaeology.
Among these, Elina Salminen was particularly helpful in undertaking significant
administrative responsibility. I thank the conference speakers for traveling to
Ann Arbor to present their work and participate in the discussion, particularly
those who came from distant locations, including Greece, Germany, Austria, and
Britain. The discussion was enhanced by the participation not only of our
interdepartmental program’s students and faculty but also of a number of
colleagues from other subdisciplines represented in the Department of Classical
Studies at Michigan, demonstrating the potential of theoretical approaches to
reach across our subdisciplinary boundaries. The conference was made possible
by funds from the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts, the Department
of Classical Studies, and the Interdepartmental Program in Classical
Archaeology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
I am grateful to our commissioning editor at the University of Michigan Press,
Ellen Bauerle, for the idea of producing a book based on some of the conference
papers. Her support and faith in the project have kept it on track during the long
process of bringing together the contributions. The press’ anonymous referees
also made helpful comments that improved the volume. Thanks are due to the
contributors for their patience while the final outstanding pieces were rounded
up and while referees’ comments were solicited. I would also like to thank Mary
Hashman for carefully shepherding the book through the production process,
Kyle Dunn for producing the index and for his attention to details, and Lorene
Sterner for generous last-minute help with figure 11.1.
I thank the following copyright holders for permission to reproduce images
from their collections: Art Resource, New York; the Trustees of the Ashmolean
Museum, Oxford; the Athenian Agora Excavations; the Bauhaus-Archiv, Berlin;
the Trustees of the British Museum, London; the Deutsches Archäologisches
Institut, Rome; the Gordion Archives, University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology; Sharon Herbert and the Tel Kedesh
excavations.
Introduction
Lisa C. Nevett
The present volume aims to stimulate debate about the direction being taken by
the archaeology of culturally Greek communities during the first millennium
BCE.1 Scholarship in this field has long had a reputation for being largely
empirical, with the bulk of research directed at questions about the nature of the
data (e.g., the style of a building or the provenance of a pot) rather than about the
lives of the individuals and groups who once used the buildings and objects.
Some of the most widely used undergraduate handbooks, at least in American
universities, cover Greek archaeology in combination with Greek art history,
adopting a descriptive, rather than analytical, approach (e.g., Pedley 2012; Biers
1996). Nonetheless, the archaeology of first-millennium BCE Greece has seen
an increasing trend toward using the material remains as a source of information
about ancient society, independent of the texts which have so long dominated
our understanding.2 So radical has this change seemed, that Anthony Snodgrass,
writing in 2002, speculated that classical archaeology was undergoing a
“paradigm shift.”3 Using material culture in this way clearly offers a powerful
means for addressing fundamental questions about the nature of society and
about social change in contexts such as the Early Iron Age, for which significant
textual evidence is lacking. It has also been used increasingly as an independent
source that provides a counterpoint to the surviving texts, with their masculine
and often elite and Athenocentric biases. In this context, the use of archaeology
reveals disparities between the views and attitudes articulated by the ancient
authors, those implied by other media (e.g., painted pottery), and/or those
embodied in the daily practice of significant proportions of the population.
Hand in hand with taking this more active and independent approach, scholars
are also increasingly realizing that to make the most of the evidence requires a
self-consciously theoretical approach. It has often been assumed that one can
approach the material record from some kind of “atheoretical” perspective that
does not involve the application of implicit beliefs about the importance of
different types of evidence or their relationship with ancient society. Such a view
is becoming widely discredited in other archaeological subdisciplines, where
scholars have argued that any piece of research necessarily invokes a theoretical
stance, whether explicit or implicit, simply through the selection of problems for