"Phoenician” metal bowls : boundary objects in the Archaic period

Abstract

Defining cultures and explaining cultural interaction takes us back to the formative years of \narchaeological thinking in the first half of the nineteenth century, when contributions to leading debates often \ncame from prehistorians and concerned prehistoric times. For later periods, for which literary sources are \navailable, it has been noticed that in ordering archaeological data into cultures and periods, archaeologists \nand ancient historians were essentially characterizing continuity and change, an exercise often affected by \nthe interplay of disciplinary structures and professional goals. This is a theme that has been explored for the \nPunic period by P. van Dommelen in several writings published over the last decade. In exposing the \nrelationship between archaeological representations of ancient colonial situations and the contemporary \nworld he has shown how the dualist conception of colonial situations as a confrontation between distinct \nentities does not work. Colonial situations are murky and ambiguous; he argues that Punic Sardinia from the \nmid-sixth century BC onwards is a good example of such a contact situation. Influencing, imitation and \ncreative subversion of a hegemonic Punic culture resulted in the creation of local inventions of material \nculture, artefacts which are essentially a hybrid. It is not the author's intention here to question the existence of a \nhegemonic Punic culture, although he believes that to be a valid query. This paper looks at cultural interaction \nin the Archaic period and takes as a point of departure a class of diagnostic artefacts – metal bowls – \ncommonly held to be Phoenician on account of stylistic idiosyncrasies. The author's principal point in reviewing the \ndefinition of a culture considered to be the progenitor of the Punic one is to widen the limited perspective that \nconsiders only the ultimate origin of certain stylistic features in material culture so that it includes one that \ntakes as its central aims a social analysis.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 7 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.