Greek Iron Age Pottery in the Mediterranean World: Tracing Provenance and Socioeconomic Ties

This volume is the outcome of a large collaborative ceramic provenance project spearheaded by S. Gimatzidis, in which neutron activation analysis (NAA) is deployed to determine the manufacturing origin of Iron Age Greek pottery found at 24 sites around the Mediterranean. The goal of the project, and thus the subject explored across the various site-level case studies, is to reexamine the social and economic connections being developed between the Aegean and the rest of the Mediterranean world during this period (broadly defined in this volume as the twelfth–seventh centuries BCE) without resorting to traditional or one-sided narratives of colonization and ethnicity (i.e., interpretations of the ceramic record that assume “pots equal dominant people”). The volume explores the exchange, consumption, and manipulation of both ceramic styles and ceramic technologies, with a particular focus on contexts of the ninth and eighth centuries BCE.The first section of the volume (Chs. 1–3) is devoted to introducing the project and the broader topic of NAA and other ceramic provenance research in the Mediterranean. Chapter 2 (S. Gimatzidis and H. Mommsen) describes the development of a large database of NAA samples from around the Aegean and Mediterranean against which the 362 new samples collected for this project were compared, while Chapter 3 (Gimatzidis) provides a summary of the provenance results from those new samples. Chapter 2 in particular lays out the dual provenance questions that are circled around throughout the book: Where were certain supposedly regional wares produced and consumed? What was the regional origin and distribution pattern of mainland Greek pottery (in origin or in type) around the Mediterranean, particularly in colonial and/or Phoenician contexts?The remainder of the book, with the exception of the concluding chapter, is devoted to site and regional case studies, in which the Greek Iron Age pottery that was subjected to NAA is placed into its archaeological and regional research context. Chapters 4–7 examine sites and regions in the Aegean and its Balkan hinterlands. These chapters focus on three categories of pottery whose manufacturing origins and exchange networks are still under debate: K-22 ware (a northern Aegean product probably produced in Macedonian centers), Protogeometric/Geometric transport amphoras (P/GTAs), and pendant semicircle (PSC) skyphoi. The NAA shows that K-22 ware, while originating in central Macedonia, was being produced locally in separate microregions throughout the northern Aegean and even inland in the Balkans (Ch. 5, A. Bozkova and Gimatzidis). In contrast, PTAs were produced exclusively in the northern Aegean (at many of the same sites as K-22 ware but likely in different workshops) and consumed throughout the broader region (including in East Locris, discussed in Ch. 6 S. Jalkotzy-Deger and Gimatzidis). Analysis at multiple sites in the northern Aegean and at Klazomenai (Ch. 7, R. Vaessen and Y. E. Ersoy) also demonstrates that PSC vessels were frequently produced locally rather than being Euboean imports, as was often assumed previously.Chapters 8 and 9 examine the provenance of Greek pottery from Campania (F. Mermati) and Sicilian Naxos (M. C. Lentini), respectively. In these cases, the authors consider types of Greek pottery that are often associated in historical narratives with Greek colonization in the central Mediterranean, with a particular focus on Euboean and Corinthian types. In both cases, NAA demonstrates that the majority of Greek-style pottery was produced locally rather than being imported. Previous estimates of imported Euboean pottery in particular, based on macroscopic analysis, are likely much too high. In both regions, local pottery workshops would instead have been established and active from the earliest phases of colonization.Chapters 10–13 examine the Greek pottery found at Phoenician sites in the western Mediterranean, both on the Iberian coast (Chs. 10 E. García Alfonso and 11 F. González de Canales, J. Llompart, and A. Montaño) and in two areas of Utica in Tunisia (Chs. 12 J. L. López Castro et al. and 13 I. Ben Jerbania). These chapters use the Greek pottery to rethink trade networks in the Mediterranean and the question of how foreign pottery types were incorporated into Phoenician practices, particularly those of ritual drinking and feasting. NAA demonstrates that, while some of the Euboean-style imports are from the Aegean, many are likely from central Italian workshops and appear along with Italian and Sardinian pottery, indicating strong economic ties with the central Mediterranean. These chapters also address the problem of competing chronologies within the Mediterranean that affect both the dating of Phoenician colonial foundations and our understanding of regional interactions between multiple groups. In particular, as more radiocarbon dates are produced from Iron Age levels in the Aegean and other areas of the Mediterranean, it has been argued that the conventional dates derived from the sequence of Greek pottery need to be revised upward through at least the Late Geometric period (see Ch.10 in particular for discussion of new radiocarbon dates from Iberian sites; Gimatzidis and Weninger 2020; Alagich et al. 2024).Chapters 14 and 15 examine the Greek pottery from an Iron Age temple at Sidon (Gimatzidis and C. Doumet-Serhal) and the al-Bass cemetery at Tyre (F. J. Núñez), complementing the picture painted at Phoenician sites in the western Mediterranean. In both of these cases, the Greek-style pottery was overwhelmingly represented by drinking vessels, used in Phoenician ritualized dining and drinking practices, both cultic and mortuary. The Aegean and Aegeanizing pottery make up a very small portion of the total assemblages and appear to have been used in the same ways as accompanying Phoenician-style ceramics, indicating that their value may have lain to some extent in their foreignness rather than their specific Greekness. NAA shows that the majority of the Greek pottery sampled is Euboean in both style and in manufacture, in direct contrast to the provenance of the Euboean-style pottery at Phoenician sites in the western Mediterranean.Chapter 16 (Gimatzidis) draws together some of the major threads that emerge out of the various case studies and particularly from the larger NAA project. It highlights the overarching goals of the project: (1) to examine the production and dissemination of Aegean ceramic technology and types around the Mediterranean through determining the provenance of as broad a range of Aegean ceramic types and fabrics as possible, and (2) to pinpoint regions of ceramic origin that are often left out of conversations about interregional exchange. These aims and the problems of relative dating of colonial foundations and cultural interactions that are explored throughout the volume lead to the conclusion that we need to reconsider traditional narratives of Greek colonization and particularly the precolonial phase in the central Mediterranean in light of the more complicated picture of economic and social exchanges that this research reveals.This volume is a valuable contribution to a number of ongoing conversations in regional ceramic studies around the Mediterranean. Its major strength is its geographical breadth, especially in incorporating the western Mediterranean regions that are too often left out of considerations of the distribution of Greek pottery and/or split off into Phoenician and Punic studies. Particularly useful are the multiple discussions of the need to consider the context in which Greek pottery appears in the Iron Age at Phoenician sites for the purposes of interpretation. Authors emphasize the ways in which the Greek pottery and, later, local imitations met local cultural needs and market demands rather than prioritizing a reading of the objects as culturally Greek. The detailed contextual site and regional studies combined with the quantitative approach of NAA therefore provide new avenues into thinking about the social and economic ties binding together the entire Mediterranean rather than just the parts of it labeled “Greek” or, even more narrowly, part of the “Euboean koine.” The volume also exposes the different types of conversations and research questions that archaeologists are having across geographical and disciplinary boundaries, with the discussions of incompatible chronologies in particular highlighting areas in Greek archaeology in need of both new work and the reevaluation of old evidence.Underlying the problem of regional chronological concordances, however, there are some methodological issues that the volume does not grapple with in any meaningful way. For example, the finely divided Attic sequence is used as the basis for Iron Age Aegean relative and absolute chronologies throughout the volume (8) (Coldstream 2008: 330), with only occasional reference to the Euboean sequence for particular ceramic types, especially when material of Middle Geometric II–Late Geometric I date is referenced (whether of specifically Attic style/origin or not). While this approach is understandable within the context of the wider Mediterranean, where a single Aegean sequence can facilitate comparison with the Phoenician or local sequences (and some aspects of the technical and historical problems involved are discussed in this volume), the practice is somewhat baffling in the context of Gimatzidis’s discussions of the ceramics of the northern Aegean and its hinterlands (Chs. 4 and 5). Discussions of these case studies ignore the existence of many regional sequences within the Aegean and take this Attic sequence and its specific internal subdivisions (e.g., Late Geometric Ia) as self-evident. Similarly unexplained is how, more broadly, southern Aegean stylistic phasing terminology is applied to the Macedonian sites and local pottery production under discussion. What defines the Protogeometric phase at Polichni as Protogeometric, for example? Is this a specific phase within the regional Macedonian sequence defined by local adoptions of specific styles or other material shifts, or is it a chronological period equivalent to the Attic or Euboean Protogeometric phases? In other words, what does it mean to use a chronological labeling scheme for sites or regions that are not culturally or ceramically invested in producing the same markers as the southern Aegean regions for which this terminological system was developed (see Van Damme and Lis 2024: 1285–86)?Equally, Gimatzidis’s choice to introduce his recently proposed high chronology for the Aegean Iron Age based on radiocarbon dates from Sindos (Gimatzidis and Weninger 2020) and then to set the matter of absolute dates aside because of the regional differences between the volume’s contributions seems like something of a wasted opportunity to further interrogate the relationship between style, form, and origins of pottery in comparing local chronologies and tracing interregional interactions over time. If ceramics are used as a proxy for both the date and geographical bounds of the social exchange networks through which they flowed as culturally encoded objects, then updated provenance or chronological information has major implications for our holistic reading of the wider archaeological record. Besides the explicit attention paid to chronologies in light of new radiocarbon dates at western Mediterranean sites in Chapters 10 and 12, the only other place in the volume that considers the implications of expanding a stylistic phase in the Aegean sequence is in the discussion of Koprivlen in Bulgaria (Ch. 5). Here, the authors point out that an extension of the Late Geometric Ia phase beyond a single decade would result in the appearance of northern Aegean–style pottery at the site being a slow process of contact and adaptation of a set of new styles and technologies rather than their quick imposition from a dominant Aegean core (171). In addition to producing additional radiocarbon dates from more stratified Iron Age contexts around the Aegean in order to solidify this higher chronology, therefore, we also need to consider the methodological and theoretical relationship between ceramic styles and periodization in contexts of cultural interaction.Some of these oversights are, I think, related to the much larger and more pervasive problem with the framing of the volume as an antidote to traditional culture-historical narratives of colonization movements and the assigning of ethnic identities in the archaeological landscape via ceramic styles. Gimatzidis, in his role as editor and as leader of the NAA project, argues that his intention is to place new empirical evidence about the geochemical origins of pottery within more nuanced discussions of their social contexts of exchange and consumption, without falling into old Hellenocentric and colonialist patterns of thought about perceived centers imposing styles or practices on supposed peripheries (Ch. 1). However, the volume then proceeds to treat certain groups and regions as culturally, demographically, and regionally self-evident, rather than as historically contingent categories that were internally diverse and fragmented during the Iron Age. “Greek” and “Phoenician” are the two most prominent examples of this, with little engagement with the now-extensive bibliography about the formation of these categories (happening largely after the period with which this volume is concerned) and with their modern constructions in scholarship (e.g., Hall 2002; López-Ruiz 2021). Greece as the origin of the Greeks who produced the Greek pottery with which this volume is primarily concerned is implied to be the southern and central mainland and Euboea, with almost no acknowledgment of the Aegean islands or the Dodecanese. In the discussions of the northern Aegean, Macedonia as a region and Macedonian identity are broadly undefined, again with the sense that the readership for the volume shares an understanding of the geographical and political boundaries and cultural identities that these encompass. Similarly, the utilization of the term “colony” for new foundations by Greek and Phoenician groups in the northern Aegean and in the Mediterranean does not receive any technical definition, with the resulting impression of unilateral imposition of a Greek or Phoenician identity at the sites in question even when local populations were also co-habitants. This would seem to contradict the intent of the volume’s framing and largely ignores the extensive bibliography on colonial interactions in the Mediterranean during this period in time (e.g., Hodos 2006).Most problematic in light of the stated goals of the volume is the labeling throughout of local populations with whom these Greeks and Phoenicians came into contact in the northern Aegean and Mediterranean as Indigenous. Presumably this terminology was chosen as an alternative to the more usual application of particular but anachronistic ethnic labels from later historical sources onto the Iron Age archaeological record, with the specific formal choice of capitalization driven by current discourse (see Younging 2018: 77–81; Derbew 2022: 10–16) and, more directly, by the Cambridge University Press (CUP) style guide’s section on inclusive language. The result in this context, however, is to present a sense of a homogenous Other with which colonizing Greeks and Phoenicians came into contact all around the Mediterranean but by whom they were not significantly influenced in their maintenance of Greekness and Phoenicianness in their new homes, itself an explicitly colonialist labeling strategy (Given 1998: 6). As a result of trying to get away from the traditional ethnic labeling practices of culture-historical archaeology without introducing another theoretical framing for the analysis of group identity and material agency of the various populations under discussion, the volume instead erases all diversity of identity and, as a result, reinforces the very binary thinking that it claims to challenge. The periodic use of language of migration and diffusion in explanations of the spread of ceramic forms and technologies across cultural borders is therefore also especially jarring (e.g., 173, 480).While some of these critiques are directed at weaknesses of the current volume as a unified project with specific stated goals (though not necessarily of all contributions), they are also indicative of some of the cracks that appear when quantitative or scientific searches for origins, particularly over a large geographic or chronological scale, are paired with questions of specific sociological identity and material agency. In many ways, this seems like the result of research questions that are typically approached from divergent theoretical and methodological starting points and that do not have the scope in a volume of this nature to converge into more than the sum of its parts. Focusing on the manufacture and movement of pottery that is identified based on formal stylistic categories, and found at sites already framed by a particular historical narrative of colonization, pushes interpretation towards a reliance on essentializing and homogenizing cultural categories. The individual human actors who are taking agency over their material choices by consuming imports, deciding to set up workshops locally, and adapting foreign styles and shapes to local cultural needs do not have much place at this scale (with a few exceptions, e.g., Ch. 8, 268). The individual case studies can and do mitigate some of these problems by providing contextual and diachronic perspectives on the larger research questions, but their ability to shed light on local negotiations of social identity through differential production and consumption of certain ceramic types is still constrained by the project’s focus on a small subset of the pottery found at each site (and the Greek pottery forms a very small percentage of the pottery at the Phoenician sites in particular). Counterproductively, this may mean that the volume is most usefully consumed in discrete regional sections rather than as a whole. Overall, therefore, this volume forms a useful starting point for more nuanced research even while lacking much of that nuance itself.The organization of the NAA results is fragmented across the volume, resulting in a certain repetitiveness of information, particularly between the case study chapters and Chapters 2 and 3, which provide an overview of the sampled pottery and their geochemical groups. Waiting to read Chapter 3 in detail until after reading the case study chapters that provide context for the pottery samples in question may make more sense for many readers, particularly if they are not ceramic and/or regional specialists. The information about the samples can be difficult to piece together across the volume, which may also prove frustrating to readers who are interested in specific results: detailed contextual catalogs of samples are included at the end of each case study chapter, separate from their discussions in the preliminary chapters and conclusions as well as from the catalog of NAA samples located at the end of the volume. Such fragmentation and repetition mean that readers interested in the results from a specific site need to cross-reference across at least three sections of the volume in order to make sure that they have all of the relevant geochemical and archaeological information about the samples. Additional visualization of these results would also have been helpful. The drawbacks of distribution maps of specific types of pottery are touched upon in Chapter 6 (200), but maps of at least some of the geochemical groups of known origin (e.g., the Euboean EuA and the of the ceramic samples to would have the discussions of distribution patterns around the is a volume, with very few or other are a of formal about visualization that can be for which more on the production of the volume than on its of the particularly in the first of the volume, are or are in and but of some of the are on is not are in under two in the of the for the of the rather than being and on the These do not appear to be included in the of the on the Cambridge which this is and the to the in the therefore a different part of This seems like an of the of particularly for a major like and it likely result in of engagement with this by these the NAA results that are are useful and other avenues for further particularly around the spread of forms and styles through the of and other of technical and rather than the of the The volume as a as a to interregional across the Mediterranean world and and a useful and for of this