Athenian Vases and Heroes out of Context: Discovering what Theseus is doing in Etruria

Abstract

Athenian figured vases have long been used as cultural informants for the Athenian society that manufactured them, rather than about the Etruscan cities in which they are predominantly found. For this practice to be valid, these vases need to comprise a single homogenous population of artifacts whose attributes are the same regardless of the find-spots from which they were recovered. Regional variation of attributes, especially those that are culturally specific to those regions, would indicate that local cultural preferences influenced the manufacture and import of these artifacts, challenging their use as Athenian informants. Applying machine learning data mining techniques to the Athenian red-figure vases (“ARF”) listed in the Beazley Archive Online Pottery Database (“BAPD”) resulted in the identification of hundreds of relationships between vase images, shapes, and their find-spots. Quantifying these differences via chi squared testing for independence and homogeneity revealed that numerous geographically specific subpopulations can be identified on the basis of these attributes. Of these, I selected the dominance of the Athenian hero Theseus on ARF from Etruria as a case study to demonstrate the utility of data mining supported by statistical ana-