Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean
(Volume 18)
Edited by
Linda R. Gosner [+–]
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Jeremy Hayne [+–]
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
Local Experiences of Connectivity and Mobility in the Ancient West-Central Mediterranean brings together a series of papers that explore theoretical and material approaches to connectivity and mobility in the ancient Central and Western Mediterranean. The diverse contributions span the period of the Late Bronze Age through the Late Roman period and focus on locales across the central-western Mediterranean region, specifically Iberia, Southern France, North Africa, Italy, Sicily, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and Corsica. Case studies are grouped around the themes of people, things, and landscapes. Focusing on the small-scale picture, they illuminate local experiences of connectivity and mobility that run “against the grain” of more usual large-scale narratives of Greek, Phoenician, Carthaginian, and Roman contact and colonization in the west. Taken together, the chapters demonstrate the value of dialogue across regional and national divides that have traditionally fragmented research in these regions. Further, they bring out the common themes that emerge when approaching connectivity and mobility from a broad diachronic perspective when not confined by traditional divisions between prehistory and the classical period. The book highlights the work of emerging scholars, framed by discussions by prominent scholars in the field, combining deep expertise with fresh perspectives and new approaches to connectivity and mobility in the ancient world.
Table of Contents
Prelims
List of Figures vii-ix
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
Preface
Preface xi-xiii
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
Chapter 1
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
This introductory chapter presents the aims, themes, and theoretical underpinnings of this book, which fill gaps in current research on mobility and connectivity. We argue that research should pay increasing attention to small-scale, and regional perspectives as well as to landscapes and contexts of colonization beyond only urban and coastal areas to illuminate the experiences of diverse local communities who were perhaps only obliquely affected by large the scale movements of Phoenicians, Greeks, Carthaginians, and Romans. Further we believe that by focusing on the West-Central Mediterranean from comparative, longue dureé perspectives can help to bridge traditional research divides along national lines and between prehistoric and classical archaeology. A discussion of our overall rationale for the work is followed by a brief overview of the volume’s contributions, including discussion of the three main thematic sections on human movement, material connectivity, and landscapes.
Part I: Human Movement, Mobility, and Migration
University of Michigan
Giulia Saltini Semerari is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Assistant Curator at the Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Her main research interest is Mediterranean connectivity, in particular, the methodological and conceptual challenges of understanding the interplay between local social changes and broad Mediterranean-wide shifts. She initiated and directed an international, collaborative project applying a spectrum of bioarchaeological and archaeological analyses to indigenous and early colonial cemeteries in southern Italy. She is the vice-director of the fieldschool at the indigenous-Greek site of Incoronata (southern Italy), where she is also studies metal finds.
From the end of the Bronze Age to the Archaic period, southern Italy saw dramatic shifts in connectivity as did the rest of the Mediterranean. Here, I discuss the results of a series of bioarchaeological analyses aimed at identifying demographic changes linked to Greek colonization of southern Italy, a key migration phenomenon dated to the 8th-7th centuries BC. Results point to long-term, two-way interactions between southern Italian communities and migrants from across the Aegean. Yet challenges remain in teasing out recurring migration waves and sustained, small-scale mobility between southern Italy and other Mediterranean regions through bioarchaeological analyses. A comprehensive reconstruction of long-term regional diachronic changes in connectivity allows us address these challenges, clarify the interpretation of bioarchaeological analyses, and use them to their full potential by allowing their results to become part of an integrated historical narrative.
3. Human Mobility between Italy and Northeastern Hispania during the Late Republican Period [+–] 59-85
University of Victoria
Alejandro G. Sinner is Associate Professor in the Department of Greek and Roman Studies at the University of Victoria. His research covers the social, economic, and cultural history of Hispania, from the late Iron Age to the early Imperial period. His research and publications explore Ibero-Roman material culture, trade, connectivity and mobility, demography, Palaeohispanic languages, and the construction of identities and the processes of cultural contact and cultural change in ancient colonial contexts.
Mobility and connectivity are core components of archaeological research in the Iberian Peninsula. Two diametrically opposed positions predominate. The first one argues that an important influx of Italians, a ‘migratory flow,’ settled in Hispania after the Second Punic War. The second position minimizes the scale of migratory flows to the Iberian Peninsula. In this chapter, I examine the epigraphic record (2nd-early 1st c. BC) of five Republican cities in northeast Spain as well as numismatic and genetic evidence. I argue that, in the northeast of the Iberian Peninsula, a large degree of long-distance mobility is inferred when in reality what we see is a limited mobility that sustained a high degree of connectivity. Permanent mobility did exist, but was minimal and concentrated primarily in Tarraco. The chapter shows the importance of studying connectivity and mobility outside the traditional large-scale colonization narratives, paying attention to regional studies and to how local communities experienced immigration.
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
The intensification of mining in Iberia following Roman conquest catalyzed episodes of migration and movement of materials in ways that stimulated both regional and empire-wide connectivity. This chapter explores diachronic changes in the movement of people and goods in and out of Roman mining districts in the Iberian Peninsula, focusing first on Republican southeast Iberia and second on early imperial southwest Iberia. Tracing these changes ultimately sheds light on the organization of labor, the complexities of local and imperial economies, and the lived experience of empire in the mining landscapes of Iberia as it was incorporated into the Roman Empire.
Part II: Material Interactions and Connections
Independent Scholar
Anthony Russell graduated in 2011 from the University of Glasgow with a PhD in archaeology. His research interests include the Middle and Late Bronze Age in the central Mediterranean, cross-cultural consumption, materiality, globalization, and intangible heritage. For the past twelve years he has been involved in culture resource management in both Scotland and western Canada. He is currently a permit-holding archaeologist for the provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan, and for the Northwest Territories.
The late second millennium BC represented a high-water mark for pre-colonial material connections in the central Mediterranean. A globalization perspective, however, does not represent a good analytical ‘fit’ for the period, given the region’s lack of hyper-connectivity, or the intensive interdependencies that globalization demands. The evidence for contact is neither plentiful nor intense enough to facilitate useful analogies between the present and this period of the past. Nevertheless, certain concepts drawn from globalization studies may provide novel interpretations that avoid anachronistic pitfalls. Examining material changes through the lens of Nederveen Pieterse’s (2015: 45-59) ‘paradigms’ of cultural globalization (culture clash, McDonaldization, and hybridization) opens new avenues of interpretation that do not require prolonged or direct contact. This study employs Middle-Late Bronze Age archaeological assemblages from Sicily (i.e., architecture at Thapsos, and Pantalica North pottery) to demonstrate how each paradigm has interpretive value regarding changing material practices, and the communities involved.
6. ‘The Missing link’? Sardinia, Corsica, and Italy: Their Connections in the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages [+–] 137-165
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
While recent scholarship has highlighted the multi-directional interactions and networks involving the various communities across the whole of the west Mediterranean during the Late Bronze (LBA) and Iron Ages (IA), some islands remain ambiguous players, often presented as disconnected. Two examples are Sardinia and Corsica, which, although geographically adjacent have very different (pre)histories. Sardinia played an active role in EIA exchanges with the Italian peninsula, while Corsica, despite being along the same route, has a less clear role. Taking a long-term approach, this chapter examines Corsica’s function in the exchanges via a ‘network thinking’ model. Focusing on the interactions between northern Sardinia, Corsica and the Italian peninsula it examines local connectivities through the LBA and EIA. It concludes that connections are not only dependent on geography but are also determined by a multitude of factors involving shifts in the social and economic situations of the different participants.
7. The Business of ‘Becoming’: Connectivity, Trade, and Community Formation in the Northwest Mediterranean [+–] 166-184
American Academy for the Advancement of Science
Catherine Steidl is a Science and Technology Policy Fellow at the American Academy for the Advancement of Science in Washington, D.C. Her primary research interests include the dynamics of community and identity in the first millennium BC Mediterranean, with particular attention to the northwestern Mediterranean and western Anatolia, and the fundamental role migration has played in shaping the sociocultural landscape of the basin over the longue durée.
The coastal regions of southern France and northeastern Spain are well-known for intensive connectivity with Mediterranean traders during the first millennium BC. The interaction of local communities with accompanying commodities has received much attention. What has received less attention is the interplay between connectivities with the greater Mediterranean region and local layers of identity on the (micro-) scales. What did the landscape of community identities in the region look like, and what was the social experience of individuals living in different settlements—coastal emporia, inland trading settlements, and other sites with less commercial focus? Using evidence from contact with the wider Mediterranean to illuminate local spheres of interaction, this paper explores the development of regional community identity. It argues that, despite shared characteristics across the region, the primary sense of communal identity would have been focused around settlements and their immediate environs, articulated by daily social experiences and interactions.
8. A Shotgun Wedding? Culture Mixing as Phoenician Mercantile Strategy in the Bay of Cadiz (ca. 800-600 BC) [+–] 185-211
University of Seville
Antonio Saez Romero is Assistant Professor of Archaeology at the University of Seville (Spain), and his research focuses on Phoenician-Punic economies, and in particular maritime trade, pottery studies, and experimental archaeology. His doctoral dissertation (University of Cadiz, 2014) addressed the post-Archaic to early Roman maritime-oriented economy of Gadir through the study of amphorae and a significant set of pottery workshops and fish-processing sites. He has been involved in fieldwork and projects in Portugal, Morocco, Gibraltar, Italy, and Greece, and is currently conducting research related to Punic trade and amphoras in the Aegean and the Eastern Mediterranean.
Independent Scholar
Philip Johnston is an independent scholar and entrepreneur currently living in Southeast Alabama. His academic research sits at the intersection of historical archaeology, archaeometry and postcolonial theory. His doctoral dissertation (Harvard University, 2015) used chemical and petrographic analysis of ceramics to outline a ‘colonial economic history’ of the Iron Age in the Bay of Cadiz. His fieldwork and writing focus on the Bronze and Iron Ages in the Levant, Spain, and Sardinia with an emphasis on the Phoenician diaspora.
Our paper examines the evidence for rapid hybridization that marks the earliest phases of Phoenician presence in the Bay of Cadiz in c. 800-600 BC. As early as 700 BC, we argue, a local culture had already appeared that was no longer Phoenician or Iberian, but already gadirita. To support this, a wide array of evidence is examined, including ceramic production, domestic and funerary architecture and consumption patterns, as well as genetic data. Drawing on postcolonial thought and direct historical analogies from other Semitic cultures, we suggest that the social developments in the Bay of Cádiz were not just side effects of culture contact, but part of an intentional strategy of cultural mixing that was deployed by Phoenicians as a means of improving their economic prospects in the Iron Age Bay of Cadiz.
Part III: Landscapes of Connectivity and Mobility
9. Isolation and Connectivity: The Maghrib and the Mediterranean in the 1st Millennium BC [+–] 215-239
University of Michigan
David L. Stone is Lecturer II in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. He studies issues of landscape archaeology, urbanism, and the economy in North Africa and is the main author of Leptiminus (Lamta). Report no. 3, the Field Survey (2011) and Mortuary Landscapes of North Africa (2007). Since 2014 he has directed field surveys analyzing the cities and countrysides of Olynthos and Pella in northern Greece.
This chapter challenges current conceptions of connectivity and isolation as applied to the Maghrib region of North Africa. It argues that North Africa’s integration with the western Mediterranean during the entirety of the first millennium BC should not now be in question, despite recent assessments to the contrary. I draw on recent archaeological field research at Althiburos and other sites to demonstrate new evidence in areas of in feasting, fortifications, and funerary practices. More specifically, I reject the arguments that the region remained isolated from the rest of the Mediterranean until Phoenicians, Greeks, and Romans arrived. Instead, we can now identify interaction with the rest of the Mediterranean from the sixth millennium BC. My focus lies on key phases of interaction in the first millennium BC in which we should no longer regard Africans playing inferior roles.
10. At the Margins of ‘Orientalization’: Funerary Ritual and Local Practice in Apennine Central Italy [+–] 240-266
University of Texas at San Antonio
Jessica Nowlin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Classics at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Her most recent work, Etruscan Orientalization, interrogates the historiography of the term ‘orientalizing’ within European scholarship on early Etruscan history. Currently a co-direct of the Sinis Archaeological Project, she has published on burial practices, exchange, and connectivity in central Italy and Sardinia. Her approaches to research and fieldwork include network analysis, quantitative methods, GIS applications, photogrammetry, and digital methods of archaeological recording.
Study of trade has often focused on urban nodes of connectivity, omitting rural communities. This is particularly the case for the ‘Orientalizing’ period of the 8th and 7th centuries BC, whose study has focused on the objects, ideas, and practices from the eastern Mediterranean that were believed to exert tremendous influence on local Italian communities, particularly those along the Tyrrhenian coast. This chapter utilizes the framework of rural globalization to articulate the distinctions between the presence of imported objects, changes in material culture, and alterations in cultural practice by focusing on two inland sites, Fossa and Campovalano, within the Apennine mountains. This examination of local responses within the Italian interior, an area at the geographic edges of effects from the Orientalizing period, demonstrates the importance of exploring the limits of Mediterranean connectivity and contextualizing the impact of greater foreign contact within an understanding of local practice and regional networks.
University of Barcelona
Catalina Mas Florit is Associate Professor of Classical and Late Antique Archaeology in the Department of History and Archaeology at the University of Barcelona. Her research examines the transformation of landscapes with particular interests in island systems and rural areas in the Western Mediterranean. She is co-director of the excavations at the Roman city of Pollentia (Mallorca) and the Roman villa of Llorís (Catalonia). She co-edited the book (with M.A. Cau), Change and Resilience. The Occupation of Mediterranean Islands in Late Antiquity (2019) and published La transformación del mundo rural en la isla de Mallorca durante la Antigüedad tardía (c. 300-902/903 d.C.) (2021).
The Balearic Islands lie in a strategic position for navigation and trade in the western Mediterranean, as was recognized by ancient populations of the Mediterranean basin. Over the centuries, maritime routes have facilitated the movement of goods, people, and ideas between the Balearics Islands and other territories. This paper offers an overview of how contact between Balearic society and different Mediterranean powers from the Roman period to the end of antiquity resulted in a series of transformations of local communities, settlement patterns, and landscapes. Another section of the paper is focused on how Christianity transformed landscapes, settlement patterns, beliefs, and mindscapes of local society. The role of maritime and terrestrial routes in the Christianization process and the agency of monastic communities within Mediterranean trade and the redistribution of goods to local communities are also addressed.
Part IV: Breaking Boundaries, Moving Forward
Brown University
Peter van Dommelen is Joukowsky Family Professor in Archaeology and Professor of Anthropology at Brown University. His research focuses on the western Mediterranean and the Phoenician-Punic world, with a particular interest in colonialism and culture contact as well as rural life and landscape, both past and present. He is actively involved in fieldwork and ceramic studies in Sardinia and Mediterranean Spain and his most recent books are, with Carlos Gómez Bellard, Rural Landscapes of the Punic World, Monographs in Mediterranean Archaeology 11 (London: Equinox, 2008) and, co-edited with A. Bernard Knapp, Material Connections in the Ancient Mediterranean (London: Routledge, 2010).
Universitat de Barcelona
Miguel Ángel Cau Ontiveros is ICREA Research Professor, director of the Institut d’Arqueologia as well as the Equip de Recerca Arqueològica i Arqueomètrica at the Universitat de Barcelona, and chercheur associée at Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, CCJ, Aix-en-Provence, France. He is an archaeologist focusing on Roman and Late Antique Archaeology in the Western Mediterranean, and in pottery studies including archaeometry. One of his main interests is to investigate the transformation of the Roman world in Mediterranean islands. He co-directs the excavations at the Roman and Late Antique city of Pollentia (Alcúdia, Mallorca), and the Early Christian complex of Son Peretó (Manacor, Mallorca).
In this chapter, we present two short vignettes: Publius Cornelius Scipios’ siege of Ibiza and the uprising led by Hampsicoras in Sardinia, both during the Second Punic War. These stories serve to highlight how local histories altered the trajectory of larger histories of connectivity in the Western Mediterranean. We then reflect on the major themes of the volume, including connectivity, mobility, and hybridity, considering past scholarship and highlighting the contributions of individual volume chapters to these themes.
University of Bristol
Tamar Hodos is Professor of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Bristol. She is a world authority on the archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age and the application of globalization theory to past contexts. She has a particular interest in highlighting the individuals and groups making and distributing luxuries, in contrast to the production processes and elite users that other luxury research explores. She is also an active field archaeologist in Turkey and Israel). Her most recent books include The Archaeology of the Mediterranean Iron Age (Cambridge University Press 2020) and The Routledge Handbook of Globalization and Archaeology (Routledge 2017).
University of Chicago
Carolina López-Ruiz is Professor of the History of Religions, Comparative Mythology, and the Ancient Mediterranean World at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Her work focuses on cultural contact in the ancient Mediterranean, the Phoenicians, and Greek and Near Eastern mythology. Her books include Colonial Encounters in Ancient Iberia: Phoenician, Greek, and Indigenous Relations (2009, with Michael Dietler), Tartessos and the Phoenicians in Iberia (2016, Spanish version 2020, co-authored with Sebastián Celestino), and The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019, co-edited with Brian Doak). In Phoenicians and the Making of the Mediterranean (2021) she offers an appraisal of cultural contact and the Phoenician’s agency during the ‘orientalizing’ period.
This essay reflects upon the individual essays in this collection and considers how their deliberately local focus both informs and is informed by broader pan-Mediterranean frameworks, especially ‘post-Braudelian’ and globalization paradigms. As a result, it outlines a number of key observations about future directions: ‘izations’ (e.g. Romanization, Orientalization, Hellenization, etc.) are the result of complex processes of hybridization at the local and regional level, which are also inseparable from the increased wider connectivity; the exchange of ideas or goods is not inevitable or reducible to geographical or environmental conditions; exchange is not always fluid or symmetrical; the economic cannot be divorced from the socio-cultural impacts of complex connections within globalization/globalizing networks. As such, it argues that meta-narratives that have characterized Mediterranean-wide interpretations must be re-examined and recalibrated to account for globalization-style connectivities, which are truly local in their enacting.
14. A Place for the Local [+–] 320-332
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
This conclusion reiterates our main themes across the volume, including our foci on local experiences, on small scale and regional connectivity, and on bridging traditional research divides—chronological, national, and disciplinary. It concludes with a comment on the editorial decisions we made when putting together the volume and several suggestions for how local perspectives contribute to major research questions moving forward.
End Matter
Index 333-353
Texas Tech University
Linda R. Gosner is Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology at Texas Tech University. Her research centers on local responses to Roman imperialism in rural and industrial landscapes of the Western Mediterranean. In particular, she studies the impact of empire on technology, craft production, labor practices, economies, and everyday life in provincial communities. Linda’s primary research and current book project examines the transformation of mining communities and landscapes in the Iberian Peninsula following Roman conquest. In addition to ongoing research and fieldwork in Spain and Portugal, Linda has co-directed the Sinis Archaeological Project in West-Central Sardinia since 2018 and worked as a core collaborator with the Progetto S’Urachi since 2013. Across these varied projects, Linda’s work engages with broad questions about human-environment interaction, community and identity, labor history, mobility, and culture contact. Linda holds a PhD from the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World at Brown University.
Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan
Jeremy Hayne is an independent researcher who also works at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan. His research interests cover the western Mediterranean Iron Age and Classical and Phoenician/Punic periods, focusing on identity, culture contact, and gender. He is an active archaeologist currently working for the S’Urachi fieldwork project in western Sardinia. Recent publications have appeared in The Oxford Handbook of the Phoenician and Punic Mediterranean (2019) and Babesch.
