The Mediterranean Sea has long been celebrated as a nexus for cultural interactions and entanglements. The sea cannot be understood apart from that which it connects and which extends beyond it, thus, calling for studies of an expansive geographical and temporal scope – a call that has been increasingly answered by scholars. Interconnections between the Mediterranean space and the lands of Western and Central Asia, though also historically significant, have yet to be placed in a matching broader perspective. Redressing this imbalance, Material Entanglements in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond investigates more extensive vistas onto ancient cultural and artistic contacts spanning the vast territories from the Jaxartes and the Indus in the east to the Straits of Gibraltar in the west for over two millennia, from the Middle Bronze Age to the Sasanian Period (c. 2000 BCE – c. 650 CE).
Setting the larger historical backdrop of this investigation is an ever growing ‘internationalism,’ allied with expanding diplomatic and political networks and trading ventures, phenomena of far-flung colonization, and a succession of powerful states aspiring to extended territorial control — bridging the geographical divides among the three continents of the Old World. At the heart of the research narrative are the artistic products of these complex interactions: architectural and sculptural creations, as well as luxury, votive and everyday objects, whose technical execution, styles, forms, materials and imagery variously emanated from and gave shape to processes of cultural contacts through combination, incorporation and adaptation of different regional material resources, traditions of craftsmanship, aesthetics, ideological trends and worldviews.
The range and volume of pertinent artistic products are immense. Our approach is to consider representative artifacts and ensembles, including monumental complexes and small-scale ‘treasures’ with mixed contents of multi-regional objects; and to query mechanisms and outcomes of cultural interactions by breaking down different aspects of materiality, such as scale and proportions, technologies, iconographies, forms and color – examined individually and in concert with one another. For example, features of monumental sculpture and architecture would be considered both separately from and alongside features of small-scale items such as seals, coins, metalwork or ceramics, which will also be addressed independently. Aspects of the materials and media used in (and the economic/social mechanisms that promoted) the production of the artworks also occupy an important domain within the project, especially regarding the sources and methods of procurement and disbursement of materials such as stones and metals.
Methods and Approaches
Thinking in terms of material properties like scale, form or technologies, issues of portability/transferability, and the exchange and mobility of craftspeople and skills requires discussion of methodological and theoretical frameworks. A body of such frameworks has developed over the last several decades, informed by post-colonial studies, cultural contact studies, materiality studies and agency studies (see, for example, Cusick, et al. 2015). Post-colonial studies, with debts to Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Culture and Imperialism (1993) and Homi Bhabha’s The Location of Culture (1994), offer provocative theorizations of cultural interactions that challenge monolithic notions of culture and that emphasize the fluidity of identities and interactions across shared spaces (both physical and mental in nature). Network analysis has proven to be one of the most productive of new approaches in culture contact studies, taking a multiplicity of forms that address variation and patterns across space and time, as well as multiple scales from the local to the regional to the extra-regional (e.g. Knappett 2011; Malkin 2011). While both cooperative and conflictual contacts will be explored, the project emphasizes aspects connecting cultures rather than drawing distinctions between East and West.
Materiality and agency studies, drawing upon recent developments in anthropology and material culture studies such as Alfred Gell’s Art and Agency (1998) and work by scholars such as Daniel Miller and Ruth Van Dyke, develop concepts of the human-object relationship that allow for nuanced relays between the preserved archaeological artworks and the ancient social situations in which they were enmeshed. Materiality can be understood as “the properties, affordances, functions and styles of different materials” (Rebay-Salisbury, Brysbaert and Foxhill 2015: 1), and how these shape and are shaped by human beings. Technology studies present a further avenue into considerations of social interaction and exchange, in particular aspects of choice, taste and preference in technological processes accessed through concepts such as the chaine operatoire (Leroi-Gourhan 1964; Dobres 2000) and technological styles (Lemonnier 1992; Gosselain 1998; Hegmon 1998), which offer insights into how knowledge and technologies are transmitted.
Materiality and technology studies depend upon close analyses of the physical aspects of the artifactual remains, while post-colonial, cultural contact and network analyses construct frameworks for social interpretation that can be derived from the close formal analyses. For the representational arts, iconography remains an important method for accessing meaning and significance, which can be enhanced through notions of object biographies or life ways that permit changes in valences over space and through time. The project takes as a central aim not just the production of new historical and social reconstructions according to the ancient artworks, but also the examination, application and assessment of these developing methodological frameworks.
In addition, a core focus throughout the project will be on a critical examination of terminology, such as ’emulation,’ ‘adaptation,’ ‘imitation,’ ‘hybrid,’ and ‘provincial.’ Hybridity and entanglement have proven particularly productive intellectual concepts for post-colonial considerations of culture contact, yet both terms are freighted with complexities and multivalencies that warrant close evaluation. Hybridity, linked most closely with the work of Bhabha, has found broad acceptance throughout Mediterranean interaction studies, but has also come under recent criticism for its underlying insistence on the prior culturally ‘pure’ states of being from which the hybrid must develop. Entanglement has emerged as an alternative concept to hybridity, offering a more neutral understanding of the complex dynamics involved in the intermingling of identities. Traced back to the anthropological study of Nicholas Thomas (1991), the concept of entanglement has found variations in forms in the work of Ian Hodder (2012) and, for the eastern Mediterranean and Near Eastern worlds, Phillip Stockhammer (2012, 2013), Stephanie Langin-Hooper (2013) and Hitchcock and Maier (2013). Yet it, too, requires further discussion, in particular with respect to the many different ways in which the term has been applied. Aspects of ‘appearance’ further prompt reflection about the intrinsic usefulness of labels, such as ‘Egyptianizing,’ ‘Orientalizing,’ or ‘Greco-Persian,’ used to denote mixed imagery and styles, and about the cultural bias engendered in modern implications of cultural dominance, such as ‘Hellenization’ and ‘Romanization’ (Woolf 1998; Dietler 2010).
Project Aims
In recent years, major exhibitions and scholarly meetings have each brought together in the same venue artifacts and/or scholarly interests spanning the Mediterranean to Central Asia, demonstrating the exciting potential for cross-dialogue with reference to particular historical periods. Material Entanglements in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond expands upon these recent discussions with its explicit goal of bridging single-period intellectual perspectives and, above all, the pre-/post-Hellenistic divide.
The Program seeks to explore interconnections, scrutinize theoretical frameworks, and foster much-needed dialogue among different disciplinary and intellectual perspectives.
As part of the Connecting Art Histories initiative of the Getty Foundation, it aims to forge connections at both the level of ideas and that of people, encouraging the exchange of viewpoints, methods and theoretical constructs among specialists who rarely come into contact with one another’s work. It is intended to be fully collaborative among an international, intergenerational cohort of scholars. Research conducted within the frame of the program, a pair of focused workshops to be held in Athens, and a platform of virtual communication will support an environment of sustained intellectual collaboration.
Program Structure
The Program pivots around two, eight-day workshops, during which the program participants, the two co-PIs and a Research Fellow will gather for a series of presentations, round-table discussions and site visits. The workshops will be held at the National Hellenic Research Foundation in Athens, Greece. The first one in fall 2018, the second in fall 2019. A program of communication and exchanges through coordinated virtual activities will occur in between the two workshops.
We anticipate that the workshop group will remain the same throughout the project. Participants developing individual research projects of varying nature will bring their own area of specialization into conversation with the group as a whole. Projects include object genres such as seals, gems, coins, ceramic pottery, architectural forms such as temples, and large and small scale sculpture that lend themselves to the shared research questions regarding the role of material artifacts in the social interactions of the Mediterranean and Near East, as well as the place of these artifacts in the ongoing dialogue among ancient artistic trends/aesthetics
References
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