The feasibility of a decolonized global archaeology in the ancient Mediterranean

Abstract

Corinna Riva and Ignasi Grau Mira have identified the nexus of several key issues holding back Mediterranean archaeology in the 1st millennium B.C. These are not necessarily issues caused by the application of Big Data methods, but rather preconditions that make this period especially susceptible to the pitfalls associated with those methods. These are: a long-standing ethnocentric focus on Greece and Rome, quantitative and qualitative variability of archaeological data, the presence of both text-rich and text-free regions and, I would add, more than 200 years of archaeological and historical framing within a heavily colonialist bias. Riva and Grau Mira rightly highlight, perhaps most strongly of all, the issue of ethnocentric bias and the centering of Greece and Rome in studies of the 1st millennium BC. Just as Athens, by virtue of an imbalance of data, long acted as a type site for the rest of the Aegean, so have Greece and Rome dominated Mediterranean narratives, as though they occupied the center of the world for every inhabitant of the basin. Archaeology has worked diligently to shed the notion that the foundation of overseas settlements by Aegean Greeks constituted the wholesale Hellenization of the Mediterranean, or that the Athenian experience could serve as generally representative of other parts of the Aegean. Yet the Mediterranean in the mid-1st millennium was only very recently labeled a ‘Greek lake’ (Woolf 2020, 205) – an assessment that would have no doubt come as a great surprise to anyone living west of Sicily (or even Sicilians themselves). As the authors argue, a readily available, rich data set for non-Greek and Roman sites leaves no room to justify ignorance of the rest of the basin, and yet broad knowledge of Mediterranean regions is still wildly uneven. Studies of the western Mediterranean, highlighted by Riva and Grau Mira in their discussion of citizenship and urban belonging, are frequently grouped together in regionally specific thematic studies (e.g. Dietler and López-Ruiz 2009), or are brought together with examples from the central and eastern Mediterranean as part of collections of individual contributions (e.g. Van Dommelen and Knapp 2010). While these are worthwhile endeavours, it is uncommon to see the integration of data from marginalized regions of the Mediterranean brought into direct comparison with data from Greek or Roman contexts (cf. Steidl 2020). A point on which I would invite further discussion is, then, if Mediterranean scholarship remains quite regionally siloed in the 1st millennium B.C., is a decolonized global archaeology a realistic goal at the present time? And how might we best integrate studies of micro-scale diversity within discussion of broader trends? I find much to agree with in the authors’ characterization of 1st-millennium archaeology, and their contention that a microhistorical perspective is essential to enrich global interpretations is well made (and most welcome). Their case study of citizenship and urban belonging clearly illustrates the value of high-resolution, bottom-up investigations of local contexts for destabilizing overly simplified narratives. The notion of south-east Iberia as an ‘anomaly’ with regard to citizenship in the classical Mediterranean, however, underscores the question of feasibility.