Text and archaeology in the Greek world
Every academic year, I teach the “Greek archaeology and material culture” section of the “Research Methods in Classics/Ancient History” graduate pro-seminar that’s offered in my department for first-year PhD students in Classics. The students have a variety of backgrounds and interests, but mostly they focus on literature. Few of them have much interest in archaeology. So, one of the things that I tell them is that archaeology is more relevant to Classics than ever before. This is due, I argue, in large part to a shift in the way that most Classicists think about ancient texts.
In the past, texts were seen as producers of culture. For instance, in a celebrated article published in 1976, Coldstream argued (following Farnell) that later dedications in earlier Mycenaean tombs “arose under the influence of epic poetry from the late eight century onwards.” Thus, Homer was first, and under the influence of Homeric epic, certain cultural practices (tomb-cult, hero-cult) were later development.
Few (if any) would hold this position today. There has been a shift towards seeing the literary text as a cultural product. So most scholars would argue that tomb- and hero-cult were cultural practices that influenced Homer as much as (or even more than) Homer influenced them. Greg Nagy, for instance, points out that Homer and the increase of interest in local hero cults are processes that are intimately linked to each other.
This matters for archaeology because if the text is a producer of culture (Homer begets hero-cult), then the role of classical archaeology is minimal–archaeology essentially illustrates the text, perhaps it affirms its accuracy, and perhaps it may even fill in some gaps. If, however, the text is a product of culture (hero-cult influences Homer), then archaeology’s role (with respect to the texts) is much more important. Archaeology provides the context necessary to understand the social, economic, and cultural forces that shape our literary texts.
This is what I tell our students, both because I believe it, and to encourage them to see archaeology as an important part of their research and not an unrelated sub-discipline of Classics that they can safely ignore. But I keep bumping against the reality that a lot of archaeological research is still driven by the old way of thinking. Texts are not only used to formulate research questions that relate mostly to the text, but are mined for “facts” around which archaeological narratives are built. Archaeology is used to illustrate the text.
Although this can be quite depressing (at least for me), it also provides lots of opportunities for radical reevaluations of archaeological orthodoxies. A good example of this is a paper published in the most recent issue of the American Journal of Archaeology. The article, entitled “Pharalis: Literary Myth or Historical Reality? Reassessing Archaic Akragas,” argues against the standard view that the archaeology of Archaic Akragas can be explained with reference to the tyranny of Phalaris, who ruled Akragas from 571-554 BC. It turns out that most of the material prosperity that archaeologists had associated with Phalaris – the city plan and fortification walls, temple building, and territorial expansion — actually dates to the end of the sixth century BC, too late to date to Phalaris’ reign. There is an interesting parallel with sixth century Athens. Although some are fond of talking about the building boom associated with the tyrant Peisistratos and his sons, it seems increasingly clear that much building both pre-dates and post-dates the tyrants, so that it makes much more sense to think more broadly about sixth century boom in architectural construction (see, e.g., Robert Parker’s Athenian Religion: A History, pp. 67-68).
I’m not trying to argue here that Classical archaeologists need to liberate themselves from the tyranny of texts, or that there ought to be an adversarial relationship between textual sources and material ones. Quite the opposite: archaeologists should embrace the developments in ancient history and Classics that make their archaeological material sing.
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