Since the 1990s there has been a major shift toward Mediterranean-scale history, expressed most forcefully in Horden and Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000). When Snodgrass developed his structural revolution model, it seemed reasonable to treat Greece largely on its own terms, but that is no longer the case (see ch. 2, above). This broadening of perspectives was one of the major accomplishments of 1990s scholarship. In this chapter, I have argued that the motors of change in eighth-century Greece - demography, perhaps climate, competition, centralization - affected the whole Mediterranean, but the Greeks’ responses to them - particularly the creation of egalitarian male citizenship and the set of cultural conflicts around it - were unique to the Aegean and its colonies.
But although 1970s discussions of eighth-century Greece now seem to lack a Mediterranean context, Snodgrass (1977a) had in fact looked toward a much wider context, linking eighth-century Greece to archaeological debates on state formation in other parts of the world. Non-classical archaeologists only rarely take Iron Age Greece into consideration, but two aspects of the Greek case seem important for current arguments. The first is archaic Greece’s peculiarity. Generalizing models trade off explanatory power against specificity, so we should not expect them to describe any particular case exactly; but archaic Greece’s basic social structures seem incompatible with most models of state formation (I. Morris 1997a; Trigger 2003: 142-3). Since the 1990s comparative archaeologists have developed alternatives to neo-evolutionary models, particularly the “dual-processual” model, recognizing the possibility of relatively unhierarchical, “corporate” social structures like Greece (Blanton et al. 1996: esp. 2, 7) as well as more individualistic “network” systems. The rapid improvement in living standards and growth of markets in archaic and classical Greece also challenges much conventional thought in archaeology (see Smith 2004).
Secondly, eighth-century Greece is not just a problematic example of a worldwide phenomenon of state formation; it is also one of the best-documented cases of the more specific process of the regeneration of complex society after collapse. Building on 1980s interest in the collapse of complex societies, regeneration is now emerging as a major research topic.19 “Collapse” and “regeneration” are varied phenomena, making systematic comparisons difficult. But if we take Childe’s (1950) famous ten criteria of civilization (urban centers, craft production, taxation, monuments, nonproductive elites, writing and numeracy, practical sciences, art, long-distance trade, craft specialization) as our starting point, eighth-century Greece is one of the clearest cases of regeneration after collapse (Morris 2006a).
World History
