The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age: A Globalising World c. 1100–600 BCE

In 1983, economist Theodore Levitt first popularized the term "globalization" to describe an incipient era of free trade, increased mobility, improved communications technology, and growing worldwide demand for affordable consumer goods (Levitt 1983). Forty years later, we are still debating the merits and drawbacks of a globalized world. Some stress globalization's role in alleviating poverty, promoting mobility, and strengthening cross-cultural ties. Others argue that globalization has driven rises in inequality within and between countries, increased the impact and scope of financial shocks, eroded local cultures, and hastened ecological disaster.The Mediterranean in the first millennium BCE might seem distant from these twenty-first-century concerns. In The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age, however, Tamar Hodos makes a provocative claim: the concept of globalization, she suggests, is not only appropriate for describing ancient societies but can also generate productive new insights about Iron Age Mediterranean archaeology and history. This volume thus further develops a theoretical apparatus explored in the author's earlier work (e.g., Hodos 2010) and joins a group of syntheses that emphasize the connections between heterogenous microregions around the Mediterranean basin (e.g., Horden and Purcell 2000; Broodbank 2013; Manning 2018).Chapter 1 presents globalization as a framework that can accommodate both generalized, Mediterranean-wide trends and local developments. Because of this flexibility, Hodos argues that globalization has distinct advantages over previous approaches to Mediterranean-wide interaction, such as Braudel's longue durée, World Systems Theory, one-sided narratives of "Hellenization" or "Orientalization," and postcolonial interpretations. The nation-states that constitute the major players in today's globalized world have no correlates in the Iron Age Mediterranean; rather, the key agents are defined as "socio-cultural groups" with "shared traits associated with cultural identity" (28). Hodos then identifies eight features of global cultures: time-space compression, deterritorialization, standardization, unevenness, cultural homogenization, cultural heterogeneity, reembedding of local culture, and vulnerability (29–30). Some of these, like "standardization," have clear archaeological correlates. Others, like "time-space compression," a term first coined by critical geographer David Harvey to describe the accelerated experience of life under late twentieth-century capitalism (Harvey 1989: 284–307), seem to me to be much more difficult to recognize in an Iron Age Mediterranean context.Considering the Iron Age Mediterranean as a whole requires reconciling archaeological evidence and chronologies across many different regions. In Chapter 2, Hodos emphasizes that the Iron Age's beginning and ending vary substantially across the Mediterranean and are often defined by localized political events or material culture changes. She identifies "the spread of Phoenician and Greek culture across the Mediterranean . . . from the ninth and eighth centuries" as the defining feature of the period (46) and sets the boundaries of her study at 1100 to 600 BCE.The remaining chapters use the lens of globalization to examine the movement of people, things, and ideas across the Iron Age Mediterranean. In Chapter 3, Hodos argues that "colonization," rather than the more general and neutral term "migration," is the best way to characterize the establishment of Greek and Phoenician settlements across the Mediterranean, as long as the term is stripped of the connotations of power differentials and inequalities associated with modern forms of colonialism. "Greek" and "Phoenician" are not internally homogeneous categories, as Hodos acknowledges, nor did overseas settlements passively reflect a mother culture. A helpful summary of literary and archaeological evidence for Phoenician and Greek activity across the Mediterranean follows (75–83), though the connection between distributions of Phoenician and Greek pottery and the presence of settled populations identifying as "Phoenician" or "Greek" could be considered more critically. Hodos resists overly schematic interpretations that see Phoenician colonization as motivated by trade and Greek colonization as motivated by gaining arable agricultural land. Instead, she argues that both types of colonies were interested in establishing local territorial control to provision their populations, supporting her argument with new archaeological evidence from Spain and Sardinia that suggests Phoenician interventions in agricultural hinterlands (88–89).Chapter 4, the longest chapter, focuses on the movement of objects across the Iron Age Mediterranean as a proxy for understanding social and economic networks. Hodos argues for a (gradual and uneven) emergence of commercial trade networks starting as early as the eleventh century BCE and accelerating throughout the period, with the concomitant development of a group of specialized traders and merchants. Shipwreck evidence attests to the importance of maritime routes for both long-haul and shorter local voyages. This connectivity can also be perceived in hybridized forms of material culture and cultural practices. Hodos's discussion of wine consumption and its social meaning in various western Mediterranean locales is an instructive example of how a single commodity could both shape local economies in various directions and draw some local actors into Mediterranean-wide networks (122–34). The chapter concludes with brief overviews of the movement of other commodities around the Iron Age Mediterranean, including oil, grain, textiles, enslaved people, and precious metals.While much interesting evidence is presented, Hodos's anecdotal style of argument often fails to ground broad claims in empirical data. This issue is particularly salient when it comes to the author's stance on the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age in the eastern Mediterranean and its economic and social effects on various regions: a scholarly preoccupation for decades. For example, we read both that "in many places in the late second and first millennium BCE, the exchange of goods was much more restricted in quantity and distance than it had been previously" (96) and that finds of Egyptian imports and imitations of Cypriot pottery from the site of Tel Dor in Israel demonstrate that "regularized commercial seaborne exchanges and influences did continue over the end of the second millennium and into the first millennium . . . continued fieldwork and analysis elsewhere will help to overcome the relative scarcity of comparable contexts" (97). It is difficult to situate the important finds from Tel Dor within larger regional or "global" trends without a more systematic assessment of the volume, type, and distribution of imports or imitations and how these might track with demographic changes (see, e.g., Murray 2017). Since a core claim of the book is that the Mediterranean-wide connections of the Iron Age "eclipsed the previous interactions" of the second millennium BCE in scale and scope (xiii), a methodical review of the relevant archaeological evidence for these connections in both periods is necessary.Hodos's brief discussion of slavery and the slave trade in the Iron Age Mediterranean (141–42) is a reminder that increased connectivity and mobility does not necessarily benefit everyone: as citizens of the global twenty-first century are well aware, surging flows of goods, ideas, and people can also create new forms of inequality. In general, the differential effects of "globalization" on different populations could be explored more thoroughly throughout the volume: as Ian Morris has observed, "globalization has created winners and new losers; Mediterraneanization did the same" (Morris 2003; see also López-Ruiz 2021: 7–8). Hodos's tone throughout reads as largely celebratory: the Iron Age is summarized as a period that is "incredibly vibrant, dynamic, active, and rapidly changing" (217). While this doubtlessly captures much truth about the multicultural Iron Age Mediterranean world, I found myself wondering: Vibrant for whom? Evidence for Iron Age slavery is admittedly sparse, but further work in this chapter and elsewhere about the new forms of dependent labor and social difference that may have accompanied increased connectivity would have furthered the analytical usefulness of the metaphor of globalization.Chapter 5 addresses the urban built environment. Hodos reviews the evidence for urban planning, settlement organization, and architecture from both the Phoenician and Greek homelands and their overseas settlements. Although Phoenician settlements in the central and western Mediterranean share certain formal characteristics and features, they also display internal diversity. The tophet (a ritual precinct for the disposal of child and animal remains), for example, is not evinced archaeologically in the Levant but appears to have specifically developed in a central Mediterranean Punic and Phoenician context (North Africa, Sardinia, Sicily, and Malta), with local variations and meanings in each of these places (161–62). The evidence for Iron Age Greek settlements is also summarized, though with some unusual emphases. The extraordinarily large and short-lived tenth-century BCE apsidal building at Lefkandi with which Hodos begins her discussion is hardly a typical example of Iron Age Greek "urbanization" (162–64): this building, which may have been a purpose-built funerary structure rather than a residence, has no known parallels in the Greek world. In discussing Iron Age urban developments, Hodos takes a middle ground: she rejects the idea that local populations passively responded to "Hellenization" and "Orientalization" but also stresses that the movement of Greeks and Phoenicians was a crucial stimulus for changes in the organization and architecture of settlements. This could involve either local engagements with or explicit rejection of external influences. Examples from Sicily, Sardinia, Gaul, and Iberia help to illustrate these points.Chapter 6 turns to alphabetic writing, emphasizing its role in both Mediterranean-wide communication and local identity formation. The Phoenician and Greek alphabets are discussed, with emphasis on the archaeological evidence for the origins, spread, and cultural deployment of these different writing systems. Not all Mediterranean regions embraced alphabetic writing. In first-millennium BCE Cyprus, for example, some agents continued to use a local Cypriot syllabary to write Greek and other languages as late as the Hellenistic period rather than adopting the Phoenician alphabet brought to the island in the ninth century BCE—a phenomenon that Hodos convincingly interprets as a deliberate and self-conscious act of regional self-definition. In the western Mediterranean, Etruscan, Tartessian, and Sicilian scripts provide further examples of how Greek and Phoenician alphabets were adopted and adapted to suit local contexts. The chapter concludes with two case studies of two inscribed artifacts—the Aristothonos krater and the San Paolo olpe—that testify to interactions between Greeks and Etruscans in the seventh century BCE.In the brief conclusion, Hodos returns to the eight criteria of global cultures mentioned above, reiterating that the Mediterranean Iron Age has "all the hallmarks of modern globalization" (220). The globalization analogy has been applied previously to the Roman Mediterranean, which was united under one political system during the Roman imperial period (e.g., Hingley 2005; Pitts and Versluys 2015). Hodos emphasizes that for the Iron Age, "cultural aspects of material, styles, and practices" motivate global connections (219; emphasis in the original). I remain skeptical that the term "globalization" is necessary to make the claims that (1) many regions of the Iron Age Mediterranean were connected by flows of people, goods, and ideas, and (2) different Iron Age populations participated in Mediterranean-wide or local trends to varying degrees. Moreover, I found that "globalization" did not provide a sufficient unifying theme for the volume. The number of regions and case studies discussed can be disorienting; marshalling this evidence to support more specific claims, rather than relying so heavily on the concept of a global Mediterranean, would have improved the book's clarity and cogency. Instead, some sentences are general to the point of meaninglessness: "The 'complex' of connectivities within a globalizing environment derives from the fact that the connections between diverse groups are multiple in number and nature . . . The connections between connected communities can be complex" (149).Despite these concerns, The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age pulls together much information and a wide-ranging bibliography that will serve as a helpful reference for those seeking to break out of "scholarly siloes" (xiii). Hodos's point about the unhelpful balkanization of the study of the ancient Mediterranean across multiple academic departments, raised multiple times throughout the volume, is particularly valuable (xiv–xv, 6–12). The fact that academic work on Greeks and Phoenicians in the early first millennium BCE takes place in different departments, is presented at different conferences, and is published in different journals is surely more a product of recent institutional and disciplinary history than of a commitment to better understand the ancient world. Yet it is also not necessarily feasible, or even desirable, for a single individual to become an expert in the archaeology of the entire Iron Age Mediterranean. Collaborative, interdisciplinary projects and edited volumes that synthesize the perspectives of those with deep local knowledge and that foster interdisciplinary discussion could provide one fruitful path forward (see, e.g., Hall and Osborne 2022). Whether or not one believes that globalization is a useful metaphor for the world of the first millennium BCE, successfully situating the difficult interpretive work of local archaeology within its broader geographical and temporal contexts should be a critical goal for all archaeologists and historians of the ancient Mediterranean.