The ancient Greek world has been hugely influential in shaping Western culture, from the emergence of poleis to the colonisation of the Mediterranean and beyond. The pursuit of understanding that world has been a long-held archaeological objective. Perhaps because of its long pedigree and well-established traditions, Greek archaeology is often perceived as theoretically uninformed. But, in her recent (2017) volume, Theoretical approaches to the archaeology of ancient Greece, Lisa Nevett explores the increasing academic attention to this area. She notes that while for a long time Greek archaeology has lived under the shadow of deep-rooted assumptions about its research methods and approaches, stemming from its origins in the Enlightenment and its relationship with ancient texts, recent years have witnessed a sea-change. This issue's NBC reviews several volumes which demonstrate that a theoretically informed Greek archaeology is in rude health, even if the approaches are varied or sometimes even contrasting. The books consider Greek archaeology at the micro and macro scales, focusing variously on: religious movement and travel on and around the Acropolis of Athens; explorations of architecture and urbanism; foodways; social interactions and communication systems through material culture; social structure and evolution; and the Greek colonisation of Europe.
We begin, appropriately, with an introductory volume. Mary Emerson's Greek sanctuaries & temple architecture: an introduction provides an excellent point of departure for the general reader. Emerson's text aims to introduce the most well-known Greek sanctuary sites, contextualise them within their social and religious frameworks and provide an account of the evolution of Greek architecture, with an explanation of technical terms along the way. Beginning from the basics of what constitutes a sanctuary, Emerson explains the physical elements of these sites, the significance of their location within existing sacred places and their role(s) for either local or Panhellenic society. The accessibility of sanctuaries at the level of the individual is addressed together with the roles of priests (male and female) and the meaning of public worship.
The evolution of the Greek temple, from Mycenaean shrines to the more familiar classical temples built in the Doric and Ionic orders, is outlined in Chapter 3. This chapter includes technical details about temple construction, including ‘anathyrosis’ (the fitting together of stone blocks without visible joints) and the so-called “petrification of wooden forms” (p. 16). Diagrams detailing the architectural components of the temple are included together with plans, and, lastly, the architectural orders are explained. A slim chapter on architectural sculpture is compensated by fuller discussions of the symbolism in sculpture in the chapters devoted to individual temples and Chapter 17, ‘Looking at Art in Sanctuaries’. This final chapter of the book considers art in sanctuaries more generally and focuses on ways of seeing and understanding art in the ancient world.
Chapters 5–16 each focus on an individual sanctuary. The examples are the most well-known sites including Delphi, Olympia, the Parthenon and the sanctuary of Apollo at Bassae, among others. These examples are punctuated by chapters that use case studies to frame a particular topic, such as ‘Views and Their Meanings’ (p. 169), which investigates how the topography of the Acropolis affected its visual impact on the landscape, and which other sanctuaries could be seen from the Acropolis. This introduces a phenomenological approach to understanding the sacred landscape and considering how iconic vistas were immortalised in text and verse, which will appeal to the more specialist reader. An accessible and readable introduction to Greek temple architecture, the volume lays the foundations for more detailed investigation of some of the questions surrounding ancient Greek religious practice, themes problematised by our second book, Ascending and descending the Acropolis: movement in Athenian religion.
Based on a workshop of the same name, this volume considers movement and travel motivated by religion, and aims to offer new perspectives on the varied nature of journeys and processions related to religion. Focusing in particular on Attica in the period from the Late Bronze Age to the second century AD, the papers explore an aspect of worship that was particularly pertinent in a world where ritual was largely performed outside of religious structures, and where movement was a significant part of ceremonial performance. As Myrup Kristensen notes in his Introduction, however, it is not only the movement that is important; the point of departure, routes and destinations, together with the identity of the individuals making these journeys, are all imbued with meaning, as are costume and accessories.
Divided into two sections, dealing respectively with movement within cities and movement beyond or between cities, the volume comprises ten case studies that address very different aspects of religious movement. Erin Warford takes a phenomenological approach to the Panathenaic procession in ancient Athens, focusing on the sensory experience of participants and spectators and how these may have shaped collective memory and identity. Drawing on literary evocations of religious processions, including popular literature from the period such as Aristophanes, and focusing on sensory experience, Warford demonstrates the power of social cues in reading ritual processions.
The long-held understanding of Greek religion as a communal or polis ritual practice is challenged by Wriebke Friese who uses archaeological and literary material relating to the sanctuaries on the slopes of the Acropolis to chart personal devotion. Results reveal that private devotion and more intimate performances of ritual were thriving and can be related to the accessibility and visibility of the sanctuary within the topography of the Acropolis. Those sanctuaries closer to the main routes and highly visible were more likely to be incorporated into communal worship, while smaller or more hidden sites are revealed to be foci for the practice of private or personal devotion. Recognising the complexity of concepts of pilgrimage and religious movement, section one concludes with Maria Pretzler debating whether the second-century AD travel writer Pausanias’ ascension of the Acropolis can be considered religious movement or simply “intellectual pilgrimage with an emotional impact” (p. 114). This segues neatly into the second half of the book, dealing with movement beyond the city, focusing on pilgrimage and returning to the question of individual vs communal participation in religion. Soi Agelidis's paper charts the procession from Athens to Eleusis and considers the broad definition of pilgrimage. In considering how important the individual traveller was and how relevant was the purpose of travel in constituting a ‘pilgrimage’ or sacred journey, Agelidis concludes that there must be a distinction between sacred travel and ordinary journeys. Although attempting to define travel using categories that are essentially Christian constructs (pilgrimage and sacred travel) may obscure the more nuanced aspects of how religion was embedded in everyday life in the ancient world, some journeys must be seen as predominantly religious undertakings. The key themes of the volume are neatly summarised by Fritz Graf in the Epilogue: these emerge as: the complexity of defining religious travel (is it mobility, procession or pilgrimage?); the permanence (or not) of processional routes; the location and liminality of sanctuaries; and the role of individual emotions and agency in procession.
Shifting the focus away from Attica and the heartlands of Greece, Greek colonization in local contexts: case studies in colonial interactions considers the evidence for cultural interactions between Greek colonisers and local populations. Developing on work such as Horden and Purcell's Corrupting Sea (Reference Horden and Purcell2000), which challenged the traditional models of the Mediterranean, the volume prompts reconsideration of the nature of Greek colonisation.
Carrie Ann Murray's chapter focuses on the physical traces of social action. Beginning with the premise that individual agency is behind the physical development of sites, she discusses how the social actions behind construction and maintenance can be manifest in the physical remains of settlements and cemeteries. Drawing on experimental archaeology to understand how different means of communication and cooperation between individuals, and between genders, affects the successful execution of tasks, Murray argues that it is possible to reconstruct the social actions that generated the archaeological record. This plays out in different ways depending on the number of individuals, power dynamics and the nature of the construction project (e.g. communal or individual). The conclusions are that the variety of forms of physical development at Greek colonies reveals complex processes and defies simple categorisation, but that combining intricate detail and broader overviews can reveal socio-political relationships—individual and collective—at colonial settlements.
In his chapter on the Greek settlement at Massalia (modern Marseilles), Jason Lucas demonstrates the consequences of contact with the wider Mediterranean world, and especially of the introduction of wine, on the settlement patterns and ceramic economy of Early Iron Age societies. Lucas maps settlement change around Massalia (from the River Rhone to the modern Italian border) from the ninth to fifth centuries BC. The patterns show increasing settlement in coastal areas between the eighth and sixth centuries BC with a significant peak following the foundation of a Greek colony in the region; subsequently, many upland settlements were abandoned. The settlement change is reflected in the material evidence, but perhaps in unexpected ways. The most abundant material is pottery associated with wine; while some of the ceramics—amphorae and fine wares—originate from Etruria, mainland Greece, or the Western Mediterranean, the largest proportion of ceramics is Indigenous. The rapid adoption of Mediterranean wares suggests that these came through existing exchange networks, while the dominance of traditional local ceramic forms indicates that the two economies were complementary rather than in competition. The evidence leads Lucas to suggest that rather than Greek colonists imposing culture on Indigenous society and dominating economic activity, the colonists seem to be peripheral to the economy and perhaps living and operating on the fringes of the established settlement. This means that despite the impact of Greek colonisers, trading networks were still negotiated by the Indigenous community.
The volume has a broad geographic scope, taking in Spain, southern Italy, Sicily, Thrace and the Black Sea. Its recurring theme is recognising the importance of social practice, especially in terms of identity, power relations and multi-culturalism in contexts of interaction, all of which manifest themselves in different ways in the archaeological evidence.
Also focused on social structure and Greek colonisation is David Small's Ancient Greece: social structure and evolution. But in contrast to the more contextual approach taken by the previous volume, Small's book is based on a unified theory. Small applies complexity theory (broadly—the premise that chaotic systems with numerous independent agents can order themselves into a coherent but non-linear system) as an analytical frame to interpret the dynamics of structural change in ancient Greece. The first two chapters explain the theoretical underpinning of the book and set out the chronological parameters from the Neolithic to the mid second century AD, taking in the rise of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilisations with geographic bounds from Spain in the west to the Black Sea in the east. Each section has a paragraph detailing what Small defines as ‘Measures of Social Complexity’; these are based on contexts of social interaction and institutionalised behaviour as evident in the archaeological record. This is a useful synopsis for navigating the text, with suggested further reading at the end of each chapter allowing the reader to pursue themes in more detail.
Synthesising the evidence for social institutions such as religion and the treatment of the dead from Neolithic sites in Greece, Small focuses on tell sites, where social organisation was embedded in households that were social rather than familial units. In terms of measures of social complexity, Small finds that social institutions such as religion, craft production and trade were not yet fully independent and were still embedded in the household. He takes us through a nuanced discussion of social organisation and considers whether it may be possible to see the earliest emergence of a hierarchy.
The following chapters deal with what Small considers “all the major features in the development of ancient Greece” (p. 204); these include detailed coverage of: developments in the fourth and third millennia BC; Crete—treated as a separate and unique entity; the Mycenaean palaces in the later second millennium BC; changes in the eleventh to eighth centuries BC after the collapse of the Mycenaean polities; the new structure of archaic Greece and the rise of Macedon. All of this leads up to Small's broad evaluation of what he defines as the ‘evolution’ of Greek society.
Reflecting a recent resurgence in interest in cross-comparative studies of ancient societies (e.g. Smith Reference Smith2012), the final chapter considers how models for the characteristics of Greek polities might be effectively applied to the Classic Maya. As Small acknowledges, this is not entirely novel having been mooted before by William Parkinson and Michael Galaty (Reference Parkinson and Galaty2007) and Thomas Tartaron (Reference Tartaron2008). Believing that the relatively rich material evidence from Greece could help to fill the gaps in interpretations of aspects such as the control of economics and the balance of power between polities, he further speculates that comparison with ancient Greece may also be fruitful for other societies consisting of small polities. This is a sometimes challenging volume that encourages reflection on the place of ancient Greece in global archaeological perspectives.
Our final two volumes both consider the Bronze Age in Greece through its archaeological record, one focusing on architecture and the other on ceramics. One of our earlier volumes (Lucas et al.) emphasised the need to assess the full material culture repertoire of a society to understand fully aspects such as social organisation and cultural interaction. Julie Hruby and Debra Trusty illustrate this point in their volume dedicated to cooking vessels from the Bronze Age Aegean. Frustrated by the privileging of fine wares and relegation of Aegean cooking vessels to passing mentions in excavation reports, Hruby and Trusty take the view that standard cooking wares are able to reveal as much about economic, political and social developments as do fine wares, but have the added value of being able to shed light on culinary culture, which fine wares cannot. The 12 papers in the volume aim to redress the balance, all being devoted to the humble cooking pot, defined here as vessels designed to maintain their integrity and survive repeated thermal shock and temperature change. Despite the challenges of poor preservation of pots, loss to recycling and inadequate curation and archaeological recording, the volume sheds light on cooking and household practices (Elisabetta Borgna & Sara T. Levi); shifts in food styles (Julie Hruby); fusion cuisine in the Aegean (Evi Gorgianni, Natalie Abelle & Jill Hillditch) and the relationship between food and cultural identity during the Bronze Age (Salvatore Vitale & Jerolyn E. Morrison). A study of Mycenaean cooking vessels from Iklaina by Joann Gulizio and Cynthia W. Shelmerdine reveals an increasing uniformity of cooking ware in the later Mycenaean period compared with the earlier diversity of ceramics and links this to the social transition from autonomy to palatial control. Similarly, Bartłomiej Lis's paper considers the changes visible in the ceramic record after the fall of the Mycenaean palaces when the increased mobility of people, and perhaps potters, in the twelfth century BC is reflected in the spread of handmade burnished ware. The volume closes with an appeal by Michael L. Galaty for a clear research agenda for the study of cooking pots, one that is “problem-oriented” (p. 150). He suggests goals for the study of cooking wares, including: a shared terminology and classification system; a policy of retaining all excavated coarse pottery regardless of whether it is diagnostic; the publication of summary data and statistical analysis of attribute data; deductive methodologies that allow hypothesis-testing; and a ceramic-ecological research framework.
Taking a similarly revitalising approach to their subject, Quentin Letesson and Carl Knappett's Minoan architecture and urbanism stands as “a collaborative manifesto towards a more comprehensive research programme for the analysis of Cretan Bronze Age architecture and urbanism” (p. 6). Drawing on recent advances in detailed regional survey methods that take diachronic approaches, and the application of interdisciplinary methodologies to interpretations of the built environment, the volume assesses the research perspectives that are afforded by these studies and suggests a new framework of interpretation that combines bottom-up empirical studies with top-down analytical approaches.
Jan Driessen theorises gendered spaces in his study of in-house relationships. Considering a diverse range of examples from the Aegean and beyond, Driessen finds that while probably segregating men and women, the architecture of some Late Minoan houses suggests a complementary gender system, with the tasks of men and women more evenly balanced. Furthermore, he draws a distinction between larger residences, where segregation is apparent, and smaller houses that do not appear to have gender segregation. This highlights the different social dynamics that co-existed in settlements.
The construction and dynamic nature of architecture is the subject of Clairy Palyvou's chapter focusing on Minoan palace design. Palyvou considers whether we have focused too much on the final form of a building and not enough on the process of architectural production and the life of the structure. She tries to bridge the gap between configurational analysis and a phenomenological approach, concluding that Minoan palaces should be understood as being combined organically into towns, therefore minimising the differentiation between palace and town.
Other papers in the volume detail a new form of Minoan harbour-side (the slipway) discovered at Kommos (Joseph W. Shaw); identification of a Protopalatial building and its links to the first community street system and monumental houses at Gournia (D. Matthew Bell & John C. McEnroe); and computational approaches to settlement interaction and growth (Eleftheria Paliou & Andrew Bevan). The volume concludes with a chapter by Quentin Letesson, Carl Knappett and Michael E. Smith calling for standardised description of Minoan architecture with datasets mobilised in comparative approaches so that the meaning of the built environment can be traced and understood as interrelated.
The volumes featured in this issue of NBC reassert Greek archaeology in the theoretical archaeological landscape, demonstrating the rich opportunities afforded by the existing archaeological record when new, explicitly theoretical interpretations are applied. As Nevett (Reference Nevett2017) observes, theoretical approaches themselves do not have explanatory power, but they prompt us to ask new questions and consider familiar evidence in different ways.
This list includes all books received between 1 May 2018 and 30 June 2019. Those featuring at the beginning of New Book Chronicle have, however, not been duplicated in this list. The listing of a book in this chronicle does not preclude its subsequent review in Antiquity.
