This article seeks to gain an understanding of distinctive changes in certain artefacts produced in Corinth in the late eighth and seventh centuries BC. The focus is the development of figurative imagery on miniature ceramic vessels (many of them perfume jars) which travelled from Corinth particularly to sanctuaries and cemeteries in the wider Greek world. Connections, conceptual and material, are traced through the manufacture and iconography of some 2000 pots, through changing lifestyles, with juxtapositions of contemporary poetry from other parts of the Greek world. Aspects of embodiment are foregrounded in a discussion of stylization and drawing, the character of monstrosity (appearing in ceramic decoration), experiences of risk in battle, discipline and control. Techniques of the self (leading through the floral to wider lifestyles) also feature in this context, together with perfume, and the consumption or deposition of the pots in circumstances of contact with death and divinity. The argument is made that the articulation of an ideological field lay at the core of the changes of the early city states such as Corinth. The article is offered as a contribution to a contextual and interpretive archaeology. It attempts to develop concepts for dealing with power relations in an understanding of material culture production which foregrounds human agency and embodied experience.