Conclusion

In general, save in very exceptional and limited circumstances involving a direct and intimate relationship with contemporary historical documents, archaeology’s greatest strengths lie not in furnishing traditional event - or personality-centered history, but in uncovering wider contexts of an economic, social, cultural and ideological nature (see Chapter 5, by Raaflaub). Where some ancient epic (particularly literary Greek and Roman epic, and to some extent also Near Eastern epic) is concerned, much of this context can be provided by other contemporary and earlier literature, including literature of a historical nature, and the role of archaeology is therefore mainly a subsidiary one. When it comes to the Homeric epics, however, such contemporary literary contexts are lacking, and this is why, ever since the 1870s or so, archaeology has often been regarded as a particularly crucial key to their elucidation, and why (in conjunction with their own ideological heritage, including a powerful ideological inheritance from the Greeks themselves) archaeologists have been tempted, aberrantly and for so long, to batter their heads against the brick wall of Homeric historicity. However, although we can excavate Troy, Mycenae, and Pylos, we cannot excavate Homer’s Trojan War, or his Odysseus, Achilles, or Agamemnon, any more than we can excavate Virgil’s Aeneas or the relics of his adventures. The most we can do is excavate the heterogeneous elements which formed the cumulative ‘‘history’’ out of which Homer’s epics were fashioned. These are to be sought not in the archaeology of specific epic history but in the history of epic glimpsed through the archaeology of contexts.

This question of archaeological contexts for the Homeric or indeed other oral epics can be approached in different ways and at different levels. At a mechanical level, archaeology, by documenting the latest datable material cultural references, can help confirm an approximate date for their creation. At a more fundamental level, aspects of the archaeological record of the period in which the epics can thus be shown to have emerged in recognizable form can shed light on the wider social and ideological contexts which produced them, and (in conjunction with ideological aspects of the texts themselves) why they may have done so and the purpose they served. In other ways, by tracking datable elements of material culture in their content, and the contexts in which they occur, archaeology can both demonstrate the existence and hint at the nature of a deep bardic ‘‘prehistory’’ which contributed to the material out of which they were created and without which they would have lacked the ‘‘authenticity’’ necessary to serve this purpose (see Chapter 13, by J. Foley and Chapter 4, by Jensen). In addition, it can detect material (including visual) correlates of elements of epic symbolism and ideology, and can trace these diachronically and across cultural and linguistic boundaries, thus shedding light on the kinds of originally disparate material which finally converged in the creation of the epics. Finally, by revealing alternating patterns in the ways in which such social practices as funerary display are used, or how representative art of a generic, emblematic nature gives way to art of a specific narrative form, the archaeological record may also give us some insight into the differing social and socio-ideological contexts in which differing forms of earlier bardic output may have been created, transmitted, or re-interpreted over a prolonged period.