Re-thinking communities: Collective identity and social experience in Iron-Age western Anatolia

Abstract

Reference to identity is ubiquitous in archaeology. Even when identity is not part of the questions driving research, assumptions about it affect interpretations of data; the terms used to designate individuals or collective groups carry implicit ideas about their identities. Default categories used to describe people, however, are often rooted in binary oppositions instead of the interactions that made up their daily social lives. In an archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, these oppositional categories are most frequently rooted in ethnicity. This article presents the community as an ideal framework to address the problems posed by an overreliance on ethnicity for understanding ancient identities, but also to compare collective social dynamics more broadly. Laying out a methodology for communities’ archaeological study, it uses two case studies from Emporion (Spain) and Ephesos (Turkey) to illustrate the new questions and conversations facilitated by an archaeology of communities that complement ongoing identity studies.

Staying local: Community formation and resilience in Archaic Southern Sicily

“…For approaching community formation, most archaeologists seek spatial and material correlates of past interactions and copresence, or of 'practices of affiliation' (Isbell, 2000: 258) and 'enactments of community' (Mac Sweeney, 2011: 37). Recently, Catherine Steidl (2020) has proposed focussing on shared maintenance practices in households and settlements, shared ritual practices, for instance, at cult and burial places, and shared social experiences, ranging from everyday encounters to festive gatherings. This focus combines 'aspects of natural and imagined communities that articulate place-making with communal identity-making' (Watts Malouchos, 2021: 22) and sees communities as mental abstractions built on the experience of human-to-human interactions.…”

“…Since the 1990s, the archaeology of communities has deconstructed common-sense notions of communities as universal social units on the supra-family level (Mac Sweeney, 2011; Steidl, 2020; Varien and Potter, 2008; Watts Malouchos, 2021; Yaeger and Canuto, 2000). It has undermined the idea that a ‘community’ is an almost natural outcome of living together at a site, i.e.…”

“…In this sense, the town defences can be seen as articulating a statement of self-identification and stabilising social coherence, as can the silos within the settlement, which would have served as a communal infrastructure, involving maintenance practices and daily encounters, and the cult building, engendering shared ritual practices and social experiences (cf. Steidl, 2020: 31–32).…”