Mitchell, 'Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and Modern Archaeologies', Bryn Mawr Classical Review 9503
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmcr/bmcr-9503-mitchell-classical

@@@@95.3.27, Morris, ed., Classical Greece (I)

Ian Morris (ed.), <i>Classical Greece: Ancient Histories and
Modern Archaeologies.</i> Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994. Pp. 244. $59.95. ISBN 0-521-39279-9 (hb), 0-521-45678-9
(pb).
     Reviewed by Lynette G. Mitchell -- University of Durham

     The self-proclaimed ambition of this collection of essays in
a series entitled <i>New Directions in Archaeology</i> is to
"re-figure" Greek archaeology in order to "bridge the divide"
between Greek archaeology and ancient history. The editor's basic
contention is that Greek archaeology, which has developed within
the European idealism of Hellenism, and which has become divided
from other, theoretical, archaeologies by concentrating simply on
artefactual analysis, is in danger of becoming irrelevant. What
he proposes here (as others too have proposed before him) is that
Greek archaeology should move beyond the study of the artefacts
for their own sake and ask social and economic questions about
the archaeological record in order to put the people back into
the archaeology. I am an ancient historian and not a specialist
in Greek archaeology, so, rather than providing a detailed
critique of the archaeological method, my comments will generally
be directed towards the usefulness of this book to ancient
historians.

     The essays are divided into four parts, the common thread
being the question: what can archaeology tell us about Greek
society? Ian Morris opens the collection with the first two
essays by setting out his position and giving an overview of the
history of Greek archaeology. This is intended to set the scene
and justify why a new approach is needed. Although in Chapter One
("Introduction") Morris is largely defensive, in Chapter Two
("Archaeologies of Greece") he moves on to the offensive,
attacking the "traditional" Greek archaeology with its
essentially taxonomic emphasis and urges instead that Greek
archaeology should move further towards adopting the practices of
the "new" archaeology which, by asking anthropological questions
of the artefacts, attempts to place them within their
socio-political context. Although there are a number of "divides"
within Greek archaeology, Morris sees that the main aim of the
new archaeology is to break down the divide between Greek
archaeology and Greek history.

     Part II contains essays by James Whitley, Herbert Hoffman
and Robin Osborne, who begin with essentially stylistic and
art-historical analyses, but then attempt, with varying success,
to show what such analyses can tell us about Greek society. Using
a contextual approach to discuss protoattic pottery, Whitley
("Protoattic pottery: a contextual approach") concludes that,
although it is generally assumed to be a ceremonial style,
protoattic was in fact used to reinforce social structures by its
"rationing" to elites. He argues this from finds principally
associated with ceremonial usage, but also points to well
deposits from the <i>agora</i> which must have been essentially
domestic. Hoffman ("The riddle of the Sphinx: a case study in
Athenian immortality symbolism") claims that the iconography and
shape of the Sotadean sphinx vase are consistent with each other
in the symbolism of liminality, and essentially represent a
"bridge connecting this world with the Other." Osborne's paper
("Looking on -- Greek style. Does the sculpted girl speak to
women too?") on archaic and classical female sculpture is the
most successful of the three in its contribution to our
understanding of Greek social history and thought. Although his
analysis of the statuary itself is not always convincing, he
moves on to argue that the changes in the representation of the
female figure between the archaic and classical periods reflect,
and even emphasise, a similar change in the Athenian attitudes to
citizenship, and from this suggests a corresponding change in the
attitude to women. In the sixth century the family had been
important in political activity, and hence political marriage. In
the fifth century, Osborne says, the emphasis was on the citizen
and his corporate role. This affected the perception and
representation of women: the political <i>man</i> suppressed and
silenced woman.

     The essays in Part III by David Gill, Karim Arafat and
Catherine Morgan look at Greek artefacts found outside Greece,
discuss what they can and cannot tell us about trade between
Greek and non-Greek communities, and challenge the generally
accepted models for trading networks, and even the notion of 
"trade" itself for the Greek world. Gill ("Positivism, pots and
long-distance trade") attacks the positivist view that the
distribution of pottery should be equated with its desirability
and value, as well as reflecting trading routes, and claims that
the presence of pottery in non-Greek locations does not
necessarily imply direct trade with Greece. Arafat and Morgan
("Athens, Etruria and the Heueneberg: mutual misconceptions in
the study of Greek-barbarian relations"), on a similar tack,
discuss Greek vases in non-Greek find-spots. They consider how
the iconography of Greek pots changed its "meaning" when
interpreted through a different culture (here Etruscan). Then in
a discussion of the "market activity" and local "economies" of
Etruria, the Hallstatt empire, and Massalia, they challenge the
"core-periphery" theory of trade and the notion that the Greeks
and barbarian worlds were inextricably bound together by trade,
arguing not only that there is little solid evidence for
long-distance established trade links, but also that parallel
markets probably provide a more appropriate model.

     In Part IV essays by Susan Alcock, John Cherry and Jack
Davis (the first a joint paper by the the three, and the second a
paper by Alcock alone) both defend the use of field survey
technique within the context of Greek archaeology and try to show
show how it can provide either new evidence for old questions or
new directions that could be pursued. Alcock, Cherry and Davis
("Intensive survey, agricultural practice and the classical
landscape of Greece") use detailed survey as a means of testing
the theory of manuring as an explanation of "off-site" pottery
distributions, concluding that manuring is inadequate as the only
explanation of this phenomenon, but other factors, such as
erosion, soil movements and the shape of the landscape, could
account for the intensity of distribution on some "sites". Alcock
("Breaking up the Hellenistic world: survey and society") then
goes on to show how our knowledge of the Hellenistic world can
open up from a "piece by piece" survey of the Hellenistic
<i>oikoumene</i></i>, and that what emerges is a complex, and
changing, mosaic of land use, population movement and economic
growth and decline.

     The final section comprises Responses from Michael Jameson
and Anthony Snodgrass. The former, though welcoming the
"re-peopling" of Greek archaeology, is, on the whole, relatively
negative and pessimistic that such an approach to archaeology can
go far beyond the type of questions posed in this collection.
Snodgrass is more positive, and sees in these essays questions
which could not easily have been asked half a generation ago.

     This collection deals with a number of individual and
generally unrelated questions. For the ancient historian some
have more significance than others: for instance, how the
Athenian male's changing self-perception affected his perception
of women, and the Athenian woman's perception of herself; how
"trade" between Greeks and non-Greeks can tell us as much about
the non-Greek receiver as about the Greek giver, and how we need
to reconstruct our understanding of ancient trade and the
movement of artefacts around the ancient world.

     But perhaps more important and of greater interest than the
particular problems dealt with by these essays are the larger
issues they raise. For example, how far, as classicists, ancient
historians and archaeologists, do we need to justify our
existence to the world at large (for, as Jameson notes, the
question of relevance is as much a problem for classicists as it
is for Greek archaeologists)? And are we still as Hellenocentric
as Morris would have us believe? Is there still confrontation
between Hellenism and Orientalism? Here, I think, Morris
overstates his case. Increasingly, other states outside the Greek
world are being studied by scholars with traditional classics
backgrounds, and not always simply in a "colonialist" spirit.
However, having said this, Morris <i>et al.</i> have defined a
positive position from which Greek archaeology can make a
conscious movement, even though the drift in this direction may
have begun twenty years ago.

     For an ancient historian the most important feature of this
collection is the challenge it presents to meet the
archaeologists half-way. In the past there has been a tendency
for ancient historians to use the evidence and analysis provided
by archaeology to answer traditional historians' questions, not
to see archaeology as the source of new enquiry. But not only
must the Greek archaeologists keep asking relevant and
stimulating questions about the classical period of Greek
history, but the Greek historians (particularly of the classical
period) must also look more to Greek archaeologists to see what
new insights they can provide and what new questions they are
asking. This collection of essays has raised provocative
questions which ancient historians need to face, and this kind of
analysis provides welcome insights into ancient Greek society and
the societies outside the Greek world with which they interacted.