This project began as a case study in classical archaeology aimed at exploring artifact design in a post-processual or interpretive approach. It ended at the limits of archaeological historiography, at an interpretive impasse. I found orthodox paradigms of design and socio-cultural archaeology/history inappropriate and confusing. The project has forced me to consider radical alternatives to the conventions of writing and representing the archaeological past.
The material is conventionally termed protocorinthian pottery. The ubiquity of the protocorinthian perfume jar (aryballos) makes it a type fossil and chronological index for much of the Mediterranean in the mid first millennium BC. Previous work has been almost entirely within an art historical tradition.
My work found the fine chronologies suspect (lack of independent stratigraphical substantiation) and the phasing dependent upon an art historical and a priori notion of stylistic development (early, mature, late). Understanding design is dependent upon iconology and a model of art workshops commonly associated with post renaissance art history, and Beazley’s classical archaeology. I proposed that the conventional terminology be abandoned and the iconology be recognized as useful but narrow. Another argument against classical art history concerned the inadequacy of the distinction between meaningful iconography and meaningless decoration.
I studied a sample of 2000 pots found in over 90 locations. About 10% had some figurative painting. The project was a contextual treatment in that it looked at all issues relevant to the design, manufacture, distribution and consumption of the whole sample. Outwardly this took the form of a study of an artifact lifecycle. Some observations about the tight link between manufacture and consumption were noted (in, for example, the lack of any statistically significant difference in patterns of consumption). Close up the study was a spiral of associations tracked through the material and its contexts – empirical, spatial, conceptual, metaphorical. Art and the Early Greek State presented a methodological chapter outlining this >>rhizomatic method.
Traditional categories of rank, resource, trade, state formation, urbanization, 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). The interpretive and analytical categories are just too blunt (on this see my book Social Theory and Archaeology). This project suggested to me that a revitalized history 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).
Though I tacked on a narrative of the early state (expansion of the polity), though I presented a systemic model of design in the early state (motivations related to class culture), the material led me into a quite different story of faces, animals, corporeality, potters wheels and brushes, physical and imagined mobility, flowers, food and consumption, sovereignty, gender, ships, clothing. Here I came up against the limits of the interpretive project. Too much is ultimately not open to interpretation. Interpretation always risks overly reducing the richness of historical and archaeological detail to plot, account, cause, effect. This reduction is part of the fallacy of representation or expression as I have called it. As well as analysis, explanation, interpretation, I add manifestation – letting the material display itself (though this heretical empirics is not merely descriptive). This is what some of the book Art and the Early Greek State attempted to do. And this also lies behind later projects in Theatre/Archaeology and [The Three Landscapes Project.
The encounter with the sedimented components of an archaeology and history of Graeco Roman antiquity meant that my study of Corinthian pottery immediately involved a reflexive treatment of the discipline – this was the point of the book Classical Archaeology of Greece. Its argument is that our topic in classical (and indeed Mediterranean) archaeology is as much the history of study in the classical tradition as it is the archaeological materials themselves. Superceding the classical tradition necessitates recognition of its working and potency, its broad and pervasive forms. Classical archaeology in the classical tradition I can only see ultimately as part of a cultural resource field, studied, used, abused, managed like any other.
Publication
The project first appeared in my PhD thesis, Cambridge University 1992
Style and the design of an Archaic Korinthian perfume jar Journal of European Archaeology 1:77-106 (1992)
Art and the archaeology of the early Greek city state: a project of embodiment Cambridge Archaeological Journal 5:1-38 (1995)
Classical Archaeology of Greece: Experiences of the Discipline Routledge,1996
Art and the Early Greek State: An Interpretive Archaeology Cambridge University Press, 1999
on the heterogeneous body see also Theatre/Archaeology with Mike Pearson Routledge, 2001