To what extent does archaeological evidence confirm or refute the information provided by literary sources? With regard to foundation dates we need to be wary about resorting to a circular argument: since our absolute ceramic chronologies are based, at least in part, on Thucydides’ dates for the Sicilian colonies (see pp. 37-8), it is hardly surprising that the archaeological evidence appears to chime with the information he provides. This chronological scheme, first formulated in the 1930s, assumes that we have retrieved the earliest pottery at each site. At the Sicilian site of Selinus, for example, the earliest pottery that had come to light prior to 1931 was classified stylistically as belonging to the first phases of Early Ripe Corinthian. Since Thucydides (6.4.2) dated the foundation of Selinus to 628, it was assumed that the transition from Late Protocorinthian to Early Corinthian styles took place ca. 630. But in the 1950s, scholars came upon earlier Protocorinthian pottery in the storerooms of the Palermo museum that was alleged to have come from graves at Selinus. Two options were possible: either Thucydides’ date was correct - in which case the introduction of Ripe Corinthian styles must have occurred rather later than 630 - or else he was mistaken. Since ceramic experts were reluctant to jettison a chronology that, in most respects, seemed to work well and that finds some support in “fixed points” derived from Near Eastern sites, they decided to abandon the Thucydidean date in favor of a date of 650, furnished by Diodorus (13.59). If, however, Thucydides could be mistaken in the date he gives for Selinus, why should his foundation dates for the other Greek colonies in Sicily be any more reliable? Elsewhere, in cases where earlier material has come to light - for example, Gela and Acragas - the Thucydidean dates have been maintained and the offending elements regarded as evidence for “precolonial” activity associated with exchange and commerce rather than settlement.
Let us assume that the standard chronology is basically sound (it is unlikely that future revisions will modify it radically). What the archaeological evidence actually reveals is a rather longer drawn-out process for the establishment of settlements overseas than is suggested by a simple foundation date. Thucydides dates Megara Hyblaea to 728 and this is approximately the period in which Greek ceramics begin to appear in bulk - especially a skyphos, assigned to the Thapsos class, which is also known from the earliest levels at Naxos, Syracuse, Leontini, Catana, Sybaris, Croton, and Taras. But there is also some fragmentary pottery that should date to around the middle of the eighth century, nearer in time to Eusebius’ foundation date of 757. Unfortunately, the earliest material found at most colonial sites is seldom associated with any secure archaeological context, meaning that its interpretation is far from straightforward. Evidence for buildings rarely predates the seventh century though, given the insubstantial nature of the materials used for construction in this period, that need not be terribly significant. Generally speaking, the earliest burials tend to be slightly later than the first Greek imports, which is perhaps what one would expect. At both Taras and the nearby site of Satyrion, for example, the earliest ceramics date to Late Geometric I (ca. 750-725) and at Scoglio del Tonno, Middle Geometric material from earlier in the eighth century has been found. Save for three or so cremations, however, the earliest burials in the cemeteries east of the city contain Early Protocorinthian pots dating to the last years of the eighth century, close enough to the date of 706 furnished by Eusebius. By and large, then, the archaeological evidence is not radically at variance with the foundation dates provided by literary sources (when they are in agreement). But it certainly does not seem to indicate the sort of highly organized, virtually instantaneous foundation anticipated by the provisions for the Athenian colony at Brea. A more likely scenario - and one which is paralleled by the process by which British settlers founded settlements in the New World - is one in which an initial party of settlers, probably relatively few in number, established a foothold in new territory and was reinforced by a steady trickle of newcomers over a period of approximately one generation and perhaps even longer. Such is the case at Syracuse, destined to become one of the most prosperous cities of the Mediterranean. Excavations of the Fusco cemetery, to the northwest of the island of Ortygia, have revealed that wealthy tombs rarely predate the seventh century.
Contrary to what has often been argued, this picture is not contradicted by the evidence from Megara Hyblaea - a site whose early urban plan can be identified thanks to the abandonment of the city after its final destruction in 214 and to its meticulous excavation by the French School in Rome. Here, a densely packed urban habitat is parceled out into approximately equal lots of land laid out on what is essentially a grid plan, although the principal avenues, which converge on a large open space that has been identified as the agora of the Archaic city, follow different orientations. Some scholars believe that these various orientations permit us to identify five different “quarters” and wish to see in this settlement pattern a replication of the five villages that are supposed to have constituted the polis of mainland Megara. It is widely accepted that a major program of urbanization at Megara Hyblaea did not begin in earnest until the third quarter of the seventh century, continuing through to about 530. Nevertheless, it is generally maintained that, since the earliest houses do not encroach on the roads or on what would later be monumentalized as the agora and since they generally follow the orientation of the later grid (including the median lines of each “block”), the basic plan of the urban area was designed right from the outset, with seventh-century development merely filling in areas already earmarked for public buildings and residences.
There is, however, a danger here of committing what has been called “teleological thinking.” Had the settlement been densely occupied from the start, the avoidance of areas that would later constitute public spaces could almost certainly be considered conscious and deliberate. In reality, however, perhaps only fourteen excavated houses, for the most part partially preserved, can be assigned to the eighth century (i. e. the first generation of the colony’s life if we follow Thucydides’ date). These dwellings, which are generally simple, one-room structures, collectively represent such a minute portion of the excavated area (a little more than 1 percent on a rough calculation) that their absence from large parts of the later settlement is not in itself terribly meaningful (Map 5.3). Among these earliest houses there are two, not five, orientations adopted, though we cannot be certain that the difference was deliberate: all are approximately oriented north-south and since the more complete units seem to open towards the south it is not improbable that their orientation was chosen to maximize exposure to the sun for the purposes of providing both heat and light. The two different orientations are largely respected in the subsequent development of the urban area - save in the area south of Road B and east of Road C1, where the eighth-century houses follow the orientation of the houses to the northwest while the seventh-century blocks are oriented on the roads to the east of the agora. Finally, if we “think away” the seventh-century urban plan, it is not immediately clear that we could have anticipated it by examining the eighth-century houses alone. The area where the agora was later situated could have served the same function for the first inhabitants of Megara Hyblaea, but an equally plausible candidate would have been the area immediately to the south of the Archaic agora - if, that is, the early residents of the zone felt that they needed a formal open meeting-place to begin with (see pp. 82-4).
If we were to examine the material evidence without presuppositions predicated on later, fifth-century models of colonization, we would probably conclude that, for the first thirty or so years of its existence, the settlement that occupied the area of the later agora at Megara Hyblaea consisted of a few, scattered houses, roughly oriented to take advantage of natural sunlight but conforming to no overall layout (there is some evidence for another settlement approximately 500 meters to the south, though the relationship between the two zones is not yet entirely clear). Even if we were to assume that early houses are represented in equal measure in the unexcavated parts of the area around the later agora as they are in the excavated parts, the eighth-century community would still have numbered around only forty or so households - comparable to the village of Nikhoria in its heyday (see p. 61). It is far from evident that so small a community would have required a permanent, formally reserved meeting-place in this period. In the early seventh century, as the population of the settlement grew, an area that had not previously been used for habitation was reserved as an agora, receiving a more monumental form in the third quarter of that century with the construction of Building i, the North and East stoas, and the two temples along the southern side. Test trenches suggest that the road network was not laid out until fairly early in the seventh century: the somewhat anomalous grid-plan that the roads create is probably determined by the formal siting of the agora and by the somewhat haphazard orientation of the earlier, eighth-century houses. Road C2, however, which is flanked by five of the earliest structures, may be a little earlier, since fragments of an eighth-century aryballos (perfume bottle) were discovered beneath the cobbles of the earliest surface.
Archaeological evidence is less amenable to determining the provenance of the earliest settlers. Regardless of the specific origins that the literary traditions
Map 5.3 Plan of the zone around the Archaic agora at Megara Hyblaea in (a) the sixth and (b) the eighth centuries. Source: after Gras, Treziny, and Broise 2004, 452 fig. 430
Figure 5.3 Early Corinthian aryballos depicting Athena and Heracles, 6th century BC terracotta. Source: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California
Attribute to each colony, the pattern of early imports varies little between settlements. Corinthian wares dominate the assemblages of almost every site (Figure 5.3), while pottery that has been identified as originating in the north and northwest Peloponnese is found not only in the Achaean foundations of southern Italy but also at Locri, Siris, Taras, Otranto, Pithecusae, and Cumae as well as at the Sicilian sites of Naxos, Megara Hyblaea, Syracuse, Gela, Leon-tini, and Himera. This almost certainly reflects the fact that most voyagers to the west chose to pass through the Corinthian Gulf rather than round the stormy capes of the southern Peloponnese. Euboean and East Greek pottery is also commonly represented and although both Chalcis and Rhodes are said to have founded cities in Sicily, the wider distribution of these wares is certainly not restricted to colonial activities. At Megara Hyblaea itself, Corinthian imports are accompanied by imports from Attica, Euboea, the Argolid, Achaea, and Rhodes as well as by local imitations of Euboean and Corinthian pottery.
As noted above in the discussion of Al Mina and Pithecusae, traded items do not need to have been carried by residents of the area in which they were produced. An old archaeological cliche warns against equating pots with peoples. Logically speaking, if the predominance of Corinthian wares cannot be taken to indicate a Corinthian monopoly on commercial transactions, then assemblages that display a diversity of provenances should not automatically be taken as an indication of a “mixed” settlement. On the other hand, the heterogeneous character of material assemblages at colonial sites is not generally matched at sites in mainland Greece. It attests to a far wider and more extensive network of contacts and exchanges than is witnessed for “Old Greece” and it is inconceivable that human bodies did not also move along these routes. The fact that the island of Ortygia and the Arethousa spring at Syracuse share their names with natural features in the territory of Chalcis might lead one to suspect that the Euboean or Euboeanizing pottery that appears alongside Corinthian wares in the earliest levels at Syracuse does, in fact, reflect the presence of Euboeans in the settlement. If this is the case, the literary foundation stories attested from the fifth century represent a much simplified version of more complex events and processes, attributing the initiative behind foundation to those groups who were dominant within the city during the Classical period.
That conclusion finds some confirmation in excavations, undertaken between 2003 and 2007, at Methone in Macedonia. Here, 191 inscribed pieces of pottery were recovered from a subterranean structure (the “hypogeum”) that can be dated to the period 730-690. The majority of pieces carried simple analphabetic symbols or marks but nine bore inscriptions indicating ownership. According to Plutarch (Mor. 293 a-b), Methone had been founded by Eretrians, expelled from Corcyra by the Corinthians, and some of the longer inscriptions from the hypogeum seem to conform to the Euboean script. But not all the letter forms are exclusively or even primarily Euboean and may betray some influences from the alphabets of Boeotia, Argos, Ithaca, or Crete, while a couple of inscriptions are almost certainly in the Attic script. Furthermore, petrographic analysis of the pottery on which the inscriptions were scratched shows that while much of it was manufactured in the Northern Aegean, and especially around the Thermaic Gulf where Methone is located, some wares were imported from not only Euboea but also Attica and the East Greek islands of Lesbos, Chios, and Samos. If this situation was at all typical, one might suspect that the literary accounts of colonial foundations are not so vastly different in kind from those for the earlier migrations.
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