This book presents a theoretically informed, up-to-date study of interactions between indigenous peoples of Mediterranean France and Etruscan, Greek, and Roman colonists during the first millennium ...BC. Analyzing archaeological data and ancient texts, Michael Dietler explores these colonial encounters over six centuries, focusing on material culture, urban landscapes, economic practices, and forms of violence. He shows how selective consumption linked native societies and colonists and created transformative relationships for each.Archaeologies of Colonialismalso examines the role these ancient encounters played in the formation of modern European identity, colonial ideology, and practices, enumerating the problems for archaeologists attempting to re-examine these past societies.
Alcohol is a special form of embodied material culture and the most widely used psychoactive agent in the world. It has been a fundamentally important social, economic, political, and religious ...artifact for millennia. This review assesses trends in the anthropological engagement with alcohol during the past two decades since the Annual Review last covered this subject. It highlights the growing archaeological contributions to the field, as well as recent developments by sociocultural anthropologists and social historians. Increasing historicization has been a useful corrective to the earlier functionalist emphasis on the socially integrative role of drinking. Recent studies tend to employ a more strategic/agentive analytical framework and treat drinking through the lens of practice, politics, and gender. Moreover, alcohol has come to be seen as an important component of the political economy and a commodity centrally implicated in strategies of colonialism and postcolonial struggles over state power and household relations of authority.
During the first millennium BCE, complex encounters of Phoenician and Greek colonists with natives of the Iberian Peninsula transformed the region and influenced the entire history of the ...Mediterranean. One of the first books on these encounters to appear in English, this volume brings together a multinational group of contributors to explore ancient Iberia's colonies and indigenous societies, as well as the comparative study of colonialism. These scholars—from a range of disciplines including classics, history, anthropology, and archaeology—address such topics as trade and consumption, changing urban landscapes, cultural transformations, and the ways in which these issues played out in the Greek and Phoenician imaginations. Situating ancient Iberia within Mediterranean colonial history and establishing a theoretical framework for approaching encounters between colonists and natives, these studies exemplify the new intellectual vistas opened by the engagement of colonial studies with Iberian history.
During the last seven centuries of the first millennium BC, the indigenous societies of Mediterranean France underwent a series of gradual social and cultural transformations that are linked in ...complex ways to their encounter and increasing entanglement with the broader Mediterranean world. This article presents a synthesis of current knowledge of this issue and explores some of the main themes guiding research. New evidence concerning the alien colonial agents (Etruscan, Greek, Punic/Iberian, and Roman), and the contrasting nature of their presence and power in the region, is discussed, as is evidence concerning forms of indigenous engagement with colonial states and paths of social and cultural change. The consumption of alien goods (wine, ceramics) and the adoption of foreign techniques and practices (ceramic production methods, coinage, writing) are examined in terms of the locally situated logic of demand and the ramifications for entanglement and change. Transformations in settlements, ritual spaces, funerary practices, and the agrarian landscape are discussed.
This book presents a theoretically informed, up-to-date study of interactions between indigenous peoples of Mediterranean France and Etruscan, Greek, and Roman colonists during the first millennium ...BC. Analyzing archaeological data and ancient texts, Michael Dietler explores these colonial encounters over six centuries, focusing on material culture, urban landscapes, economic practices, and forms of violence. He shows how selective consumption linked native societies and colonists and created transformative relationships for each. Archaeologies of Colonialism also examines the role these ancient encounters played in the formation of modern European identity, colonial ideology, and practices, enumerating the problems for archaeologists attempting to re- examine these past societies.
Celtic identity has been invoked in recent European history in the construction of what Benedict Anderson calls "imagined communities." Appeals to an ancient Celtic past have played, and continue to ...play, a number of important and often paradoxical roles in the ideological naturalization of modern political communities at several levels, including: (1) pan-European unity in the context of the evolving European Community; (2) nationalism by member states of that community; and (3) regional resistance to nationalist hegemony. Archaeology may be appropriated by invented traditions, but it also has a role to play in the deconstruction of competing claims.
From the ancient Near East to modern-day North America, communal consumption of food and drink punctuates the rhythms of human societies. Feasts serve many social purposes, establishing alliances for ...war and marriage, mobilizing labor, creating political power and economic advantages, and redistributing wealth. In this collection of fifteen essays, archaeologists and ethnographers explore the material record of food and its consumption as social practice. They examine the locations of roasting pits, hearths, and refuse deposits, or the presence of special decorative ceramics, and infer ways in which feasting traditions reveal social structures of lineage, clan, moiety, and polity.
Perhaps the most intriguing and consequential case of “invented traditions” in European history involved a sweeping “colonization” of modern consciousness by the ancient Greco-Roman world. This ...process was launched several centuries ago, and its evolving manifestations have been a pervasive feature of European cultures ever since. The passages cited above are illustrative of this curious cultural conquest of the present by the past, although hundreds of other examples easily could have been substituted to make the point. More important in the present context, however, is to examine the nature of, and reasons for, the historical development of this referential and
Developing the theoretical tools to accomplish the goals outlined in the previous chapters, and to enable a productive archaeological contribution to the comparative understanding of colonialism, ...requires coming to grips with the issue of agency in both indigenous and colonial societies and abandoning the kinds of teleological assumptions of inevitability that have been shown to underlie many of the approaches discussed previously. Progress in understanding the colonial experience and its unfolding consequences in the specific contexts examined here depends on recognizing that intercultural consumption of objects or practices, the process that instigated the initial entanglement of the colonial encounter, is
