Introduction

Every book on the classical past in some fashion holds up a mirror to the age in which it was written. This volume is no exception: a fact perhaps seen most clearly in this chapter, with its emphasis on cultural interaction, human connectivity, and the consequences of global exchange.

Some of the sharpest criticisms applied to “old-fashioned” classical studies converge on its once serene assumption of the impermeability and innate superiority of the cultures of Greece and Rome. Archaeologists were complicit in such models, as they traced unidirectional, Hellenic influences on the colonial western Mediterranean or across the Hellenistic kingdoms to the east. Roman archaeologists, in turn, measured the spread of “Romanization” through the movement of artifacts such as wine amphoras and shiny red pottery. Greece and Rome, it seemed, could expand at will, but remained somehow unaffected.

The fallacy of such attitudes is clearly illustrated in the following chapter, which traces innumerable back-and-forth processes of contact, exchange, influence, emulation, and annexation across the ancient world. All manner of people, goods, skill-sets, and beliefs were mobilized around the Mediterranean and far beyond, with implications—direct or indirect—for all actors caught up within these networks, be they local or long-distance. While we do possess some travelers’ accounts or ethnographies which can occasionally testify to these multiple forms of contact, archaeology stands in the strongest position to detect and make sense of them. Categories of data range widely, including stylistic influences in statuary or architecture, imported foodstuffs, shipwreck contents, new ritual practices, and the presence of exotica, to name but a few. Despite some usual and ubiquitous difficulties (for example, tracing the movement of perishable goods, including self-moving

Items of trade such as slaves), material evidence remains our best hope for recovering the circulation and consumption of things, both tangible and intangible.

The nature of these interactions varied, of course, from period to period, and from one political formation to another. In some cases, they took the shape of serendipitous exchange, in others, of highly structured, long-distance trade. Colonial foundations opened up and nurtured new links—not least through intermarriage between colonial and indigenous populations—while imperial expansion forged entirely unprecedented unified worlds, such as the Mare Nostrum (“Our Sea”) of the Roman Empire. The complexities of living in these wider worlds in turn complicate definitions of just what we mean by “Greek,” or “Roman,” culture.

For all this multiplicity of connection and interaction, contact with “the other” nonetheless simultaneously provoked new perceptions of the self and of separate cultural identities (see also chapter 9). The polarity of Greek and barbarian ran profoundly deep: a fact with immense ramifications for later conceptions of “western civilization.” Despite this perceived distance, ongoing, two-way exchanges between Hellenic and eastern societies are now readily documented. Similarly, Rome’s frontiers are increasingly perceived as highly permeable; indeed they are better described as zones of interaction than rigid barriers. Yet in antiquity they still demarcated spheres of Romanitas versus barbarism. These ambiguities have contributed to making the study of culture contact, frontiers and boundaries, and networks among the most fertile topics in classical archaeology today.