Community Formation in Iron Age Ionia: Experience and Practice in Comparative Perspective

Steidl, Catherine A.

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Year:: 2018
Contributor:: Steidl, Catherine A. (creator); Rojas, Felipe (Advisor); van Dommelen, Peter (Advisor); Alcock, Susan (Reader); Ratte, Christopher (Reader); Brown University. Department of Archaeology and the Ancient World (sponsor)
Genre:: theses
Subject:: Mediterranean archaeology; archaeology of communities; Greek archaeology; Iron age; Archaic Greece; Ionia
Extent:: xvi, 388 p.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26300/297m-4p31

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Abstract:: This dissertation studies the comparative dynamics of community formation and flux in Ionian Anatolia and the Northwestern Mediterranean during the early first millennium BCE. The transition from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age in Ionia is not well understood archaeologically, but rather based on narratives of migration from much later written sources. The need to understand the source of Ionia’s ‘Greekness’ as an influx of people from mainland Greece was driven by the region’s central importance to the Greek cultural imagination in the Classical and later periods. Dissatisfaction with the historicity of the ‘Ionian Migration’ and increasing archaeological evidence for continuity at major sites, however, have made traditional explanations untenable. I analyze the archaeological and social complexities in the region with a constructive approach that does not conceptually separate Anatolian from Greek material culture, and I use the concept of ‘community’ to address challenging questions of identity and contact. I ask: how did Iron Age inhabitants of the western Anatolian coast develop a coherent regional identity in the first place? And how did that region suddenly become ‘Greek’ after centuries of intense cultural contact and exchange with the Aegean? I study continuity at cult sites and key settlements in order to investigate the interactions that must have taken place between a diverse array of people coming, going, and remaining in a region characterized by interaction and exchange. I designed a new framework to study communities in the archaeological record that distinguishes between three broad categories of practice and experience around which communities articulate: shared maintenance practice, shared ritual practice, and shared social experience. This allows for comparison across contexts, and I illuminate the potential of Ionian data through its direct comparison to analogous counterparts on the Northwestern Mediterranean littoral—a region similarly situated within diverse networks of interaction. Overall, the results of this analysis and approach revealed the importance of continuity at cult sites for the articulation of Ionian communities. They highlight the variable nature of community articulation, and the importance of shared social experiences for negotiating complex, cross-cultural interaction in diverse spaces on both sides of the Mediterranean.
Notes:: Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2018

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Steidl, Catherine A., "Community Formation in Iron Age Ionia: Experience and Practice in Comparative Perspective" (2018). Graduate Research Theses and Dissertations. Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library. https://doi.org/10.26300/297m-4p31

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Graduate Research Theses and Dissertations

Theses and Dissertations for the Graduate Research department.
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