Interactions with the Ancient World

In my first blog post, I described some of the reasons why Cástulo was an important place in antiquity. Now I want to explain what made me want to come here and start a collaboration (future posts will discuss what life is like on an excavation and some of the special experiences I’ve had since coming to Cástulo).


For almost twenty years I’ve been interested in interactions between different groups of people in the ancient world. While the expansion of ancient states such as Persia, Macedonia, and Rome to form empires spanning great distances and different cultures is fairly well-known today, most lay-people are probably unaware that the Mediterranean was also the locus of other kinds of cross-cultural meetings and exchanges. Beginning in the eighth century BCE, for example, Greeks from various cities sent out colonial expeditions to South Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Syria, Egypt, France, and Spain. In every case, the territories they claimed were already occupied by indigenous populations. The results of these meetings — sometimes peaceful, sometimes aggressive, sometimes successful, sometimes failures — first attracted my attention in 1996, when I traveled to Sicily as part of a semester abroad in Rome. The island was ringed by foreign colonies (Greek on the east and south coasts, Phoenician at the western tip) while indigenous groups were pushed away from the coast into the hinterland. My own parents are immigrants, so I’ve always been conscious of the ways people construct their identities either as members of a group or as different from a group, for example through the use of language, household equipment, or even table manners. So how did these relationships work in antiquity?

I got the chance to start doing research on these issues when I was invited to participate in the long-standing American excavations at
Morgantina
, Sicily, in 1999. The town was founded by indigenous Sikels around 1000-900 BCE, and Greek influence became pervasive between 550-460 BCE. Even though it was a Sikel town, however, a historical source tells us that the city was captured (destroyed?) by an anti-Greek Sikel army in 459. At some point later on, the city was refounded with a Greek-style grid plan and then survived until the first century CE. I was asked to study the imported Athenian pottery from both the earlier and later towns to see what it could tell us about the dates of destruction and re-foundation. I also wanted to know how people at Morgantina incorporated these imported vases (mostly for drinking) into their daily lives. This work ultimately developed into my dissertation, which concerned the earliest households in the second Morgantina. Ultimately, I was able to determine that the group which settled the new Morgantina did so around 440-430 BCE, they were comprised of a mixed group of Sikels and Greeks, and — perhaps most importantly — the material in the household deposits were evidence for the ability of ancient consumers to make choices about the kinds of equipment they wanted to use in their homes (
read more
).

A Cástulo cup, made in Athens ca. 450 BCE, found at Morgantina.

Map of the distribution of Cástulo cups in ancient western Europe — note the popularity of these cups in southern Spain.