In the last decades Mediterranean archaeology has changed dramatically questioning some of its most basilar assumptions, as for instance the existence of large scale migrations à la Childe and prehistoric thalassocracies à la Evans. Yet despite this, when it comes to the interpretation of large phenomena of cultural change and interaction there are some axioms laying at the very core of the discipline which remain largely unnoticed and therefore almost completely unchallenged. The most persistent and influential among those is undoubtedly that of directionality of culture change, from East to West, from the civilized to the uncivilized.My aim in this contribution is to instil doubts about the inescapability of this trend. Can cultural influence travel the other way round? In order to do that I will deal with an historical context in which the South-East/North-West cultural drift, as Andrew Sherra (1997) named it, does not really fit with archaeological data. I am referring to the end of the palatial era and the post-palatial period in Greece (LH III B–C), corresponding roughly to Recent and Final Bronze Age in Italy and Bronze D and Halstatt A in the rest of Europe (Jung 2006, 216). The title I choose evokes the well known Orientalizing period, a moment in which the cultural osmosis between the Greek ‘West’ and the ‘East’ is said to be at one of its higher point (Burkert 1992; Riva and Vella 2006). The hypothesis that I will provocatively try to explore here by the means of a World System approach, asserts that a similar phenomenon in terms of width and strength of existing connections came about with regions which were located westward and north westward of the Aegean a few centuries before, in the last part of Bronze Age. I will try to show in this paper that after the dissolution of mainland states a contraction occurred in the sphere of cultural influence of the Mycenaean ‘core’, leaving room for a variety of formerly peripheral elements to be accepted and become influential in Greece.
Westernizing Aegean of LH III C
Francesco Iacono
2013
Abstract
In the last decades Mediterranean archaeology has changed dramatically questioning some of its most basilar assumptions, as for instance the existence of large scale migrations à la Childe and prehistoric thalassocracies à la Evans. Yet despite this, when it comes to the interpretation of large phenomena of cultural change and interaction there are some axioms laying at the very core of the discipline which remain largely unnoticed and therefore almost completely unchallenged. The most persistent and influential among those is undoubtedly that of directionality of culture change, from East to West, from the civilized to the uncivilized.My aim in this contribution is to instil doubts about the inescapability of this trend. Can cultural influence travel the other way round? In order to do that I will deal with an historical context in which the South-East/North-West cultural drift, as Andrew Sherra (1997) named it, does not really fit with archaeological data. I am referring to the end of the palatial era and the post-palatial period in Greece (LH III B–C), corresponding roughly to Recent and Final Bronze Age in Italy and Bronze D and Halstatt A in the rest of Europe (Jung 2006, 216). The title I choose evokes the well known Orientalizing period, a moment in which the cultural osmosis between the Greek ‘West’ and the ‘East’ is said to be at one of its higher point (Burkert 1992; Riva and Vella 2006). The hypothesis that I will provocatively try to explore here by the means of a World System approach, asserts that a similar phenomenon in terms of width and strength of existing connections came about with regions which were located westward and north westward of the Aegean a few centuries before, in the last part of Bronze Age. I will try to show in this paper that after the dissolution of mainland states a contraction occurred in the sphere of cultural influence of the Mycenaean ‘core’, leaving room for a variety of formerly peripheral elements to be accepted and become influential in Greece.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
