Response. Connecting proposals for a post-colonial global archaeology in the Mediterranean (and beyond)

Abstract

We thank sincerely all the respondents for their contributions, which have provided much food for thought, and for allowing us therefore to open up the debate further. These brief final words are not intended to settle the matter, as our genuine intention is to continue a debate that will help us to advance the discipline. We would like to structure our response according to four points: (1) our position vis-à-vis global archaeology; (2) the need to extend what we propose to other regions of the Mediterranean; (3) what globalization theory does not do for the Mediterranean in the 1st millennium B.C., and therefore our concerns with it vis-à-vis the problems we have raised; and (4) further solutions to achieve a truly post-colonial global archaeology. We begin by reiterating a point that we thought we had made clearly but feel we need to underline: our position is not against large-scale comparative approaches to research problems. We agree with Stoddart that we need to take up the challenge of global studies, but we must do it by not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. We hence provided a solution to this challenge that fully embraces multiple scales of analysis, which belongs to a tradition that, as Stoddart rightly points out, has a long history, among others, in landscape archaeology; this solution, we proposed, also includes rehabilitating the micro scale, the value of which we, archaeologists who constantly confront the fragmentation of the documentation at our disposal at that scale, are best placed to appreciate – another point drawn out by Stoddart – and exploit to our advantage for a post-colonial global archaeology. The Iberian case study which we treated represents one of several, multiple examples which we could have used (and would have liked to use) in the varied Mediterranean of the 1st millennium B.C. – a veritable laboratory for comparative analysis – in order to draw out the problems we have raised. Originally, our conversation began as we compared and contrasted investment, whether of research funding and projects or intellectual interests at an international level, between Iberia and Etruria and began to write a piece comparing the two vis-à-vis Graeco-Roman areas. In doing so, we would have had the opportunity to further emphasize the biases, well laid out by Belarte, in the continuing investment in both financial support and intellectual efforts, in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean. It is in this spirit that we deem Stoddart’s and Belarte’s invitation to extend what we propose to the several other non-Graeco-Roman regions (see below) as absolutely essential for resolving the problems we have outlined. We particularly welcome Belarte’s use of the example of North Africa: we simply cannot sustain a global view of the Mediterranean of the 1st millennium B.C. unless we have a command of the regional variety and variability of the basin and are therefore able to harness it analytically, where ‘regional’ pertains not to broad regions (Iberia, North Africa, Italy), but, crucially, to areas within and across these broad regions, as Belarte rightly points out regarding the very diverse societies inhabiting the Iberian peninsula. If we seriously wish to do