Yannis Hamilakis

Antiquities as symbolic capital in modern Greek society

The Great Powers — starting with ancient Imperial Rome and running up to the present — have valued Classical Greek culture as embodying the founding spirit of their own, our own western world. So where does the modern state of Greece stand? It is, more than most nations, encouraged or required to share what might be its particular heritage with a wider world.

Food technologies/technologies of the body: The social context of wine and oil production and consumption in Bronze Age Crete

This paper argues that conventional archaeological approaches to food need a new and sophisticated theoretical framework which acknowledges that food is culturally defined and acquires immense significance in all societies because it involves the human body. It is (through consumption) an act of incorporation involving senses, feelings and emotions. Away from the nutritionist paradigm and the subsistence discourse, this study re-examines the issue of wine and olive oil production and consumption in Bronze Age Crete and suggests that they are related to broader social and political developments rather than to environmental conditions or micro-economic concerns on the part of Bronze Age Cretan farmers.

What is Archaeological Ethnography

Abstract In this introductory essay to this volume, we chart and survey an emerging field, that of archaeological ethnography. We show its links and associations with both disciplinary and social-political trends in archaeology and in social anthropology in the last decades, and discuss some of the key recent work that has been carried out under this rubric. We argue that archaeological ethnography needs to be defined broadly, as a trans-disciplinary and transcultural space that enables researchers and diverse publics to engage in various conversations, exchanges, and interventions. Material traces from various times are at the centre of this emerging space. The production of his space requires a radical rethinking of the ontological and epistemological basis of archaeology, questioning the modernist roots of official archaeologies, and demonstrating the existence of other, public discourses, practices and engagements with the material past which can be defined as alternative archaeologies. Archaeological ethnography can bring to the fore these alternative engagements without necessarily endorsing their premises, being constantly alert to their political connotations and renderings. The main interconnected facets of archaeological ethnography as we propose it here are its critical reflexivity, its holistic and multi-sited nature, its multi-temporal rather than presentist character, its sensuous and sensory engagement with the world, its political commitment, and its conception as collective and team practice, which transcends the boundaries between the researcher and his or her diverse publics.

Archaeology and the politics of pedagogy

It is argued here that pedagogy, rather than being a passive process of delivery, is part of the field of cultural politics, a contested domain, a public sphere where knowledges, views and perceptions on the past and the present are debated and contested, or valorized, reproduced and legitimized. Recent archaeological theory has neglected the field of pedagogy, which, as a result, has been largely colonized by the instrumentalist discourse, in its new, market-oriented reincarnation. This dominant view of archaeological pedagogy is presented in objectified, neutral terms as the natural, inevitable course of affairs: it has become the ‘doxic’ regime that is presented as being beyond criticism at its core, save for peripheral managerial points. Archaeology, however, has the ability to undermine this objectified discourse by showing the contingency, historicity, and the inevitably transient and unstable nature of the present-day pedagogical regime in archaeology. Current instrumentalist pedagogy, despite its dominance, does not go unchallenged. One way of challenging it is by devising pedagogical processes that create a space for critical reflection, reconnect subjectivity and experience with knowledge, and allow students not only to understand the material and social processes that generate and reproduce their own subjectivity, but also question and even transform these processes and conditions. Student-centred journals that promote critical reflexivity are an example of one such pedagogic process. This paper presents the experience of the author in using such a device in the teaching of a course on the archaeology and anthropology of eating and drinking.

Sacralising the Past

The paper discusses the religious undertones classical Greek heritage is vested with in Greece. Drawing on the argument that nationalism and religion need to be seen as similar cultural systems, we show that classical antiquities have become powerful emotive icons for performances of national memory in the process ot imagining the topos of the Hellenic nation. This process is open to all social actors and not simply to State bureaucrats and intellectuals. We offer an explanation of this phenomenon by examining the position of antiquity in the construction of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation, as well as the ways by which Orthodoxy and classical antiquity became enmeshed in the formation of Hellenic national identity.We finally explore some of the implications that this phenomenon has for archaeology as a discipline and as social practice.

A manifesto for a social zooarchaeology. Swans and other beings in the Mesolithic

Recent, non-anthropocentric explorations of the interaction between human and non-human animals have resulted in many groundbreaking studies. In this ‘animal turn’, zooarchaeology, which deals with and has access to the material traces of animals that existed alongside humans over the last 2.5 million years, could occupy a privileged and influential position. Despite some encouraging efforts, however, zooarchaeologys ability to contribute to these discussions is heavily limited by the subdisciplines firm footing within anthropocentric ontologies and reductionist epistemologies. This paper outlines a framework for a new social zooarchaeology that moves beyond the paradigm and discourse of ‘subsistence’ and of representationist and dichotomous thinking, which have treated non-human animals merely and often exclusively as nutritional or symbolic resources for the benefit of humans. Building on alternative zoontologies which reinstate the position of non-human animals as sentient and autonomous agents, this framework foregrounds the intercorporeal, sensuous and affective engagements through which humans and non-human animals are mutually constituted. These ideas are illustrated with two case studies focusing on human–whooper swan interactions in the Danish Later Mesolithic, based on the faunal assemblage from the site of Aggersund in North Jutland, and the whooper swan remains found associated with the Grave 8 at Vedbaek.

Sensorial Assemblages: Affect, Memory and Temporality in Assemblage Thinking

Archaeologists are familiar with the concept of assemblage, but in more recent years they have started problematizing it in interesting and innovative ways, beyond its common connotations of aggregation. Sociologists such as Manuel DeLanda and political philosophers such as Jane Bennett have been key influences in this move. These authors had adapted and modified the assemblage thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. In this article, an assemblage of sorts itself, I propose that we need to return to that original Deleuzian body of thinking and explore its richness further. Assemblages, temporary and deliberate heterogeneous arrangements of material and immaterial elements, are about the relationship of in-betweenness. I further suggest that sensoriality and affectivity, memory and multi-temporality are key features of assemblage thinking, and that assemblages also imply certain political effects. The omission of these features in the archaeological treatments of the concept may lead to mechanistic reincarnations of systems thinking, thus depriving the concept of its potential. Finally, I explore these ideas by considering communal eating and feasting events as powerful sensorial assemblages.

The Past as Oral History

The archaeology of Bronze Age Crete is a strange world. Inhabited by a mysterious ethnic group which was given the name, ‘Minoans’, it occupies an eminent position in the public imagination, where mythological elements are mixed with archaeological information and architectural and artistic representations, many of them created at the beginning of this century. Airports and tourist shops in the Mediterranean are full of books that have fictionalised the Europeanist, romanticised mythologies created mostly by Sir Arthur Evans but also by others who may not admit it, but have constructed a world, so familiar to their background and country of origins. Their Minoan constructions are full of palaces, kings, queens and aristocratic estates but also colonies, fleets and trade (cf. Bintliff 1984, MacEnroe 1995, MacGillivray 2000, Hamilakis, forthcoming, Hitchcock and Koudounaris forthcoming). In the 1970’s and most of the 1980’s, that strange world was filled in with redistributive centres, compassionate elites with amazing managerial powers and a spirit of public duty, specialist farmers with an amazing understanding of formalist microeconomics (e.g. Renfrew 1972, cf. Hamilakis 1995 for further bibliography). In the 1990’s, a few brave story-tellers started rewriting some of the stories using terminology which bewildered many and passed by the rest of old and the not so old guard: structure and agency, semiotics, gender. The ‘Minoans‘ are, to a large extent, still elusive, however, their materiality void, their experiential realm an empty space.

No laughing matter: Antiquity in Greek political cartoons

Abstract This article discusses the deployment of antiquity in Greek political cartoons covering the period from 1974 to the present. It argues that in order to function cartoons must rely on preconceptions and widespread popular beliefs; they thus can be seen as an important source for the investigation of popular stereotypes of antiquity. Moreover they engage actively in the construction of visual memory through the visualization of abstract notions. Greek political cartoons are shown often to use the most easily recognisable themes from antiquity and rely on its moral authority (stemming from the position of antiquity in the national imagination and public discourse) in order to critique and ridicule policies and politicians. The authority of antiquity itself, however, is rarely questioned. Cartoons and antiquity are not involved in a simple relationship of representation; theirs is rather a relationship of engagement, a relationship of veneration and submission which constructs a reality where the dividing lines between the past and the present are blurred, a reality which is structured by the powerful symbolic order of national memory.

Postcards from the Edge of Time: Archaeology, Photography, Archaeological Ethnography (A Photo-Essay)

Abstract In this photo-essay we present and discuss an experiment with digital photography as part of our archaeological ethnography within the Kalaureia Research Programme, on the island of Poros, Greece. We contextualize this attempt by reviewing, briefly but critically, the collateral development of photography and modernist archaeology, and the links between photography and anthropology, especially with regard to the field of visual anthropology. Our contention is that at the core of the uses of photographs made by both disciplines is the assumption that photographs are faithful, disembodied representations of reality. We instead discuss photographs, including digital photographs, as material artefacts that work by evocation rather than representation, and as material memories of the things they have witnessed; as such they are multi-sensorially experienced. While in archaeology photographs are seen as either official records or informal snapshots, we offer instead a third kind of photographic production, which occupies the space between artwork and ethnographic commentary or intervention. It is our contention that it is within the emerging field of archaeological ethnography that such interventions acquire their full poignancy and potential, and are protected from the risk of colonial objectification.