For ten years I studied ancient Corinthain pottery - perfume jars in particular, made between about 720 and 620 BC.

I learned how to work in clay. I visited museums to look at the pots. I built databases and read the ancient authors.

I attempted an archaeological interpretation that began with ceramic design, production and consumption. Outwardly this took the form of a study of artifact lifecycles. In its early stages the project worked with a relatively familiar historiography of the early Greek city state (my take - expansion of the polity form explained through structures and discourses related to class cultures), and I presented a systemic model of artifact design.

But the material led me into a quite different cultural field of faces, animals and monstrosity, corporeality, potters wheels and brushes, physical and imagined mobility, flowers, food and consumption, sovereignty, violence, alterity, gender, ships, armor and clothing, and much more. Here, arguably, I came up against the limits of any interpretive project - too much is ultimately not open to interpretation, or at least overflows an analytical or interpretive project. Interpretation always risks overly reducing the richness of historical and archaeological detail to structure, plot, account, cause, effect.

Traditional categories of rank and social class, resources, trade, state formation, urbanization, and manufacture I found too connected with long-standing tendencies to emplot archaeological material in standardized metanarratives (here of the expansion of the city state as a component of ancient imperialisms, as well as the cultural florescence of ancient Greece). My interpretive and analytical categories were just too blunt (on this see Shanks and Tilley Reconstructing Archaeology 1987). My work suggested that a revitalized archaeology of Graeco-Roman antiquity requires an approach that challenges many of these components of conventional narratives (economy, trade, colonization, acculturation, stylistic expression of ethnic and political identities), and indeed the narratives themselves.

Historical narrative * didn't work at all. So much so that I sometimes think we have a very distorted view of the early Greek state.

see Classical Archaeology of Greece

see Art and the Early Greek State

bibliography