bruxelles - brussel - roma belgisch historisch instituut te rome

institut historique belge de rome istituto storico belga di roma

2016

conceptualising early colonisation

lieve donnellan, ed.Valentino nizzo

gert-Jan burgers

98110_Donnellan_voorwerk.indd 3 17/03/16 09:45

© 2016 ihbr - bhir

no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm or any other means without written permission of the copyright owner.

d/2016/351/2isbn 978-90-74461-82-5

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Table of content

Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................................... 7

l. donnellan & V. nizzo, Conceptualising early Greek colonisation. Introduction to the volume ... 9

r. osborne, Greek ‘colonisation’: what was, and what is, at stake? .............................................. 21

i. malkin, Greek colonisation: The Right to Return ....................................................................... 27

J. hall, Quanto c’è di “greco” nella “colonizzazione greca”? ............................................................ 51

a. esposito & a. Pollini, Postcolonialism from America to Magna Graecia............................... 61

g. saltini semerari, Greek-Indigenous intermarriage: a gendered perspective .......................... 77

r. Étienne, Connectivité et croissance : deux clés pour le VIII e s.? ................................................ 89

F. de angelis, e pluribus unum: The Multiplicity of Models ........................................................ 97

V. nizzo, tempus fugit. Datare e interpretare la “prima colonizzazione”: una riflessione “retro-spettiva” e “prospettiva” su cronologie, culture e contesti .................................................................. 105

m. cuozzo & c. Pellegrino, Culture meticce, identità etnica, dinamiche di conservatorismoe resistenza: questioni teoriche e casi di studio dalla Campania ..................................................... 117

o. morris, Indigenous networks, hierarchies of connectivity and early colonisation in Iron AgeCampania ........................................................................................................................................... 137

l. donnellan, A networked view on ‘Euboean’ colonisation ........................................................ 149

h. tréziny, Archaeological data on the foundation of Megara Hyblaea. Certainties and hypo-theses ................................................................................................................................................... 167

F. Frisone, ‘Sistemi’ coloniali e definizioni identitarie: le ‘colonie sorelle’ della Sicilia orientalee della Calabria meridionale ............................................................................................................. 179

e. greco, Su alcune analogie (strutturali?) nell’organizzazione dello spazio : il caso delle città achee ....................................................................................................................................................... 197

d. Yntema, Greek groups in southeast Italy during the Iron Age ................................................... 209

g.-J. burgers & J.P. crielaard, The Migrant’s Identity. ‘Greeks’ and ‘Natives’ at L’Amastuola,Southern Italy ........................................................................................................................................ 225

P.g. guzzo, Osservazioni finali ......................................................................................................... 239

m. gras, Observations finales .......................................................................................................... 243

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1 Compare for example Braudel’s The Mediterranean, Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea and Broodbank’s The Making of the Middle Sea, which all focus on the Medi-terranean as a unity, but with different outcomes. See also

the very thoughtful remarks of Roland Etienne in this vol-ume.2 Horden & Purcell, The corrupting sea, p. 396, 383-400.3 Broodbank, The making of the Middle Sea, p. 524.

Contextualising early “Colonisa-tion”

The discussion about what constitutes Greek “colonisation” has reached a new high in the recent years, and the gap between believers and non-believers appears wider than ever before. Publications focusing on diverging scholarly perceptions of Greek colonisation, especially terminology and its heuristic valid-ity, chronology and cross-cultural comparisons have succeeded one another rapidly the last couple of years. The present volume attempts to engage with this ongoing debate, with a number of theoretical and methodological reflections, and adds case-studies that explore the validity of various conceptualisations of “Greek colonisation”.

What exactly the term “Greek colonisa-tion” means, whether there was such a thing as “Greek” or “colonisation” in the first place, lies at the heart of a heated debate. The difficulties that exist in defining what a foundation in the first millennium BCE – “colonial” or other – is, in social and political terms, or how a founda-tion manifested itself physically, can partially be related to contrasting ontological presuppo-sitions, inherent to the different academic schools and traditions that currently exist. Different ontologies result in different stances

on the degree of social complexity of the socie-ties involved, collective memory formation, or, more generally, the processes underlying change in ancient Mediterranean societies. On the other hand, conflicting views can also be traced to the huge complexity and challenges that the study of the Mediterranean in the Early Iron Age poses. This extremely dynamic and rapidly changing field comprises so many inter-related geophysical, hydrological, biological, cultural, social and economic realities which, as a consequence, allow for virtually endless varieties in scientific research.1

Despite its problematic definition and seemingly evasive nature, Greek “colonisation” is, without exception, considered one of the key phenomena of Greek Antiquity and Mediterra-nean history. Horden and Purcell connect colo-nies and emporia to the redistribution of goods and various forms of human mobility, and see it as ‘a direct manifestation of the maritime koine’.2 A similar inevitability of events is sug-gested by Cyprian Broodbank, who remarks that in the ever shrinking sea and at a ‘rather arbitrary point in this continuum of mobility […], the result has become known as a “colony”’.3 Yet, whereas scholars working in Braudel’s spirit of the longue durée stress the continuity of human mobility in the Mediterranean through-out the millennia, Classical archaeologists and

Conceptualising early Greek colonisation. Introduction to the volume

Lieve Donnellan & Valentino Nizzo

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4 Tsetskhladze, ‘Revisiting ancient Greek colonisation’, p. xxiii.5 Osborne, Greece in the making (2nd ed.), p. 79-80.6 Term introduced first by C. Renfrew, ‘The Great Tradition’.7 The bibliography is very vast. Among the “canonical” works are most certainly (to name just a few) Graham,

Colony and mother city; Boardman, The Greeks overseas; Cordano, Antiche fondazioni; Pugliese Caratelli (ed.), Magna Grecia; Malkin, Religion and colonisation.8 Shepherd, ‘The pride of most colonials’.9 Papadopoulos, “‘Phantom Euboeans’”.10 See also Papadopoulos, ‘Phantom Euboeans, a decade’.

historians usually consider the “Greek coloni-sation” of the 8th to the 6th centuries BCE to be a unique event, an événement, to use Braudel’s terminology. Thus, it is considered to be a phe-nomenon distinct from the previous move-ments, which are usually seen as “migrations”. Gocha Tsetskhladze, in the introduction to his comprehensive collections on Greek colonies and other settlements overseas, states:

“Migrations feature in every period of Greek, Roman and Near Eastern history, but Archaic Greek colonisation is distinguished from most of the rest by its scale and extent — some comparisons may be made with Alexander the Great’s campaign in the Near East and the Hellenistic period, but the nature and charac-ter of these events are different’.4

Historians, both ancient and modern, identify a phenomenon of increased mobility, conventionally called in Roman and modern times “colonisation”, from the Aegean to other regions. Robin Osborne, in his Greece in the making, explains:

“For two decades and more Pithekoussai was a unique Greek settlement in the west, but in the last third of the eighth century BC Greeks set-tled at numerous sites in Sicily and South Italy. Already in antiquity these settlements seem to have been regarded as different in kind from the settlement at Pithekoussai, and modern scholars have included them, but normally not Pithekoussai (or Al Mina), in what they call ‘Greek colonization’”.5

The phenomenon manifested itself from the second half of the 8th century BCE onwards. But upon seeking a more specific description, opinions starts to diverge, some-

times dramatically. The publication of a num-ber of papers in the later 1990s - early 2000’s, has triggered a debate on the nature of “Greek colonisation” and which appears to be taking the size of a schism, a new “Great Divide” or, as Arianna Esposito and Airton Pollini expound in their contribution in this volume, an intel-lectual apartheid, between “revisionist” Anglo-phone scholars and “traditionalist” continental European scholars.6

Several “revisionist” papers have been questioning the traditional foundation model or at least, a text-based approach to Greek colo-nisation that accepts ancient written references to founders, mother cities and foundation ora-cles as being truthful representations of past events.7 Thus, Gillian Shepherd concluded that the widely accepted notion that colonies faith-fully copied their mother cities in funerary behaviour was false.8 She compared burial ritu-als of the Sicilian colonies Syracuse, Megara Hyblaea and Gela with mother cities Corinth, Megara, Rhodes and Crete. She attributed the deviant practices to the heterogeneous compo-sition of the colonies. The thought-provoking conclusion was that these would not have drawn their population from the mother cities, as mentioned in the foundation myths, but rather from a broad range of Greek cities and regions.

John Papadopoulos, equally questioned the premise of close connections between alleged mother cities and foundations.9 Focus-ing on the Euboeans and their supposed pri-macy in early exploration and settlement in the Mediterranean, he suggested that instead of “phantom Euboians” other groups, usually overlooked, such as Phoenicians and Corinthi-ans, should be included.10

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conceptualising early greek colonisation 11

11 Osborne, ‘Early Greek colonisation?’.12 See also Osborne, ‘Colonial Cancer’.13 Yntema, ‘Mental landscapes’.14 Graham in the 2nd edition of the Oxford Classical Dic-tionary, as cited in Tsetskhladze, ‘Revisiting ancient Greek colonisation’, p. xxv.15 Ridgway in the 3rd edition of the Oxford Classical Dic-tionary, as cited in Tsetskhladze, ‘Revisiting ancient Greek colonisation’, p. xxv.16 E.g. Greco (ed.), Gli Achei; Lombardo & Frisone (eds.), Colonie di colonie.

17 Antonaccio, ‘Excavating colonization’, p. 97. The citation is also referred to in Tsetskhladze, ‘Revisiting ancient Greek colonisation’, p. xxiv.18 Ancient West and East vol. 10 (2011).19 Published as Alle origini della Magna Grecia.20 See especially the various contributions to the Tavola Rotonda in Alle origini, pp. 1183-98 and the polemical use of the term “negazionisti” for scholars critical towards tra-ditional perceptions of Greek colonisation, esp. p. 1185, 1189.

The assumption that Greek colonies were state-led undertakings through which Greek poleis disposed in an organised way of a part of their population was also questioned in the most controversial of the “revisionist” papers, of the hand of Robin Osborne.11 Osborne looked at private enterprises and individual mobility, and rejected the term “colonisation” as inappropriate.12 In this volume, Robin Osborne reiterates his reservations regarding the conventional terminology, and provides some other thought-provoking arguments on how colonisation invokes the idea of fully developed Greek states, an anachronism for the eighth century BCE.

Similar notorious “revisionist” ideas have been explored in Douwe Yntema’s work13: the foundation myth, he proposes, is basically an origo myth, and it provided a focus for the inhabitants with different ethnic backgrounds, located in between the Greek and native worlds. In his contribution to this volume, Yntema explores a three-stage model of early Greek exploration, Greek-native interaction and co-settlement and the development of colo-nial identities further.

Concepts of Greek colonisation, perhaps more than any other concept in ancient Greek history, have been reformulated continuously. Gocha Tsetskhladze has illustrated this very well in his introduction to his Greek Colonisation, with a succinct exploration of definitions of Greek colonisation: the one formulated in 1970

by A.J. Graham versus one in 1996 by D. Ridg-way. Whereas Graham confidently states that ‘colonisation was a natural activity for the Greeks’14, Ridgway defines Greek colonisation as ‘a somewhat misleading definition of the process of major Greek expansion’ and adds ‘the mass of general and particular information that has accumulated under these two headings [“Greek” and “colonisation”] is only rarely susceptible to a single uncontroversial interpretation’.15

The comprehensive collection of essays gathered in two volumes by Tsetskhladze is one of several works that have attempted to redefine and conceptualise Greek colonisation recently.16

But rather than leading to more consensus, definitions of “Greek colonisation” appear to be drifting apart as never before.

Even though Carla Antonaccio remarked that increased excavation of Western “colonial” sites ‘led to a long-overdue dialogue between Anglophone and European scholars with their respective perspectives and agendas’,17 there has been little of a dialogue, at least in a literal sense. The closest attempt to a real dialogue between conflicting approaches to Greek colo-nisation has been a discussion section in Tset-skhladze’s Ancient West and East of 2011,18 a volume whose publication intersected with the 50th annual conference on the History and Archaeology of Magna Graecia at Taranto,19 an occasion where the need for a real debate between schools and approaches was made pressingly clear.20 This call constituted the

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21 Dion. Hal. Roman Antiq., I.11.1 (Loeb). 22 Mele, Greci, pp. 1-40 with references.

23 d’Agostino, “Pitecusa”, cf. also d’Agostino, ‘Pithecusae e Cuma’.

immediate incentive for the organisation of the CeC meeting, as an opportunity for con-frontation and discussion between schools.

The main axis of conflict appears to be, next to the appropriateness of terminology - particularly those terms related to modern col-onisation - the validity of historical representa-tions of foundations and underlying presuppo-sitions of intentionality and organisation of the movements of people from the Aegean to other regions.

However, is has become clear that the problem is more complicated than the veracity (or not) of written traditions on Greek founda-tions. In reality, the historical, social and eco-nomic processes that underlie the “colonial” phenomenon in the West are much more com-plex and dynamic than the actual evidence (lit-erary and historical) allows us currently to reconstruct. Recent discoveries, for example at Huelva or Sant’Imbenia, indicate that the ori-gins of the phenomenon have to sought before and probably elsewhere than where one nor-mally looks: in a slow and sometimes extempo-rary process of experimentation, or even better “improvisation”, trough indivi dual or collective success and failure which progressively led to what was captured already in Antiquity, and perhaps improperly also today, the “colonial” phenomenon.

A famous passage of Dionysius of Halicar-nassus illustrates this very well: it refers to “indigenous” realities and appropriated Greek ways of doing:

‘But the most learned of the Roman historians […], say that they [the Aborigenes] were Greeks, part of those who once dwelt in Achaia, and that they migrated many generations be-fore the Trojan War. But they do not go on to indicate either the Greek tribe to which they

belonged or the city from which they moved, or the date or the leader of the colony, or as result of what turns of fortune they left their mother country; and although they are following a Greek legend, they have cited no Greek histo-rian as their authority. It is uncertain, there-fore, what the truth of the matter is’.21

The main heuristic problem lies, therefore, in a historical and sociological definition of a process that in its earliest phases was not collec-tive, and is overall extremely difficult to grasp in terms of its political codification. Our under-standing of the malleability of identities has advanced significantly over the last years, but how individual experiences became collective is extremely difficult to grasp.

Framing the “phenomenon” poses innu-merable problems, historically, on the level of its terminology which is often used, as some critics say, teleological, as is also the case with concepts such as “proto-urbanisation” or “proto-colonisation”. Even though useful on an epistemological level, such concepts danger-ously distort realities through the (unwilling) implication of unilinear and evolutionist per-spectives.

Pithekoussai is a case in point. In absence of literary sources that help to understand its nature and in absence even of the parameters that ancient historiography considered neces-sary for a “colonial” reality, it appears to escape a classificatory logic, to the extent that some even omit its existence intentionally, because it does not conform to the “colonial” reality, or what is held to be such a reality.22 This situation of negation, or in the best case, of reduction, was common in the first half of the last century, until Giorgio Buchner and next, David Ridg-way, uncovered its tangible archaeological real-ity. It is this ‘apoikia di tipo particolare’23, the

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conceptualising early greek colonisation 13

difficulties in classifying it, that demonstrate the complexity of realities rather than “failure” or “unrealised polis”, as some say. It offers tan-gible evidence of dynamic historical processes that induce change, adaptation, contortion, or simply conclusion of broader processes. In the case of Pithekoussai, we have to take into account the background of many different homelands (Greek, Levantine, Cypriot), the dialectics between natives and newcomers, including their sometimes contradicting con-sequences, oscillating between mediation, imitation, assimilation, naturalisation, hybridi-sation or negation on a local level, and also the events taking place at the opposite coast, events that, moreover, should not be discon-nected from broader local developments. Lieve Donnellan’s paper in this volume elaborates on these relations between homeland and local indigenous context.

In order to grasp cases of “Greek colonisa-tion”, it is necessary to disentangle ancient and modern perceptions and integrate them in a study of the wider context, historical and methodological. This can only be made possible by the inclusion, not the rejection, of different approaches, fields or schools as well as a continu-ous redefinition and refinement of concepts and inquiries into their validity as heuristic tools.

In this spirit, the conference “Contextual-ising early Greek colonisation: Archaeology, Sources, Chronology and Interpretative Models between Italy and the Mediterranean” (abbrevi-ated as CeC) was organised in Rome in June 2012. The conference evolved around several axes or key themes in the research of early “colonisation” in Italy. The goal was to contex-tualise the “phenomenon” archaeologically (sites involved, neighbouring regions and con-nected processes such as Phoenician colonisa-tion), historically (literary representations, broader historical patterns in Italy and the Mediterranean), methodologically (the ongoing chronology debate) and to confront various conceptualisations of the phenomenon.

The CeC conference was saddened by the sudden death of David Ridgway, just a month before the event. It was decided to dedicate the conference and its published outcome to the memory of him who was a great archaeologist and pioneer in the study of early Greek coloni-sation, and also a close friend and mentor of many of the participants in the conference.

The large numbers of participants in the conference, as well as the subsequent publi-cations, and the desire to present a manageable published outcome, both in terms of expenses and thematic coherence, led to the decision to publish the acts in three different volumes. A first volume is entitled Contexts of early colonisation”, a publication generously spon-sored by the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR) as part of their Papers of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome series. The present and second volume “Contextualising early Colonisation II. Conceptualising early col-onisation” is generously sponsored and pub-lished by the Belgian Historical Institute in Rome in the Artes series. The third volume, which collects shorter papers issued from the poster session held during the CeC conference, are published as a special issue of the online journal Forum Romanum Belgicum of the Bel-gian Historical Institute in Rome.

Conceptualising early Greek colonisation

The CeC conference was organised with the specific goal of facilitating a dialogue between various approaches and schools of “Greek colonisation”. While, at the time, a great divide between “traditionalists” and “revision-ist” readings appeared to be in place, the fis-sions, in reality, cross-cut various disciplines, sub-disciplines and national “schools”. The controversy can be traced to what Jonathan Hall eloquently described as historical-positiv-ist, poeticist or historical-constructivist atti-

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24 Hall, ‘Foundation stories’.25 Tsetskhladze , ‘Revisiting ancient Greek colonisation’, p. lviii.26 For example Tsetskhladze, ‘Revisiting ancient Greek colonisation’ and Tsetskhladze & Hargrave, “Colonisation from Antiquity to modern times”; Greco, ‘Greek colonisa-tion in Southern Italy’.

27 See especially the groundbreaking work by Peter van Dommelen, such as ‘Colonial constructs’ and On colonial grounds; and of course Michael Dietler in numerous con-tributions: e.g. his recent major work Archaeologies of colonialism.

tudes to foundation stories,24 and also involves conflicting ontologies and epistemologies of Classical Archaeology and History in Anglo-phone countries and the European continent, the various Italian schools of pre and protohis-torical sciences, and their relations with other social and human sciences.

The use of certain concepts as a heuristic tool to approach Greek colonisation is certainly, and for a large part, determined by local schol-arly traditions, education and personal prefer-ences. As a result, as Tsetskhladze rightly states ‘people sometimes seem to be discussing different concepts because they are using different terms, when in fact they are often discussing the same phenomenon’.25

Indeed, even though many different terms and concepts are preferred at the expense of others by individual scholars, such as the rejec-tion of “colonisation” by Robin Osborne, in the first paper, but accepted by others elsewhere,26 there appears to be a general consensus that the Greek “phenomenon”, whether one calls it “colonisation”, “migration”, “apoikism”, “dias-pora” or “mobility”, was a process that was essentially different from modern colonisation. One of Osborne’s main objections to the term “colonisation”, as he expounds here, is the underlying assumption of state-led enterprises that its use entails.

Irad Malkin, who generally favours a view of more organised expeditions following the lit-erary model of oikistes – Delphic oracle – foun-dation – cult of the founder, sets forth in detail, in the second paper, how organised apoikism in an oikos-based society could function. Even though the nature of the enterprise that arrived

overseas is essentially different for both Osborne and Malkin, there is more consensus on what sort of society they left behind.

The importance of different concepts lies in the ways they are used as analytical tools. A preference for a certain concept can be deter-mined by the desire to avoid certain presump-tions, but has, on the other hand, also unwanted consequences. Malkin makes a case for the use of “colonisation”, on the condition that its choice is made explicit and related to what he calls Zeitgeist. A similar spirit, postcolonialism, dans l’air du temps is found in the paper by Esposito and Pollini.

Other threads between “schools” can be identified, regarding the incorporation of native societies into the various scholarly narratives of Greek “colonisation”. The various national “schools” have favoured different agenda’s on native societies, often critical of each other, but ending nevertheless mutually recognising the fundamental role played by native societies in attracting foreign visitors and in establishing enduring relations that were, no doubt, some-times violent but also to their mutual benefit.

The discussion on how we should approach the physical and mental spaces of intercultural encounters overseas has been enriched methodologically, in the last two dec-ades, with concepts drawn from anthropologi-cal and cultural studies, especially postcolonial studies.27 However, as several contributions in the present volume point out, their application is not always uncontroversial. Postcolonial concepts, and nuanced readings of ethnic and gender identities contribute significantly to the comprehension of daily life, le quotidien to use

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conceptualising early greek colonisation 15

Braudel’s term, to grasp how people from dif-ferent social and cultural backgrounds might have interacted on a daily base, and help to understand the origins, ideological motiva-tions and semiotic stratifications of their habi-tus, as introduced by Bourdieu. On the other hand, theories have their limits and need to be tested and verified against the evidence, in order to avoid empty and mechanical theoreti-cal representations of what was, as the consen-sus appears to be, an essentially diversified and in each individual case, a historically unique phenomenon.

Conceptualising “Greek colonisation” thus is a daunting enterprise, and in order to represent it in its full complexity, it is necessary to explore, contrast, confront and even contra-dict assumptions, theories and generally-accepted interpretations. The various chapters in the present volume explore concepts such as colonisation, migration, apoikia and metropo-lis, what Greek is (or not), connectivity, growth, gendered relations, métissage, resistance, time, networks, as well as how various concepts oper-ate in practice.

Conceptualising early colonisation is divided in three parts. The first part groups papers that approach Greek “colonisation” from a historical and theoretical point of view. They discuss vocabulary and general concepts, where these have brought us and what they could lead to. How these various concepts might operate in practice is the subject of the second part of the volume. This second part comprises historical and archaeological contri-butions that apply one or more principles dis-cussed in the first theoretically-oriented part of the book. The (short) third part offers con-cluding views on the recent controversies in the conceptualisation of Greek “colonisation”, presented during the CeC conference.

In the first chapter, Robin Osborne draws attention to some overlooked consequences of the continued use of the term “colonisation”. Terminology, he states, is never innocent and

careful attention should be paid to what certain terms and the way they are used, implies. Schol-ars often identify intentionality behind the sto-ries about groups moving away, but Osborne argues that there are no sound arguments to do so: there was no Greek state that could have steered such an enterprise. Migration, or per-haps diaspora, describe more accurately the process.

Irad Malkin, in the second contribution, points out that home communities remained in place during the “colonisation”, while during the migrations of the early first millennium entire communities migrated. Thus, colonisa-tion, contributed to the development of the polis at home. Therefore, Malkin pleads for considering the phenomenon of the archaic period as distinct from earlier movements, and despite not being entirely appropriate, adheres to the word “colonisation”, with its Latin roots, which constitutes, as he demonstrate at length, a useful heuristic tool. Malkin helpfully enriches the existing debate by drawing atten-tion to the ancient terminology used. As he explains, the reference to the oikos in the word apoikia/apoikos refers to a sense of belonging, whereas the metros-prefix in metro polis refers to an ongoing relation in terms of kinship. The intentionality of foundation and the idea of belonging to a home community becomes most obvious through the existence of the right to return to that home community as evidenced in the foundation decrees of, for example, Nau-paktos or Cyrene, and which proves the exist-ence of a mutually recognised relation in terms of colony and mother city. These relations, well defined and universally acknowledged in the ancient Greek world, ultimately constituted a network, within which Hellenic identity rose.

The far-reaching consequences of the for-mation of Hellenic identities for the study of “Greek colonisation” are the subject of the third chapter. Jonathan Hall stresses the connection of the overseas regions with the homeland, but, in contrast to Malkin, Hall points at the

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16 lieve donnellan & valentino nizzo

Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries as the ultimate con-text in which self-identification was formulated in Hellenic terms. As Hall points out, this not happen in the 8th century BCE, at the time the colonies were founded, but rather in the 6th century BCE. He formulates several objections against the idea that the confrontation with non-Greeks would have led to the creation of Greek identity. Hall points out that the Greek-native encounters in Sicily and Southern Italy date back to Mycenaean times and were there-fore no novelty.

The late 1990s did not only witness critical revisions of concepts of Greek “colonisation”, but also of Hellenic identities and relations between colonists and colonisers. The intro-duction of postcolonial approaches provided new key-concepts and heuristic tools for the revision of approaches and have profoundly impacted the study of mobility and interaction between the Aegean and Italian peninsula. In the fourth chapter, Arianna Esposito and Air-ton Pollini propose a historiographical review of recent work on Greek colonisation, with spe-cial regard to postcolonial concepts that have been adopted and adapted from the studies on American colonial societies. Esposito and Pollini review models such as acculturation, middle ground, frontier, power, diaspora. The latter term can be a useful one, according to them, as can be mobility or spread. They under-line that the point should be to recognise the contemporaneity and parallelisms between “colonisation” and several networks of move-ments of various groups. While broad terms contribute to recognising different kinds of mobility, the drawback is that they are also vague. Whereas comparisons between ancient and modern colonisations are anachronistic, Esposito and Pollini consider them useful. Esposito and Pollini, in addition, usefully elab-orate on the use of postcolonialism for the study of Greek colonisation. While English-speaking scholars have enthusiastically embraced post-colonial approaches, they are regarded with

suspicion by French-speaking scholars and thus there is a risk of an intellectual “apartheid” coming in place.

An often overlooked identity in the study of Greek colonisation is gender. Giulia Saltini Semerari therefore analyses intermarriage from a theoretical gender perspective. Intermarriage between Greeks and natives is often alluded at, but Saltini Semerari argues that most studies tend to invoke the same data sets and historical examples. She usefully expands the discussion and elaborates on several consequences of a more nuanced theoretical reading of gender relations for Greek - native inter action, labour and power. She discusses three possible scenar-ios of intermarriage and stresses that variability was most likely in place, both chronological and geographical.

Recent new proposals to approach Medi-terranean history and its inherent human mobility were made in Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea and also by Ian Morris in the Cambridge Economic History. Both works address problems related to the Mediterranean rather than Greek colonisation alone, and Roland Etienne explores how the two main concepts proposed in the books, “connectivity” and “growth” can be of use. Etienne concludes with the rejection of both concepts. The notion of connectivity is not specifically related to the Mediterranean and therefore of little use to the study of Greek colonisation. Growth is an essentially unilinear concept, and Etienne cau-tions against such a homogenesing concept for the study of “Greek colonisation”.

Great divide, schism, fusion or apartheid: conceptualisations of Greek “colonisation” diverge and Franco de Angelis pleads for the development of a single approach to Greek “colonisation”, in analogy with culture contact studies in North America. He points out that the various existing approaches, roughly divid-able in classical archaeological Greek versus a prehistoric native approach, have both contrib-uted to the discussion in their own way. None

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conceptualising early greek colonisation 17

of the rivaling approaches, however, is so com-plete that the other becomes completely invalid. A single coordinated approach could be based on frontier studies, a suggestion that has been made many years ago by Ettore Lepore and Moses Finley.

Mediterranean chronologies constitute one of the main axes of discussion of mobility and colonisations in the Mediterranean. Rival-ling chronologies in and between Egypt, the Near East, Carthage, Greece and the Alps com-plicate significantly interpretations of chrono-logical and cultural synchronisms, as the first part of the first volume of the CeC conference illustrates in more detail. Valentino Nizzo draws attention to continuous reformulations and the impact of changing concepts of chro-nology and time on scholarly understandings of “Greek colonisation”.

As all chapters of this first part make amply clear, terminology is never innocent, and attention needs to be paid to how and why it is used. Different terms operate differently on a heuristic level, and in the second part of the book, the operation of various concepts is explored through case-studies. The case-studies in this volume are organised geographically and counterclockwise, from inland Campania, over Pithekoussai to Sicily and the Ionian coast.

Invoking postcolonial conceptualisations, the first paper of the second part by Maria Assunta Cuozzo and Carmine Pellegrino draws on subaltern studies and the possibilities these offers to identify resistance in the archaeologi-cal record. Rather than being primitive or backward, resistance can be seen as an active choice and counterreaction to dominant pow-ers. Looking at internal Campania, at the site of Monte Vetrano, and the various strategies used to cope with external influences from the Aegean, but also neighbouring Italian regions. Some connections were more tight, others much looser.

Network-informed approaches rapidly gain importance in the study the Mediterra-

nean world and Owain Morris further explores the concept of networks in Campania. He argues that Greek “colonisation” in Campania should be looked at against this background of regional mobility. He invokes the concept of connectivity to address hierarchies that have been applied to sites in Campania. Traditio-nally, well-connected sites, such as Cuma, are seen as more advanced than lesser connected sites of the interior. Much in line with the ideas expressed in the previous paper, Morris thus rejects one-sided traditional readings of the archaeological contexts. Connectivity, and the closely related glocal approaches, are used by Morris to situate Cuma in a broader regional and Mediterranean context. He argues that weak ties were fundamental for the introduc-tion of new material and ideas in otherwise tightly connected local cliques.

In addition to Cuma, networks are used to analyse the situation across the Bay, at Pithek-oussai. Lieve Donnellan applies a formal net-works analysis of the Late Geometric phases of the necropolis. Very much in analogy to the interpretations offered in the two previous papers, Donnellan proposes to re-evaluate the situation of the indigenous population, which, at Pithekoussai has traditionally been consid-ered exclusively in Greek terms.

Moving from Campania to Sicily, the site of Megara Hyblaea iconically represents the best preserved and most studied case of what is considered an early Greek foundation. Henry Tréziny summarises the results of several dec-ades of French excavations in the town, which appears to have been newly founded after the middle of the 8th century BCE. Megara Hyblaea represents the earliest case of intentional and organised use of urban space and is therefore a crucial piece of evidence in the discussion of early Greek colonisation.

The notion of structured colonisation is corroborated by the process of subfoundation soon after the foundation of a primary colony. This is one of the key arguments of scholars

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18 lieve donnellan & valentino nizzo

defending “traditionalist” readings of Greek colonisation. Flavia Frisone, illustrates how this conceptualisation of colonisation functions for Zancle and Rhegion. Despite identifying pat-terns of organised foundation, Frisone pleads for a nuanced reading of traditional and canon-ical foundation models. She underlines the diversity of each foundation.

Structured colonisation, spatial organisa-tion of urban and territorial areas, and sub-foundations have also been identified for the Achaean colonies of Southern Italy. Emanuele Greco reviews meticulously the urban and extra-urban public architecture and planning of the primary foundations Sybaris, and Croton and the secondary foundations Metapontum and Posidonia, and points out that all colonies were furnished with an extra-urban sanctuary for Hera. He concludes that the common char-acteristics of the Hera sanctuaries in terms of their dimensions, location at the limits of the chora, invoke the idea of structure that could have been part of the communities that identi-fied themselves as Achaean.

In opposition to structured colonisation, there are arguments for the development of a polis with a colonial Greek identity as s a grad-ual process. Yntema thus models “Greek colo-nisation in three stages and explores this con-ceptualisation for Metapontum, L’Incoronata, Siris-Policoro and the Salento peninsula (Brindisi, Otranto, Torre Saturo). Yntema points out that the outcomes of Greek-native interactions had different results: only four out of many more settlements on the Ionian coast developed into poleis, whereas others were abandoned or enjoyed another political status.

An analogous defintion to the one advanced by Yntema, namely the transformation from native to Greek settlement as a gradual process, is explored by Gert-Jan Burgers and Jan Paul Crielaard. The results of their research

at L’Amastuola, in the hinterland of Taranto, and based on many years of excavations and survey, leads them to the conclusion that there is sufficient evidence to support the thesis of complex and overlapping Greek and native identities, rather than radically opposed identi-ties or sudden replacements of the entire area by Greek colonists.

These case-studies offer invaluable under-standings of how the many sometimes overlap-ping, sometimes rivaling conceptualisations of “Greek colonisation” can operate. New terms and definitions clearly offer advantages, allow for nuances, better understandings and greater complexities, but they also have their limits and old terms do not always and necessarily lose their validity.

Piero Guzzo, in concluding the final dis-cussions of the original CeC conference, offers some valuable epistemological reflections. He draws attention to the métier of the archaeolo-gist and historian and the development and increased use of models to represent the evi-dence. While the development of new interpre-tation is inevitable and necessary, their applica-bility will determine their usefulness.

The exceedingly rapid development of new definitions and models is also underlined in the concluding observations, originally for-mulated during the CeC conference, by Michel Gras. He also lines out that even though many archaeological contexts were discussed – even leading to the editorial necessity of publishing them as a separate volume – many more were not discussed. The incredible complexity of the problem and the ever-expanding corpus of evidence will need continuous elabora-tion. Models provide useful tools to do so, and like Piero Guzzo, Michel Gras stresses that models and understandings will always be transforming.

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conceptualising early greek colonisation 19

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