Between the Aphrodite-Temple and the Late Archaic House III

Abstract:

Did phases of globalization exist before „globalization“? Aside from the epochal signature left by today’s digital World Wide Web, earlier epochs and mega-spaces can clearly be regarded as forerunners of today’s “globalization”. Downright paradigmatic for such a phase is the Mediterranean area of the 6th to 5th century BC. Obviously, in that day it was not the internet that served as the basic resource for interconnectedness, but simply the Mediterranean itself. With its seaways, winds and currents it enabled people, goods and ideas to move and interweave megaspatially at a very early time.

In this densely interconnected Mediterranean world around 500 BC the coasts along the western tip of Sicily formed a central hub that not only connected the migratory and transfer movements of Greeks, Etruscans and Phoenicians. Indeed, they also served to connect the indigenous populations in the interior of the island and this proto-global Mediterranean world. But what effects did this relatively sudden connectedness have on the lives of the indigenous people living in the mountainous hinterland?

Since 2011 this question has been examined in the long-term project “Between Late-Archaic House and Aphrodite-Temple” through targeted archaeological fieldwork on Monte Iato, approx. 30 km southwest of Palermo. What has come to light thus far is a pre-global microcosm that is no less dynamic and complex than today’s modern world.

After more than 100 years of only loose contact with the trans-Mediterranean coastal network, from 550 BC onwards a few families on Monte Iato deliberately began to undertake hospitality and networking with the tyrants and aristocrats of the Greek coastal cities. It was through this hospitality that goods, technologies, and craftsmen also arrived on the hill. By their power to decide which of the local co-inhabitants was allowed to participate or not, these families increasingly consolidated their claim to leadership. Already around 500 BC this process of appropriation and empowerment culminated in a monumental high-tech architecture and a seemingly Greek style of consumer culture that was hardly distinguishable from the life of the Greeks in their mundane coastal cities. To prevent being socially dislocated from their indigenous milieu, the return to imaginary age-old cults and rituals was simultaneously forced. Apparently, such a religious reference to local authenticity and identity was needed to make this new globalized environment - as the manifest of a new order and rule - socially and politically tolerable within the indigenous societal framework.

The questions the third and final stage of the long-term project seeks to answer are the following: How did this proto-global process become possible on Monte Iato in the first place? And why did it come to an abrupt end only 50 years after it began?