Herodotus’s peoples: relations of dependence
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2015-10-15

Timothy Taylor
INSTITUTE FOR PREHISTORIC AND HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY

This paper examines the ethnic concepts of the fifth century BC observer and analyst Herodotus and looks at the way that these have been profoundly oversimplified in the modern application to archaeological cases (typically distorted by modern nationalist agendas). Reading Herodotus carefully reveals a highly nuanced account of identitiy issues, and evidence for a complex chain of vertical and lateral relationships between on-going communities and humans as material items (including slaves). Understanding the range of identity types, defined by custom, language, location, appearance, social status, economic role and so on requires us to move both up and down scale. Upscale, we have what can be termed the Eurasian network, integrating the Old World Iron Age technocomplex at the broadest level, downscale we deal with Limited Interest Groups (LIGs) of varying status and kind that articulated with it. It becomes clear that Herodotus, in attempting to construe a complex diachronic account of Black Sea social formations, used ethnonyms as semiotic markers in a remarkably flexible and contextsensitive manner. It is important to understand what he is discussing before we can understand these terms, even when these appear recurrent. Due to Herodotus’s subsequent authorial influence, implicitly considered the exemplar for all ethnographic descriptors, the issues raised in the case of the use of terms Scythian and Thracian (which Herodotus applied to socio-cultural phenomena about which he had first-hand knowledge) are also relevant in the Celtic case (despite the fact that that impinges
only tangentially on his narrative).