Archaeology of Identity

From Saxon mercenaries to prince Beowulf  – Scandinavian identity in Anglo-Saxon England ca 450 – 800 AD.
Through an analysis of the spatial, chronological and social organization of Scandinavian material culture in England during the early and middle Anglo-Saxon period, it is argued that the Scandinavian cultural traits take part in a social discourse relating to the manifestation, negotiation and transformation of Anglo-Scandinavian identity. Both archaeological and contemporary historical sources are explored, and the analysis focuses on the intersection of manifestation of ethnic identity in the different medias/sources. The theoretical basis of the analysis is the perception of ethnicity as a dynamic, contextual and multidimensional phenomenon, generated in a situation where a cultural encounter between peoples of differing cultural traditions takes place. The cultural content of ethnic identities is seen as dependent on both the cultural practices of the agents involved, and the social conditions that characterize the specific historical situation where the meeting takes place.
The analysis of Scandinavian material culture indicates that in the period immediately following the ”Anglo-Saxon” invasion, Scandinavian identity is incorporated in a common Germanic, ”Saxon” identity that is contrasted and defined in opposition to a British/Romano-British ethnic identity. Then, in the period ca 475 – 575 AD, Scandinavian culture seems to be actively involved in a process of polarization between different regional groups. These groups are based on a constellation of different ethnic groups, such as Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Francs, ”Norwegians”, a ”native” Romano-British population etc, and are later to be known as Angles, Saxons and Jutes referred to in historical sources from the 8th and 9th centuries. At the end of the 6th and beginning of the 7th century, Scandinavian identity is going through a process where it is structured in accordance with a hierarchical principle, in which it comes to symbolize the common cultural heritage of an emerging aristocracy.

A metalwork hoard dated to the Wilburton phase of the later Bronze Age, found at Barway close to the Isle of Ely in the Cambridgeshire Fens, is reported. Consideration of the hoard, in the context of later prehistoric hoarding in the local landscape, reveals that particular sorts of artefacts were associated with particular places in the landscape. In particular a strong association between later Bronze Age hoards and causeways connecting the Isle of Ely to the outside world is identified, and an interpretation suggested. This study demonstrates the potential of a detailed contextual approach for providing a more nuanced understanding of later Bronze Age metalwork deposition that moves away from a simplistic wet-dry dichotomy.

Lo scopo di quest’articolo è realizzare una sintesi introduttiva sullo stato della ricerca per ciò che riguarda il genere. Comincerò rivedendo tutto ciò che riguarda l’origine degli studi di genere per poi soffermarmi su una delle aree in cui questo nuovo campo dell’archeologia ha avuto più successo, quello della critica all’impostazione androcentrica. Introdurrò poi alcune considerazioni su come si dovrebbe concepire il genere, vale a dire come una categoria multidimensionale e diversa. Gli studi di genere sulla sussistenza e sulla produzione, sulla cultura materiale, su genere e paesaggio, e come que¬sto tipo di identità può essere studiata in relazione al potere e alia gerarchia sociale, sono altri temi sui quali si soffermerà questo lavoro.

This essay is an examination of Udjahorresnet’s Persian identity. Best known from the inscription on his naophorous statue now in the Vatican, Udjahorresnet was a high-ranking courtier in Egypt under the Saite pharaohs Amasis and Psamtik III, and subsequently under the Persian kings Cambyses and Darius. While his statue’s form, function and inscription make it clear that he was an Egyptian, certain representational features of the statue indicate that he had a Persian identity as well. These features include the statue’s garment, which evokes the Persian “court robe” depicted at Persepolis and elsewhere, and the lion-headed bracelets on his wrists, which are examples of a well-known class of Achaemenid jewelry. The court robe, which derives from Elamite tradition, is a key visual marker of the idealized “Persian man,” a central aspect of Achaemenid royal ideology, and the lion bracelet, which draws on various material culture traditions from Iran, is a symbol of imperial unity. Udjahorresnet’s decision to include these features on his statue thus suggests that he constructed a Persian identity for himself.

The concept of the community is vital to the way we understand human societies both past and present, and the last decade has seen widespread interest in communities from both the popular and academic spheres.

The concept is also central to archaeology, where the relationship between sites and communities remains controversial. Naoíse Mac Sweeney aims to take the debate one step further, setting out a comprehensive framework for the archaeological investigation of community identity, encompassing theoretical approaches for its conceptualization, practical methodologies for its investigation, and detailed case studies in Anatolia to test and illustrate its arguments.

The attached download is a sample of the book, consisting of chapters addressing the theorisation of community both in archaeology and in the wider social sciences.

We discuss the important role of the feminist critique in bringing awareness to gender, childhood, and identity research, and in giving voice to the perspectives of underrepresented groups. As a case study of ancient social lives and gender, we discuss a range of Marajoara identity markers interpreted through the study of ceramic tangas (female pubic coverings) from Marajó Island in the Brazilian Amazon (A.D. 400-1400). There, tangas were made and used by women as a material representation of social position, gender, and individual identity. We argue that identity constitutes a fundamentally important aspect of archaeological research, and that the strongest case studies in identity are those that encompass a variety of gendered inferences to understand social lives of the past.

In 1938, a woman’s burial was uncovered by road builders at Ketilsstaðir in north-eastern Iceland. Recently, her physical remains and associated funerary goods were re-examined by an international, interdisciplinary team and formed the basis for an exhibition at the National Museum of Iceland in 2015. This paper focuses on the items of dress that accompanied the woman — born in the British Isles, but who migrated to Iceland at a very young age — to gain insights into the ways her cultural identity was expressed at the time of her death. Here we explore the roles played by material culture in signaling her identity, and the technologies and trade networks through which she was connected, visually, to Scandinavia, the British Isles, and the Viking world at large.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Medieval Archaeology on June 18, 2019, available at

https://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/85KSUjTRteGNwPAUjc7z/full?target=10.1080/00766097.2019.1589816

Late antique identities from the Western Balkans were transformed into new, Slavic identities after c. 600 AD. It was a process that is still having continuous impact on the discursive constructions of ethnic and regional identities in the area. Building on the new ways of reading and studying available sources from late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the book explores the appearance of the Croats in early medieval Dalmatia (the southern parts of modern-day Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina). The appearance of the early medieval Croat identity is seen as a part of the wider process of identity-transformations in post-Roman Europe, the ultimate result of the identity-negotiation between the descendants of the late antique population and the immigrant groups.

Personhood has become an important element of archaeological theory in the last two decades. Following C. Fowler's (2016) analysis, most approaches to the study of personhood conceptualise it through either a Single-Spectrum or a Multiple-Spectrum model. The former tends to assume that the tension between individual/dividual personhood is a central, structuring element of personhood, usually making use of extensive ethnographic analogies. The latter, on the other hand, rejects the centrality of the individual/dividual tension, along with any evolutionary understanding of the development of personhood and any sort of aprioristic assumption about how it might have looked in any given society. At the same time, the increasing popularity of posthumanist approaches, including the arrival of both the Ontological and Affective turns, raise questions about how these new trends will contribute to debates on personhood. This session aims to debate the current state of approaches to personhood in archaeology, particularly focusing on the following questions:
• To what extent are historical and ethnographic analogies still useful for the archaeological study of personhood?
• How can new approaches, such as New Materialism and the Ontological Turn, contribute to the study of non-human personhood?
• Is the single-spectrum model still relevant to the study of prehistoric personhood?
• How can archaeological approaches contribute to the study of personhood in contemporary societies?

"Manuel Fernández-Götz’s book unifies in an exemplary way written and archaeological sources, and adds new explanatory depth to the emergence of ethnicity and migration. The book shows the strength of a theoretically informed interdisciplinary approach in archaeology. As such it is an outstanding contribution to our understanding of the Hallstatt and  La Tène periods in Europe".
Professor Kristian Kristiansen, University of Gothenburg.


"Manuel Fernández-Götz’s detailed study offers a wide-ranging, markedly new overview of the development of later Iron Age societies of northeastern Gaul, more particularly the Moselle-Middle Rhine sector; this is focused on the key themes of power and identity. His anthropologically-informed approach sets the developments of the period into wider perspectives, extending back to the late Hallstatt world and on to the transformations accompanying ‘Romanisation’. This overview is destined to become both a key source for the comprehension of the regional record and, perhaps more importantly, a vade mecum for further consideration, both theoretical and practical, of his central topics within temperate European Iron Age studies".
Ian Ralston, Abercromby Professor of Prehistoric Archaeology, University of Edinburgh.

Headdresses of Sophisticated Ladies – Hallstatt Period Gold Spheres from the Dürrnberg at Hallein
Due to its salt mines and the excellent location for traffic, the Dürrnberg mountain at Hallein is one of the most important economic and  communication centres in Iron Age Europe. Immediately after its settlement and the beginning of salt mining in the period Ha D1, members of the local population were buried with rich grave good assemblages under barrows with wooden chambers. Grave 353 of the »Eislfeld« cemetery contained a young woman alongside a large set of pottery and bronze vessels of partly Italian-south Alpine origin. Apart from brooches, bracelets and anklets of the usual pattern her personal ornaments comprised an elaborated headdress consisting of hair rings and seven spheres of gold sheet. Similar needle and ornamental bonnets are known only from a few late Hallstatt female graves in the centre of the West Hallstatt culture. By comparing these graves with gold spheres, the position of the Dürrnberg within the supra-regional network of cultural relations is analysed on the basis of grave 353. The contact and cultural impulses which are recognised, contributed to the creation and further development of the social structures within which the women wearing gold spheres assumed an outstanding position.

This chapter and the larger body of work on which it builds focuses on what I characterize as the environmental, spatial, and visual bases of Iranian iden- tity and royal power: that is, landscape, architecture, the built environment, and the ritual activities they hosted. These, I argue, played a complementary, and no less central role in establishing and changing Iranian identity as that of textual or oral discourse. I have argued in several places that royal engage- ment with natural, urban and architectonic space was not merely a reflection or trapping of imperial power, but a fundamental tool by which sovereigns created and transformed royal identity and continually instantiated it with ritual practice.

An overview of the Etruscan inscriptions from the Faliscan area shows different patterns for different centres, with a strong presence at Narce in the archaic period and at Corchiano in the Hellenistic period. The former, which has been considered in the past as a colony of Veii on the basis of epigraphic evidence, is revealed as a very dynamic and culturally independent community since at least the 7th century BCE. Moreover, new evidence for a definition of Narce as a spura, an independent civic community, comes from an Etruscan gift inscription of the late Orientalizing period, in which the centre is mentioned using the non-Etruscan name Thevnalthia.
Some attention is then paid to a group of inscribed red-varnished saucers of the late archaic period, which were probably produced in Narce and were perhaps a substitute of the Spurinas Group in the Faliscan area. Some final remarks are dedicated to human mobility along the Tiber valley, highlighted by the migration of some specific gentilicia from Veii in the 7th-6th centuries BCE to Clusium and northern Etruria in the Hellenistic period, through the Faliscan and Volsinian areas.

Keywords:
Ethnic identity; Etruscan; Faliscan; Narce; red-varnished saucers; human mobility

The modern interdisciplinary exploration of ancient Egyptian burial sites represents one of the major trends of contemporary archaeological research in Egyptology. Cooperation among representatives of the natural, technical and social sciences is imperative if we are to understand the information collected during the excavation process. The ancient Egyptians believed in an afterlife similar to the life they had lived on earth, and their tombs – in terms of their location, architecture, decoration, inscriptions, and burial equipment – reflected many aspects of their world, including the administration of the state, the social standing of tomb owners and their families, the realities of everyday life, religious ideas, the anthropology of the population of that time, and the state of (and changes in) the environment.
Over time, four royal complexes of Fifth-Dynasty kings were built in the Abusir pyramid  field during the Old Kingdom. In addition, members of the royal family and the state’s high officials constructed their tombs here. In their shadow, lower-ranking officials, along with their wives and children, would be buried. All of these monuments tell thousands of multifaceted stories, from which we can reconstruct the history of the world’s oldest territorial state.
As the Abusir burial ground is so vast, it comes as no surprise that several different non-royal burial sites gradually arose independently of each other in this widespread area over the course of the third millennium BCE. While the factors influencing their position, nature and time of origin varied, key considerations would undoubtedly have been the location of the Old Kingdom’s capital, White Walls, the evolution of the network of settlements, the local cult topography, and the main communications connecting the necropolis with the Nile valley. Although much of the site remains unexplored, current knowledge and archaeological research offer a relatively detailed awareness and description of how it developed in time and space. Each of the burial sites tells, in its own specific way, the story of its time and of the owners of the individual tombs. These monuments reflect the dynamics and transformations of ancient Egyptian society. The following text provides a very limited description of some of these sites, drawing on the enormous wealth of sources known to date .

Feasting equipment, copper‐alloy cauldrons and flesh‐hooks, are a distinctive feature of the later Atlantic Bronze Age suggesting elements of a shared ideology whose ultimate origin may lie in the eastern Mediterranean. The easterly distribution of the earliest British cauldrons previously identified is further confirmed by the recent discovery of a Type Colchester example at Salle, Norfolk, which brings to three the number of cauldrons of this type found in the region. Similarities between them suggest their origin lies in a single workshop, if not individual craftsman. The appearance of the cauldrons found at Feltwell, Norfolk, and Salle is so close as to suggest a new ‘Feltwell’ Variant. Analysis of the contents of the Feltwell cauldron hint at the function of these intriguing objects as high status cooking vessels, most likely reserved for the chiefly class and deployed in the hosting of feasts which, along with flesh‐hooks, served to build and cement political alliances.

KEYWORDS
CAULDRON, FLESH‐HOOK, FEASTING, LATER BRONZE AGE, IDEOLOGY, BRONZE AGE CHRONOLOGY, METAL DETECTING

The Aegean-inspired pottery of Iron I Philistia has received a great deal of scholarly attention. Many have studied the various influences that shaped it, its development during the Iron I, the ethnic identity of its users, and even its disappearance at the beginning of the Iron II. While constantly changing during the first 150 years after the initial settlement of the new immigrants in Israel’s southern coastal plain, this decorated pottery grew in popularity, and steadily increased its percentage in the ceramic assemblages of the Philistine centers. Later, in the early Iron II, this Aegean decorative tradition disappeared. The decorated pottery in Iron II Philistia (Ashdod Ware) was more akin to Phoenician decorative traditions, was applied to different vessel forms, and was far less popular than its predecessor. It is the aim of the present article to reevaluate the developments of the Aegean-inspired pottery during the Iron I and to reexamine the drastic transition from this decorated pottery to a local type of decorated ware in the Iron II, in order to learn about processes of development and change within the society of Philistia and about the relations between the Philistines and their neighbors, both within and without Philistia, at that time.

This paper challenges the common ethnocentric notion of the Faliscans as an autonomous and autochthonous group inside Etruria and emphasizes the Faliscan ethnicity as a ductile ideology linked with the geopolitical changes which occurred in the middle Tiber Valley between the 8th and the 3rd centuries BC.
Within this framework the paper analyses the landscape history of the ager Faliscus between the 10th and the 3rd centuries BC  to identify significant changes in the territorial organization such as aspects of the political identity of the Faliscans.
The Faliscans appear as allied or dependent communities of the powerful Etruscan city of Veii from the 8th century BC onwards, but substantial changes in Faliscan political unity could have occurred from the 6th century and particularly after the fall of Veii in 396 BC.
The political identity of the Faliscans is newly negotiated after 241 BC, despite the drastic modifications occurring in the territory because of the military conquest by Rome.
This paper also proposes to identify the area around the via Flaminia as the part of the territory directly  controlled by Rome after the peace treaty with the Faliscans, and where the expropriation of lands known from the literary tradition can be identified thanks to the remains of land divisions found by recent archaeological surveys.

The present study attempts to identify and characterise some basic principles that underlined  historical  development  in ancient  Egypt,  specifically  during  the  Old Kingdom period. Looking at the ever-increasing corpus of the evidence, it applies the theory of punctuated equilibrium for explaining some of the major features operating human society in a diachronic perspective. The explanatory potential of the punctuated equilibrium concept seems to work rather well when applied to the historical evidence we have at hand. As a consequence, Old Kingdom history is not any more a rather homogenous continuum represented by individual pharaohs and monuments arranged into a regular evolutionary scheme; on the contrary, it emerges as an intricate open system punctuated by several historically brief “events” during which major changes in society took place and which were divided by longer periods of stasis, a continuum with seemingly no significant development. The Old Kingdom era emerges as an open system in which the specific role of the individual in specific historical circumstances is able to significantly enhance our understanding of new discoveries, historical facts, and known contexts.

The  emerging concept  of historical  development  outlined  above can  be, in my view, successfully applied for a description of some of the irregularities which once governed the development of ancient Egyptian society during the Od Kingdom. Stephen Jay Gould and Nils Eldridge in the early 1970s formulated a new theory, describing the nature of processes encountered in evolutionary biology. It was a theory that explained some formerly incomprehensible patterns in the distribution of fossil remains over a long period of time. They concluded, due to a lack of other evidence, that instead of an evolutionary linear concept, one may well apply a theory of punctuated equilibria. This appeared to be a much more suitable explanation for the observed phenomena.
In simplified terms, the original concept of “punctuated equilibria” means that species (following the original studies of Eldridge and Gould) continue to exist in an apparently balanced way, punctuated by major individual events introducing  crucial  changes  within  that  basic species, or group evolution. These major developmental changes tend to happen in certain discrete peri- ods of time divided by rather uneventful  periods of stasis when no significant development takes place.
If we look now at the data which we have analyzed for the Old Kingdom, we can see that a similar “punctuated” pattern emerges. The explanatory potential of the punctuated equilibrium concept seems to work quite well when applied to Old Kingdom history. There is every reason to believe that it can be applied to other periods as well. The results given above have proven to have had a significant bearing on how we can now view Old Kingdom history. With regard to the Old Kingdom, it seems to be appropriate to assume that the evidence at our disposal is rich enough and sufficiently heterogenous to allow for such a theory, thus avoiding the risk of coming to speculative conclusions.
In my opinion, Old Kingdom history should no longer be considered as a rather homogenous continuum represented by individual pharaohs and monuments arranged into a regular evolutionary scheme: on the contrary, it emerges as an intricate open system in which several historical individuals embedded in specific historical contexts managed considerably greater achievements than others. It would certainly deserve a detailed study if the “events” must always be connected to a historical personage. For the time being, this seems to be the most probable context.
Equally powerful can be the concept of punctuated equilibrium when applied to an analysis of the development, rise and fall of any given complex society—as it has done in the case of the history of Old Kingdom Egypt. The fact that we can bind specific innovations to specific historical circumstances and embed them in a particular historical context lets us detect more satisfactorily the decisive turns in the development of any given society.
  In this particular case we can see without any significant bias that factors that formerly initiated dramatic success of the ancient Egyptian state gradually transmuted into negative ones that contributed to the decline and eventual collapse of the Old Kingdom. Thus the roots of principal internal factors contributing to a system’s ultimate demise can be detected already in the formative stage of the system. Their former positive feedback eventually turns them into factors that usher in a crisis of the system. At the same time, it is the shortening and eventually total disappearance of the equilibrium periods which is indicative of the approaching collapse of the current state of affairs.

The multiplier effect, coupled with the concept of punctuated equilibrium, represent tools with which it is possible to better understand the nature of some traditional phenomena in history. Moreover, this concept provides a rather different perspective from the former notion of history as a continuous uninterrupted current of more or less isolated events.

Famous as the homeland of Odysseus, Ithaca has been a preferred research area for archaeologists. However, the archaeology of Ithaca has been severely biased by its Homeric focus. As a result, Late Archaic and Classical Ithaca remains poorly understood. This biased research agenda combined with the lack of visible remains of monumental public architecture have created the impression that Classical Ithaca was an isolated backwater. This thesis aims to partially redress the balance. At Polis valley, northern Ithaca, relatively rich deposits of Late Archaic and Classical occupation have come to light. Six assemblages of fine ware pottery, Ithacan and imported, provide important insights on the hitherto unknown local pottery production and development, its relations to the Western Greek pottery tradition as well as the influences from the well-known pottery production centres of Athens and Corinth. The contexts of behaviour in which the pottery participated likely represent activities of communal feasting in the open and during daylight, followed by an arranged exposure of the leftovers on the surface. The social significance of the pottery is then investigated and it is argued that the local elite largely regulated pottery production and imports of foreign ceramics as strategies for maintaining the established social hierarchy. Furthermore, the depositional practices of the pottery may reveal a complex negotiation of social behaviours and concepts, such as insularity, acculturation, identity and connectivity. The final conclusion is that the local widely-connected seafaring elite deliberately cultivated a culture of austerity and traditionalism in order to maintain its power over the community, and the manipulation of fine ware pottery played a major role in the success of this strategy.

In this paper, I used theories of embodiment, identity, materiality and landscape dwelling to write an interpretative archaeology of the Mesolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age periods on Cranborne Chase in Dorset.
The paper also featured fictional vignettes intended to provide possible insights into very different past lives, world views and understandings of landscape. It was also illustrated with imaginative drawings by Cornelius Barton and Erica Hemming. The paper was an avowedly experimental exercise in interpretative narrative, to try and create a bridge between sometimes dense theoretical treatments, and more populist accounts. Inspired by some of Mark Edmonds' fictional accounts of working wood and flint, I tried to portray something of people's beliefs and cosmologies, a difficult task in which I was only partly sucessful. I was particularly keen to try and envisage a Mesolithic world of animist, relational ontologies. I also wished to focus on ideas of identity, including possible multiple genders; and the activities and taskscapes of women and children, which the illustrations too supported. I would love to continue these fictional thought experiments at a future date, perhaps in a graphic novel set during the British later Iron Age.
This paper represents the final Word text, with some remaining typos, but not the final paginated typeset Archaeopress formatted article. I have also removed the illustrations, but have retained the glossary of theoretical terms included at the rear of the book, one of the aims of which was to try and explain complex theoretical concepts in more accessible terms. There is also a bibliography for suggested further reading, though of course this is only valid up to 2004, and there have subsequently been many important contributions to landscape archaeology, cultural geography and archaeological discussions of identity.

This article deals with the socio-political dimension of public space in 13th-century bc Ugarit, with a particular focus on the city’s squares. It approaches urban space as an organic, dynamic, and multiscalar system of intersecting interactions, in which
the street network functions as prime connector and point of encounter for different social groups. The paper combines the analysis of space configuration, the analysis of urban design, and the contextual analysis of small finds and their distribution.
This combined methodological approach helps identify at Ugarit a market square and a system of ceremonial squares, each with its own political and social value.

It is widely accepted that the Liburni, at some point in the Iron Age, ruled over much of the Adriatic. Professor Slobodan Čače was the first scholar to truly challenge these narratives through a critique of the written sources.  The aim of this paper is to build upon the work of Čače in seeking to rethink identities in pre-Roman Liburnia through analysis of ancient literary sources. It also takes a multidisciplinary approach, and seeks to address ideas about identity and cultural change through material culture. A re- examination is undertaken into Liburnian identity through archaeological evidence, and the transformations it apparently went through during the Iron Age, focusing on ideas about ethno-cultural identities and ‘Hellenization’ in interpretations of developments in Liburnia during the last 4 centuries BCE.