A SHARED MEDITERRANEAN? SOME OBSERVATIONS ON AN ARCHAEOLOGY OF RESISTANCE
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 17/12/2020

Throughout history and starting from the Late Palaeolithic period, the Mediterranean has between intertwined with human societies and their relations. Coastal and island communities developed networks with each other, with some gradually being promoted as emporia or hubs where goods and services were collected and distributed throughout the networks. At all times, however, there have been communities that, despite being located on trade routes, resisted innovations and did not receive imports. In The Art of not being governed, J.C. Scott discussed societies that willingly and reactively remain outside nation states, explaining marginality as a consequence of remaining free from state-building neighbours. A similar political stance is present in modern resistance studies but comprises observations that are useful in showing how material culture is actively used. In the pre-Hellenistic Mediterranean, however, there are few signs that imperialistic political and military threats could have affected the resistance to new technological inventions. There rather seem to be instances of boundary maintenance (cf. F. Barth), the construction of social confines that allow groups to maintain their identity when members interact with others. This not only demands the creation of group membership criteria and ways of signalling these but also indicates a conscious structuring of interactions. In addition, this often takes the form of purposeful or imposed choices made through material culture. Boundary maintenance reinforces a group’s unity and distinctness by emphasizing traits that set its members apart from others. Examples of such studies are still relatively scarce but in my paper, using examples from the Bronze Age Aegean, I will apply the concept of cultural resistance to explain anomalous diffusion patterns of material culture and argue that through such resistance, material culture was used to help shaping and maintaining boundaries and hence community identity.


Author(s): Driessen, Jan (Université catholique de Louvain)