Peter van Dommelen

Past Practices: Rethinking Individuals and Agents in Archaeology

Archaeologists who seek to examine peoples roles in past societies have long assumed, consciously or unconsciously, the existence of individuals. In this study, we explore various concepts and dimensions of ‘the individual’, both ethnographic and archaeological. We show that many protagonists in the debate over the existence of ‘individuals’ in prehistory use the same ethnographic examples to argue their positions. These positions range from the claim that any suggestion of individuals prior to 500 years ago simply projects a construct of western modernity onto the past, to the view that individual identities are culturally specific social constructs, both past and present. Like most contributors to the debate, we too are sceptical of an unchanging humanity in the past, but we feel that thinking on the topic has become somewhat inflexible. As a counterpoint to this debate, therefore, we discuss Bourdieus concept of habitus in association with Foucaults notion of power. We conclude that experiencing oneself as a living individual is part of human nature, and that archaeologists should reconsider the individuals social, spatial and ideological importance, as well as the existence of individual, embodied lives in prehistoric as well as historical contexts.

Postcolonial archaeologies between discourse and practice

Abstract As postcolonial theories have gradually but persistently gained more prominence in archaeology over the last decade or so, most attention has been directed towards critiques of contemporary academic and, to a lesser extent, popular representations of past colonial contexts. Much less effort has been spent on alternative and fresh interpretations of the colonial contexts in the past themselves. In this issue, however, the focus is firmly on ‘doing archaeology’ along postcolonial lines. That means either novel interpretations and perspectives on colonial situations in the past, whether distant or less so, or reflections on fieldwork and research in contemporary postcolonial contexts. In both cases, the underlying assumption is that postcolonial theories offer exciting perspectives for doing archaeology differently and it is the aim of this issue to explore these differences, both past and present.

Moving On: Archaeological Perspectives on Mobility and Migration

AbstractEven if archaeological explanations and theoretical interests have shied away from migration with the advent of the New, Processual and Post-Processual archaeologies, the reality remains that migration was in all likelihood as common, recurrent and widespread a phenomenon in the ancient and distant past as it is today and has been recorded historically in recent periods. By way of introduction to this thematic issue on Mobility & Migration, this paper offers a brief survey of intellectual developments and signals recent trends.Abstract Even if archaeological explanations and theoretical interests have shied away from migration with the advent of the New, Processual and Post-Processual archaeologies, the reality remains that migration was in all likelihood as common, recurrent and widespread a phenomenon in the ancient and distant past as it is today and has been recorded historically in recent periods. By way of introduction to this thematic issue on Mobility & Migration, this paper offers a brief survey of intellectual developments and signals recent trends.

The Cambridge prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean

The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean off ers new insights into the material and social practices of many diff erent Mediterranean peoples during the Bronze and Iron Ages, presenting in particular those features that both connect and distinguish them. Contributors discuss in depth a range of topics that motivate and structure Mediterranean archaeology today, including insularity and connectivity; mobility, migration and colonisation; hybridisation and cultural encounters; materiality, memory and identity; community and household; life and death; and ritual and ideology. The volume’s broad coverage of diff erent approaches and contemporary archaeological practices will enable even general readers to understand better the people, ideas and materials that make up the world of Mediterranean archaeology today, beyond the borders that separate Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It will also help the practitioners of Mediterranean archaeology to move the subject forward in new and dynamic ways.

Cemetery or sacrifice? Infant burials at the Carthage Tophet: Phoenician bones of contention

Even if the foundation, rise and eventual demise of Carthage and its overseas territories in the West Mediterranean occurred in much the same space and time as the glory days of Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic Greece and Rome, there is no doubt that the Phoenicians and their Punic successors (to use the conventional terms) have rarely been regarded as fully signed-up members of the ancient world. Reduced to walk-on cameos as skilled silversmiths, agricultural experts, shrewd traders or military strategists, Phoenician and Punic representations tend to be rather stereotypical (Prag 2010, with earlier bibliography), which perhaps should not come as a surprise, as nearly all these portraits have been sketched by outsiders; they certainly do not add up to a coherent ethnographic or political description.

Rural settlement and land-use in Punic and Roman Republican Sardinia

The study of rural settlement, land-use and agrarian practices in the Classical world sits at the intersection of history and archaeology, as scholars draw on both literary and archaeological evidence to explore these topics. While ancient historians have long studied rural and agrarian topics such as the agri mensores and the annona, the archaeological contribution to these debates has arisen only since the 1970s, when archaeological surveys began to document rural settlement in earnest.1 While rural studies have become well established in Classical and Mediterranean studies, it was only in the course of the 1990s that systematic field surveys and excavations of rural sites began to be carried out in the regions of Phoenician and Punic settlement in the Western Mediterranean.2 Starting with S. Gsell’s seminal study in 1920,3 the topic has tended to remain the realm of ancient historians, but the paucity and complex nature of the literary sources have meant that there has been little movement until recently.4 This is all the more remarkable since Carthage and her overseas Punic territories were renowned in antiquity for their agricultural expertise: the Roman Senate, for example, commissioned a Latin translation of the agronomic treatises of the Carthaginian agronomist Mago before ordering the destruction of Carthage. Only in the last two decades does new archaeological evidence throw fresh light on the topic and also suggest new questions and approaches.5

Myth into Art: Foreign Impulses and Local Responses in Archaic Cypriot Sanctuaries

This chapter discusses Greek and Phoenician colonisation in the central Mediterranean as a historical activity. It presents the interactions between the colonising and existing local communities in Sicily and Malta as articulated through shared and modified practices expressed in the material culture record. Most contemporary Phoenician material in Sicily comes from Motya, an island site of Sicilys western coast founded by Phoenicians at the end of the eighth century. Late eighth-century Phoenician material also appears in the earliest graves of the Greek colonies. Finally, the chapter reviews the cultural and sociopolitical development of Malta and Sicily, both of which were geographically situated at strategic locales within a connected Mediterranean, to argue that their respective diverse developments resulted from their engagements with one another and the broader central Mediterranean. The permanent presence of Greeks and Phoenicians in the central Mediterranean led to the widespread exchange of goods, practices and ideas between these foreigners and the extant local populations.

Reconciling material cultures in archaeology with genetic data: The nomenclature of clusters emerging from archaeogenomic analysis

Genome-wide ancient DNA analysis of skeletons retrieved from archaeological excavations has provided a powerful new tool for the investigation of past populations and migrations. An important objective for the coming years is to properly integrate ancient genomics into archaeological research. This article aims to contribute to developing a better understanding and cooperation between the two disciplines and beyond. It focuses on the question of how best to name clusters encountered when analysing the genetic makeup of past human populations. Recent studies have frequently borrowed archaeological cultural designations to name these genetic groups, while neglecting the historically problematic nature of the concept of cultures in archaeology. After reviewing current practices in naming genetic clusters, we introduce three possible nomenclature systems (‘numeric system’, ‘mixed system (a)’, ‘geographic-temporal system’) along with their advantages and challenges.

An agricultural field of Hellenistic date at Pauli Stincus, Terralba, Sardinia

Excavation at Pauli Stincus in Sardinia has revealed an ancient plough soil, with associated evidence of intensive prehistoric agricultural activities.

The Anatolian Context of Philia Material Culture in Cyprus

Using the concept of the maritory, this chapter explores the degree, extent and social significance of material connections between the island worlds of the south-central Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Of all the ways that islands make a difference in a study about ancient human mobility, two are the most important: first, that throughout prehistory, contact between the island group of the central Mediterranean and the rest of the world was entirely through the medium of maritime connections; second, that the sea was the medium which could both isolate the islanders from and bring them into contact with their closest neighbours. The chapter considers three principal cycles of object/human/knowledge mobility that touch on the central Mediterranean over the longue duree, conscious of the fact that the difficulty to pigeonhole archaeological data and processes in neat periodisation schemes should assist constructive generalizations.