Session Program

• Introduction: Mobility, Materiality and Mediterranean Identities, A. Bernard Knapp and Peter van Dommelen, Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
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• Role of Things in Identity Production: Colonial Entanglements and Archaeological Interpretation, Alison Kohn, Department of Anthropology, University of Chicago, USA.
  • Across the social sciences today, there is a growing concern with theorizing material culture in social life. Such lively debate around materiality lends exciting new possibilities for the archaeological interpretation of the past. In this panel alone, we see a wide-ranging series of archaeological interpretations that are made more robust by utilizing theoretical models that, in particular, are able to shed light on the role of material culture in identity production, in the context of colonial entanglements within the ancient Mediterranean. In this paper, I seek to contextualize the symposium by discussing a range of theoretical paradigms that focus on identity production and material culture, and by synthesizing a diverse array of approaches. As an ethnographer and archaeologist, I conclude with my own viewpoints, exemplified with material from southern France, on the opportunities presented and the challenges faced today in interpreting the past.
• From Colonization to Habitation: Early Cultural Adaptations in the Balearic Bronze Age, Damià Ramis, Institut Mediterrani, University of the Balearic Islands, Palma deMallorca, Spain.
  • This paper focuses on the earliest human colonisation of the Balearic islands during the 3rd millennium BC, including interactions with the environment. Local developments in material culture are analysed in the attempt to understand better the progressive development of the first indigenous Balearic culture during the second millennium BC. Although the Balearics are not oceanic islands, and an intense relationship with source regions may be assumed, and a linear historical trajectory can be understood for the late 3rd and 2nd millennia cal BC. Although cultural manifestations are quite similar throughout the archipelago during this period, diverse elements on each island — Mallorca, Menorca, Ibiza — are considered, in particular with respect to the process of identity formation. The evidence emphasizes the persistence of most cultural traits in the Balearics during this period and constitutes a Mediterranean example of long-term insular settlement, development and change. The early record indicates a colonization stage, while the so-called habitation phase can be seen later with the development of the first indigenous Balearic culture.
• Contacts, Movements and Identities in Iron Age East Iberia, Jaime Vives-Ferrándiz, Museo de Prehistoria, Valencia, Spain.
  • This paper examines the relationship between movements of people and material culture along the southeast coast of Iberia during the early Iron Age (8th-5th centuries BC). The focus falls on questions of connectivity in the context of a Phoenician commercial diaspora, because indigenous sites — e.g. Peña Negra, Saladares, Caramoro II — are likely to have played an important role in shaping the entire setting. I suggest that asymmetrical power relationships between Phoenicians and indigenous people were not a feature of this situation, and that there was no dramatic split between these two social groups. The creation and maintenance of social distances as well as social groups are examined by concentrating on production, exchange and consumption. Smelting remains and amphorae represent the materialization of local networks of exchanges, and nodal points of transactions, but they also form ways of increasing power in these societies. Finally, daily cooking practices from two inland settlements (Peña Negra, Saladares), which show convergences between the indigenous and Phoenician habitus, shed more light on cultural encounters.
• Mimesis/Mimicry: Colonialism and Imitation in Roman Baetica, Alicia Jiménez, Instituto de Historia, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain.
  • The ancient Greeks used the term mimesis to refer to the ability to simulate the appearance of something or somebody. This concept was especially important in the context of Greek theatre to understand the philosophical relation between play and reality. According to Aristotle, every instance of imitation produced learning. The concept of mimesis reappeared implicitly in modern scientific literature, in particular in evolutionist theories envisioning the imitation or emulation of superior cultures (i.e. Greek or Roman), as one way leading native cultures to ‘civilization’. Homi Bhabha renewed the notion of mimesis/mimicry from a postcolonial viewpoint, analysing the subversive aspects of imitation, now understood as one way to reformulate the image of the colonizer by local populations. In this paper I explore different questions related to the complex interplay between copy and model in colonial contexts like Roman Baetica. How shall we interpret examples of appropriating foreign traits in colonial contexts? Why were some traits chosen and other dismissed? Was there a conscious desire to imitate the coloniser’s culture by local populations? What were the consequences of the mimesis processes for the constructing the identity of these communities?
• Insularity, Connectivity and Elite Identity in Late Bronze Age Sardinia, Anthony Russell, Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
  • This paper investigates the role cultural encounters played in the development of an elite identity on Sardinia during the Late Bronze Age (LBA) (ca. 13th–9th centuries BC). Sardinian archaeologists tend to favour frameworks that either stress the importance of extra-insular contacts in the sociopolitical development of Nuragic settlements, or claim that the increasing hierarchic complexes of the LBA are best understood as an independent Sardinian phenomenon. The material record, however, indicates that the leaders of Nuragic polities both appropriated traditional, indigenous materials and acquired foreign exotica in order to legitimise and distinguish their social positions. The significance of both local and foreign goods would have changed continuously within the framework of emerging social identities, as local materials became more exclusive, and foreign exotica became entangled within the materiality of Sardinian society.
• Entangled Identities on Iron Age Sardinia, Jeremy Hayne, Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow, Scotland.
  • This paper examines regional differentiation in Sardinia during the Iron Age and early historical periods (900-400BC) as demonstrated through the island’s material culture. Whilst traditional views of Iron Age Sardinia have focused on issues of resistance and isolation to create a distinctive island-wide identity, attention to regional differences reveals divergent developments and relationships with the outside world. In northern Sardinia, in particular, material evidence from sites such as Nurdole and Sant'Imbenia suggests gradual and regional hybridisation processes and practices involving various social groups that resulted in differences not just across but also within the island itself. Issues of mobility are explored by examining the contacts between Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Greeks and Etruscans, all of whom frequented the waters of the Tyrrhenian Sea at this time. Traditional ideas of isolation and resistance may be confronted with wider, overlapping movements and identities of people in the Mediterranean. The resulting entanglements and ever-shifting regional and intra-regional movements inform this study and allow the changing nature of identities to be investigated with respect to colonial and trading encounters.
• Connectivity and Shifting Identities in the North Tyrrhenian Sea, Corinna Riva, Institute of Archaeology, University College London.
  • This paper examines the extent of connectivity in and around the north Tyrrhenian Sea. That area saw intensive movement by Carthaginians, Greeks, Etruscans, Sardinian and other Italic peoples during the Iron Age (7th-5th centuries BC), all interacting in diverse situations and socio-cultural circumstances. Investigating the shifting nature of identities in terms of people's materiality and mobility, and with respect to dynamic colonial encounters, particular attention is paid to the acquisition and use of Etruscan imports outside Etruria, with special reference to the southern coast of France. Taking into account studies that emphasise the ways in which objects that travel far are recontextualised and given new meanings according to local value systems, I look at the ways in which imported Etruscan objects were incorporated into existing or new practices and traditions, namely winedrinking, thus actively transforming the identities of the people – both indigenous and colonising — who imported these objects.
• Prehistoric Social Identities in the Cretan Landscape, Marina Gkiasta, Department of Archaeology, Leiden University, Netherlands.
  • This paper explores the variability of social identities in Bronze Age Crete through the medium of materiality and by assessing the role of landscape in constructing and perpetuating social identity. Reconstructions of large social systems often impose present ideology on the ways that prehistoric society is structured and evolves; they lack the fine-tuning of the multiple levels in which humans perceive themselves in their — by default — multi-scalar societies. In order to understand how people perceive themselves in relation to ‘others’ we need to define a theoretical and methodological framework of studying the construction, expression and perpetuation of social identities at the personal and community level. The mountainous landscape of the island of Crete has played a major role in connecting, but also in isolating people. Communities, their connections and their interdependent relationship with the specific landscape are key themes in this study, which will focus on basic, principle frameworks of social life and their signatures in material objects and the landscape. Research themes include variability of social identities and their material expressions and ideology and social practice. Observing these themes in the present and a psychoanalytical perspective on social identity are used to provide crucial aids in analysing past people.
• Negotiating Island Interactions: Cyprus, the Aegean and the Levant in the Late Bronze-Early Iron Ages, Sarah Janes, Department of Archaeology, University of Glasgow.
  • This paper asseses the complex and extensive mortuary remains of Cyprus as they relate to issues of identity, insularity and connectivity on the island during the Late Bronze-Early Iron Ages (ca. 1450-750BC). I propose to reconsider how material culture was actively involved in the multiple social and spatial dynamics — maritime interactions, migrations and colonial encounters — that occurred with the collapse of larger, regional palatial polities at the end of the Late Bronze Age, and the subsequent emergence of smaller, local, hybridised polities involving native Cypriotes and incoming peoples from the Aegean and Levant. In contrast to the Hellenisation perspective that has characterised most traditional work on negotiating island identities during these periods, this paper offers a more nuanced interpretation of the role material culture played in facilitating and mediating socio-cultural interaction between Cyprus, the Aegean and the Levant.