Art and the Greek City State: An Interpretive Archaeology (original) (raw)
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Review of Shanks, Early Greek Art (2000)
Early Greek Art in a State Art and the Greek City State: an Interpretive Archaeology, by Michael Shanks, 1999. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; ISBN 0-521-56117-5 hardback, £40.00. US\$69.95, xv+237 pp., ills.
Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece
In the modern world, objects and buildings speak eloquently about their creators. Status, gender identity, and cultural affiliations are just a few characteristics we can often infer about such material culture. But can we make similar deductions about the inhabitants of the first millennium BCE Greek world? Theoretical Approaches to the Archaeology of Ancient Greece offers a series of case studies exploring how a theoretical approach to the archaeology of this area provides insight into aspects of ancient society. An introductory section exploring the emergence and growth of theoretical approaches is followed by examinations of the potential insights these approaches provide. The authors probe some of the meanings attached to ancient objects, townscapes, and cemeteries, for those who created, and used, or inhabited them. The range of contexts stretches from the early Greek communities during the eighth and seventh centuries BCE, through Athens between the eighth and fifth centuries BCE, and on into present day Turkey and the Levant during the third and second centuries BCE. The authors examine a range of practices, from the creation of individual items such as ceramic vessels and figurines, through to the construction of civic buildings, monuments, and cemeteries. At the same time they interrogate a range of spheres, from craft production, through civic and religious practices, to funerary ritual.
Editorial advisory Board . Dediche votive private attiche del IV sec. a. C. Il culto di Atena e delle divinità mediche ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 467 Rocco Palermo Aneta Petrova� Funerary Reliefs from the West Pontic Area (6th-1st Centuries BC) � ���������������� 469 Margarit Damyanov Maeve McHugh. The Ancient Greek Farmstead� ���������������������������������������������������������������������� 474 Anna Meens Jasna Jeličić Radonić and Miroslav Katić. Faros -osnivanje grčkog grada -I, (Pharos -the foundation of the ancient city -I) ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 477 Branko Kirigin Diana Rodríguez Pérez (ed.). Greek Art in Context: Archaeological and Art Historical Perspectives ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 483 Robin Osborne Lisa Nevett (ed.) Theoretical approaches to the archaeology of ancient Greece: manipulating material culture ��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 486 Saro Wallace Dimitrios Yatromanolakis (ed.). Hellenistic François Queyrel. La Sculpture hellénistique I: forms, themes et fonctions� �������������������������������������������� 492 Judith Barringer iv Guillaume Biard. La représentation honorifique dans les cités grecques aux époques classique et hellénistique ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������� 494
Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200-700 B. C. E
American Journal of Archaeology, 2000
The study of Dark Age Greece has undergone a revolutionary transformation in the past three decades with the acceptance of new approaches to the material culture of early Greece (cf. I. Morris, "Inventing a Dark Age," in his Archaeology as Cultural History [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 77-106). Accompanying radical shifts in methodology has also been a flood of new data from a host of excavations-among which Lefkandi and Nichoria are published examples-and surveys such as in Messenia, south Argolid, Pylos, Methana, Berbati-Limnes, Kea, and Boeotia, to name but a few in mainland Greece. The volume and complexity of these new data, and the real methodological problems that abound in bridging a conceptual divide between the archaeological evidence itself, on the one hand, and the process of interpretation, on the other, might preclude at this point in time the effective use of such data toward broad historical generalizations-reconstructing a history of Dark Age Greece. Citadel to City-State does this very thing. In many ways reminiscent of early groundbreaking achievements such as Finley's World of Odysseus (New York: Meridian, 1959) or Starr's The Origins of Greek Civilization (New York: Norton, 1961), the authors' framework is unabashedly historical; their aim is to weave a narrative, a "Plutarch's Lives of Places, not individuals, as it were" (xii). This novel approach leads them to choose six places-Mycenae, Nichoria, Athens, Lefkandi, Corinth, and Ascra-which in six chapters become representative of stages of a developmental process, an evolution of culture leading the reader through the decline of the Mycenaean state-structure to the emergence of the Greek city-state. In each chapter they provide a detailed survey of the archaeological evidence for each site, which they integrate into a broader discussion of developmental stages of early Greek society. Even though they make the surprising statement that the book is meant to be an introduction to the subject, complementing the comprehensive syntheses of Desborough, Coldstream, and Snodgrass (xi), they necessarily draw on material published since the 1960s and 1970s. The glossary and bibliography might make the book useful as an undergraduate textbook. Without apology or explanation the authors avoid discussion of Crete almost entirely, which seems strange, given the recent final publication of the Knossos North Cemetery and a flood of reports of both excavation and survey from
Abstract: The paper examines culture change on Crete, ca. 600 B.C., in an urban context. The purpose is to reassess the current methodological discourse, and the application of site-specific recovery methods and research paradigms in addressing traditional problems of polis formation and urbanization in the Greek Aegean. One aspect of urbanization in the Aegean at the end of the Early Iron Age is nucleation of population, the settlement aggregation and the restructuring of social, political and economic landscapes, giving rise to Archaic Greek cities and city-states. This paper presents a case study of an excavation of one such early emergent center, the site of Azoria in eastern Crete (700–500 B.C.). Within contexts of agropastoral production and consumption in domestic and communal spaces, the material patterns suggest public activities that actively formed civic institutions, mediating social and political interaction and forming mechanisms of community organization and integration.
This chapter considers one element in the problematic relationship between ancient artistic conventions and modern interpretations of them. The scholarly understanding of ethnicity has increasingly been framed in nuanced terms, yet historians still sometimes see ethnicity as fixed in relation to Greek art. I here survey several examples of the unstable nature of ethnicity and representation in Greek art, before turning to the so-called Alexander Sarcophagus to show how interpretation of that work's visual conventions in ethnic terms that are believed to be particular to Greek art and Hellenic audiences is problematic, in several respects that miss or misconstrue its expression of Sidonian identity. This chapter closes by underscoring the value of ethnic-ity as a heuristic tool that goes beyond identifying the costume or action of figures shown in ancient art. Ethnicity allows us to ask with sensitivity who is represented by a work of art. Revisiting the topic of representation and ethnicity in an expressly theoretical context has strengthened my conviction that art history has much to offer to the larger enterprise of interpreting classical antiquity. 1 It is with art historical methodologies in mind that I offer a necessarily brief reconsideration of ethnicity, naturalism, and representation, to help refine our expectations of what images can tell us and how imagery contributed to the expression and construction of identity. In juxtaposing representation and ethnicity, we gain valuable insights into the largest source of data that we possess, material culture. I believe that representational strategies in ancient art have striking