The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World (original) (raw)

Abstract

The Oxford History of the Archaic Greek World (OHAGW) Brief Project Description project directors: Paul Cartledge (Cambridge University), Paul Christesen (Dartmouth College) The Archaic Greek world was remarkable for its diversity. As Greeks dispersed throughout the Mediterranean basin, the different environmental and human ecosystems they encountered almost inevitably led to important differences among widely scattered communities. Moreover, even communities situated relatively close to one another often responded in remarkably different ways to similar demographic, political, social, and economic challenges. At the same time, Greek communities had important commonalities, most notably language, and were bound together by a loosely structured but highly active network of commercial, cultural, diplomatic, and military ties. Diversity and uniformity are thus key issues for a broad range of scholarship on the Archaic Greek world. There is, nonetheless, a long-established tendency to focus attention on a limited number of communities, most notably Athens. That tendency has been frequently lamented, and with good reason: it implicitly homogenizes and inevitably impoverishes our perceptions of the Greek world. Decades of excavation and scholarship have greatly enriched our knowledge of dozens of Archaic Greek communities. The resulting information, however, has not been integrated and synthesized as regularly as it should be, for a variety of reasons. Of particular importance is the fact that much of this information is scattered among hundreds of publications. Even in cases where individual communities, such as Corinth and Miletus, have been the subject of scholarly monographs, the resulting publications take widely varying approaches with respect to the types of evidence considered and the methodologies used. The resulting lack of commensurability makes integration and synthesis difficult. OHAGW will provide detailed studies of 32 sites, sanctuaries, and regions in Greece during the Archaic period. Each essay in OHAGW will be built around the same set of eleven rubrics, so that it will be possible to read either vertically (reading a complete study of a single site) or horizontally (reading, for example, about the economic history of a number of different sites). Taken together, these studies will add unprecedented depth and subtlety to our evidence for and understanding of diversity and uniformity in the Archaic Greek world. - total expected length c. 1.25 million words - will be published by Oxford University Press in hard copy and digitally in stages starting in 2021

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