Graduate Program in Balkan and Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology

Online course, 30 hours, 3 credits

 

This class is dedicated to the ways food and other goods were produced and consumed in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. We begin with Neolithic households and continue to Bronze Age urban and palatial economies. We then approach the richer archaeological and textual sources from Greek and Roman times through the lens of theoretical issues such as contact studies, connectivity, globalization and regionalism.

In the legacy of Fernand Braudel’s Mediterranean, we constantly zoom in and out, dealing with household inventories but also know-how and technology; the social and the political; small worlds and multi-regional networks such as those documented by the shipwrecks at Uluburun and Marzamemi.

Economy is also about contacts between producers and consumers, between tradesmen and merchants from across the Mediterranean and beyond, as well as the mingling of people from different social and ethnic groups. That is why this course will focus on shipwrecks, harbors, markets, agoras, fora, roads, colonies, emporia and other places of interaction. These are the spaces of hybridization and innovations such as the creation of new alphabets, dialects, metric systems, and values. But these places are also loci of isolation and segregation, clashes and conflict between people from different cultures, foreigners, metoikoi, places where slaves and women were traded as staple goods. The economy is a microcosm of social life, and its study reveals information about the ancient world far more detailed than simple facts like supply and demand.

If you are interested in Neolithic Spondylus shell bracelets, copper oxhide ingots, wines spices and perfumes, textiles, marble and other luxury goods, and many other sources for the ancient economy, you should check out this class.

 

 

	Topic	Number of hours
1	Setting up the table: Why and how to think about ancient economies?	2
2	From Karl Marx to our days’ thinkers of production and consumption	2
3	The fundamentals: Pre-industrial agriculture and stock breeding in a Mediterranean environment	2
4	Household archaeology and the Eastern Mediterranean Neolithic	2
5	Specialized craftsmen in the Early Bronze Age. First urban sites and trading centers in the Eastern Mediterranean	2
6	Wa-na-ka-te-ro. Palatial economies of the 2nd mill BCE Eastern Mediterranean	2
7	Economies in Geometric Greece	2
8	Consumption, commodities, and value in Archaic Greece	2
9	Economies in Archaic and Clssical Greece	2
10	Emporia and colonial encounters	2
11	The Roman empire: labor	2
12	The Roman empire: trade and markets	2
13	The Roman empire: globalization and connectivity	2
14	The Roman empire: narratives of growth and collapse	2
15	Final discussion, summary and conclusions	2

 

 

 

Essential readings:

 

 

Adams, C. 2012. “Transport.” In W. Scheidel (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy, 218-40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Arnaud, P. 2016. “Cities and Maritime Trade under the Roman Empire.” In C. Schäfer (ed.), Connecting the Ancient World: Mediterranean Shipping, Maritime Networks and their Impact, 115-72. Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf.

 

Allison, P. (ed) 1999 “The Archaeology of Household Activities”. Routledge.

 

Appadurai, A. 1986. “Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value.” In A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 3-63. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Bang, P.F. 2009. “The ancient economy and new institutional economics.” Journal of Roman Studies 99:194–206.

 

Barker, G. / A. Grant 1999  “Food and Farming”. In: Barker, G. (ed.) Companion Encyclopaedia of Archaeology, Vol 1, London et. al., 1999, 546-607.

 

Bogaard, A. / V. Isaakidou  2010. “From megasites to farmsteads: community size, ideology and the nature of early farming landscapes in western Asia and Europe”. In: Finlayson, B. / G. Warren (eds.), Landscapes in Transition: Understanding Hunter-Gatherer and Farming Landscapes in the Early Holocene of Europe and the Levant, Oxford: CBRL and Oxbow 2010, 192-207.

 

Bresson, A. 2016. The Making of the Ancient Greek Economy: Institutions, Markets, and Growth in the City-States. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Braudel, F. [1949] 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 1. New York, Harper & Row.

 

Braudel, F. [1949] 1973. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. Vol. 2. New York, Harper & Row.

 

Broodbank, C. 2000. An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades. Cambridge University Press.

 

Chang, Cl. 1993. “Pastoral transhumance in the Southern Balkans as a social ideology: ethnoarchaeological research in Northern Greece”. American Anthropologist 95 (3): 687-703.   

 

Chapman, J. / E. Magyari / B. Gaydarska. 2009. “Contrasting subsistence strategies in the Early Iron Age? - New results from the Alföld plain, Hungary, and the Thracian plain, Bulgaria”. Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 28, 2, 155-187.

 

Chesson, Meredith S. 2003 “Households, Houses, Neighbourhoods and Corporate Villages: Modelling the Early Bronze Age as a House Society”. JMA 16,1, 2003, 79-102.

 

Costin, J. 1991. Craft specialization: issues in defining, documenting, and explaining the organization of production. Archaeological Method and Theory, 3: 1-56.

 

Decker, M. 2001. “Food For an Empire: Wine and Oil Production in North Syria.” In Economy and Exchange in the East Mediterranean during Late Antiquity, edited by S. Kingsley and M. Decker, 69-86. Oxford: Oxbow Books.

 

Dietler, M. 2010. Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France. Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

Dietler, M. 2018. “Emporia: spaces of encounter and entanglement.” In: The Emporion in the Ancient Western Mediterranean: Trade and Colonial Encounters from the Archaic to the Hellenistic Period, ed. by E. Gailledrat, M. Dietler and R. Plana- Mallart, pp. 231-242. Montpellier: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée.

 

Earle, T. 1999 “Production and Exchange in Prehistory”. In. G. Barker (ed.) Companion Encyclopedia of Archaeology, Vol 1, London et. al., 1999, 608-636.

 

Evershed, R. et al. 2008 “Earliest date for milk use in the Near East and southeastern Europe linked to cattle herding”. Nature 10. 1038, 1-4.

 

Finley, M. I. 1973 The Ancient Economy. London.

 

Fredericksen, M.W. 1975. “Theory, Evidence and the Ancient Economy.” Journal of Roman Studies 65:164-71.

 

Garnsey, P., ed. 1980. Non-slave labour in the Greco-Roman world. Cambridge Philological Society Supplements 6. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

 

Halstead, P. / J. Barrett (eds.) 2004 Food, Cuisine and Society in Prehistoric Greece. Sheffield Studies in Aegean Archaeology, Oxbow Books, Oxford 2004

 

Halstead, P. 2014. Two Oxen Ahead. Pre-mechanized Farming in the Mediterranean. Wiley-Blackwell 2014

Harper, K. 2011. Slavery in the Late Roman World, AD 275-425. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Hendon, J. A. 2004. “Living and working at home: the social archaeology of household production and social relations.” In: Meskell, L. / R. Preucel (eds.) A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing, 2004, 272-286.

 

Horden, P. / N. Purcell 2000. The Corrupting Sea: A Study of the Mediterranean History. Oxford, Blackwell.

 

Jones, D. W. 2014. Economic Theory and the Ancient Mediterranean. Wiley Blackwell

 

Kapitän, G. 1969 ‘The Church Wreck off Marzamemi’, Archaeology 22(2), pp. 122-33.

 

Karagiorgou, O. 2009. “Mapping Trade by the Amphora.” In Byzantine Trade, 4th-12th Centuries: The Archaeology of Local, Regional and International Exchange, edited by M. M. Mango, 37-58. Surrey: Ashgate.

 

Kehoe, D.P. 2007. “The Early Roman Empire: Production.” In W. Scheidel, I. Morris, R. Saller (ed.s), The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, 543-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Kingsley, S.A. 2003. “Late Antique Trade: Research Methodologies & Field Practices.” In L. Lavan and W. Bowden (ed.s), Theory and Practice in Late Antique Archaeology, 113-38. Leiden: Brill.

 

Knappett, K. 2011. An Archaeology of Interaction: Network Perspectives on Material Culture and Society. Oxford University Press.

 

Knappett, C. 2017. “Globalization, Connectivities and Networks: an archaeological perspective.” In T. Hodos (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Archaeology and Globalization. New York: Routledge.

 

LaBianca, Ø. S. and S. A. Scham. “Introduction—Ancient Network Societies.” In Ø.S. LaBianca and S.A. Scham (ed.s), Connectivity in Antiquity: Globalization as Long-Term Historical Process, 1-6. London: Equinox.

 

Leidwanger, J. (2018) ‘New investigations of the 6th-c. A.D. “church wreck” at Marzamemi, Sicily’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 31, pp. 339-56.

 

Leidwanger, J., Pike, S.H., and Donnelly, A. (2018) ‘Revisiting the Origin and Destination of the Late Antique Marzamemi “Church Wreck” Cargo.’ in Poljak, D.M. and Marasović, K. (eds.) ASMOSIA XI: Interdisciplinary Studies of Ancient Stone. Split: University of Split, pp. 291-300.

Moore, H. L. 1982 The interpretation of spatial patterning in settlement residues. In: I. Hodder (ed.) Symbolic   and Structural Archaeology, Cambridge, 1982, 74-79.

Morris, I. / J. G. Manning. 2005. "The Economic Sociology of the Ancient Mediterranean World" In: N. J. Smelser / R. Swedberg (eds.) The Handbook of Economic Sociology. Princeton University Press, 131-158.

 

Morley, N. 2016. “Trade and the Integration of the Roman Empire.” In C. Schäfer (ed.), Connecting the Ancient World: Mediterranean Shipping, Maritime Networks and their Impact, 105-14. Rahden: Verlag Marie Leidorf.

 

Morris, I. 1986. “Gift and commodity in Archaic Greece.” Man, 21:1-17.

 

Mullins 2004 in Meskell, L. / R. Preucel (eds.) A Companion to Social Archaeology. Blackwell Publishing, 2004

 

Nanoglou, Str. 2008. “Building biographies and households. Aspects of community life in Neolithic northern Greece”. Journal of Social Archaeology 2008, 8, 1, 139-160.

 

Nee, V. 2005. “The New Institutionalisms in Economics and Sociology.” In N.J. Smelser and R. Swedberg (ed.s), The Handbook of Economic Sociology, 49-74. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Oka, R. and C.M. Kusimba. 2008. “The Archaeology of Trading Systems, Part 1: Towards a New Trade Synthesis.” Journal of Archaeological Research 16.4: 339-95.

 

Ortiz, S. 1994. “Work, the division of labour and co-operation”. In Companion Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. By T. Ingold, pp. 891-910.

 

Osborne, R. 2002. “Pride and prejudice, sense and subsistence: exchange and society in the Greek city.” In The Ancient Economy, edited by W. Scheidel & S. von Reden, pp. 114-132.

 

Panella, C. & A. Tchernia 2002. “Agricultural products transported in amphorae: oil and wine.” In The Ancient Economy, edited by W. Scheidel & S. von Reden, pp. 173-189.

 

Paterson, J. 1998. “Trade and Traders in the Roman World: Scale, Structure, and Organization.” In H. Parkins and C. Smith (ed.s), Trade, Traders, and the Ancient City. London: Routledge.

 

Pitts, M. and M.J. Versluys (ed.s). 2014. Globalization and the Roman World: World History, Connectivity and Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Polanyi, K. 1957. “The Economy as Instituted Process.” In K. Polanyi, C.M. Arensberg, and H.W. Pearson (ed.s), Trade and Market in the Early Empires: Economies in History and Theory, 243-70. New York: Free Press.

 

Renfrew, C. 1986. “Varna and the Emergence of Wealth in Prehistoric Europe.” In A. Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, 141-68. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

 

Russel, N. 2012. Social Zooarchaeology. Humans and animals in prehistory. Cambridge University Press.

 

Sahlins, M. 1972. Stone Age Economics. Chicago

 

Scheidel, W. 2009. “In search of Roman economic growth.” Journal of Roman Archaeology  22.1: 46–70.

 

Scheidel, W. 2014. “The shape of the Roman world: modelling imperial connectivity.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 27: 7-32.

 

Sherratt, A. 1997. Economy and Society in Prehistoric Europe. Changing Perspectives. Edinburgh University Press.

 

Sirks, B. 1991. Food for Rome: The legal structure of the transportation and processing of supplies for the imperial distributions in Rome and Constantinople. Studia Amstelodamensia ad Epigraphicam, Ius Antiquum et Papyrologicam Pertinentia 31. Amsterdam: Gieben.

 

Tchernia, A. 2016. The Romans and Trade. Trans. J. Grieve and E. Minchin. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Terpstra, T.T. 2019. Trade in the Ancient Mediterranean: Private Order and Public Institutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

 

Thompson, F.H. 2003. The Archaeology of Greek and Roman Slavery. London: Duckworth.

 

Van Wees, H. 2013. Ships and Silver, Taxes and Tribute : A Fiscal History of Archaic Athens. London: I.B. Tauris.

 

Venticinque, P.F. 2016. Honor among Thieves: Craftsmen, Merchants, and Associations in Roman and Late Roman Egypt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 

 

Voutsaki and J. T. Killen (eds.), Economy and politics in the Mycenaean palace states, Proceedings of Cambridge Philological Society supplementary volume 27, 2001,

 

Whittaker, C.R. 1983. “Late Roman Trade and Traders.” In Trade in the Ancient Economy, edited by P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins, and C.R. Whittaker, 163-80. London: The Hogarth Press.

 

Whittaker, C.R., and P. Garnsey. 1998. “Trade, industry, and the urban economy.” In A. Cameron and P. Garnsey (ed.s), The Cambridge ancient history. Vol. 13, The late empire, A.D. 337–425, 312–337. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.

 

Wilson, A. I. 2009. “Indicators for Roman economic growth: A response to Walter Scheidel.” Journal of Roman Archaeology 22.1: 71–82.

 

Wright, J. (ed.) 2004. The Mycenaean Feast, Princeton University Press, Princeton.