This edited volume presents papers from a conference held in 2014 at Magdalene College, Cambridge to celebrate the contributions of Anthony Snodgrass to the discipline of Classical archaeology. The authors are Snodgrass’ former students and include many prominent members of the field; a separate volume collects the conference papers of Snodgrass’ colleagues and peers (Bintliff & Rutter eds., Reference Bintliff and Rutter2016). Editors Lisa Nevett and James Whitley present the book not as a traditional Festschrift, but rather as a disciplinary history of Classical archaeology since 1976, when Snodgrass joined the Cambridge Classics faculty, as well as an exploration of current debates on the future of the field (pp. 2–3). While the various chapters do not quite coalesce into a unified narrative of developments in Classical archaeology over the last forty years or delineate a coherent program for the field's future, they reflect the wide-ranging intellectual interests and publication history of the volume's honorand, spanning topics as diverse as Early Iron Age and Archaic Greek social history, survey archaeology, ancient art, ethnoarchaeology, and reception studies.
James Whitley (Ch. 1) and Susan Alcock (Ch. 17) bookend the volume with reflections on Classical archaeology's historical development, current purview, and future prospects. Whitley depicts Snodgrass as a transformative figure, forging links between the Schools of Classics and Archaeology at Cambridge throughout the 1980s and 1990s and helping to usher in a ‘paradigm shift’ towards a contextual Classical archaeology (pp. 6, 12)—a project whose full potential has perhaps not yet been realized (Haggis, Reference Haggis2018). Though Snodgrass’ influence on Classical archaeology is undoubtedly profound, the centrality of Cambridge is perhaps overstated by Whitley, who omits from his discussion foundational developments in North America in the latter part of the twentieth century such as the University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition (UMME), which explicitly incorporated the aims and methods of the New Archaeology into the design of a regional project in Greece. Alcock's short conclusion identifies two potential areas of tension in the future of Classical archaeology: (1) the integration of new approaches from the archaeological sciences with more traditional forms of analysis and (2) the training of graduate students. That the capaciousness of a reimagined Classical archaeology poses challenges as well as opportunities has been frequently noted over the past several decades (Morris, Reference Morris and Bintliff2004: 266; Hall, Reference Hall2014: 215–19), but institutional change has been slow in coming. Hopefully, the field is beginning to acknowledge Alcock's important observation that students cannot attain perfect command of both ancient languages and art historical knowledge while simultaneously gaining comprehensive training in archaeological theory, GIS, or laboratory-based methods. These questions about the future of archaeology have grown even more pressing since this volume's publication, as evinced by the recent closure of Sheffield University's world-class archaeology department and the increasing neoliberalization of higher education in general.
The body of the volume consists of chapters grouped into four parts. Several contributions respond directly to arguments or concepts drawn from Snodgrass’ impressive body of work. Robin Osborne (Ch. 5), for instance, proposes a new explanation for Snodgrass’ observation that Greek art before 550 BC rarely depicts scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey. Osborne posits that while epic poetry emphasizes the stories of glorious individuals, art of the seventh and sixth century BC focuses instead on what distinguishes humans as a category from animals and gods. While intriguing, this argument is not always convincing. It is difficult to understand, for example, how the multiple depictions of scenes from the life of Achilles on the famous black-figure François Vase should be understood as emphasizing the archetypal human rather than the individual persona of the famed hero (p. 79). David Small (Ch. 2) and Ian Morris (Ch. 8) both respond to the concept of ‘structural revolution’ as articulated in Snodgrass’ Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment, from which the volume under review borrows its title (Snodgrass, Reference Snodgrass1980). Snodgrass used the term to refer to a period of accelerated demographic growth accompanied by profound social and economic change in late eighth century BC Greece; Morris expands the concept to encompass changes in the mode of production across the span of global history. Small, on the other hand, rejects the idea of a ‘revolution’ as overly teleological, preferring instead a model of Iron Age Greek social development drawn from complexity theory, where periods of stability are punctuated by periods of sudden transformation, or ‘phase transitions’ (p. 22). While this approach has the potential to frame historical evidence in new ways, some of Small's archaeological arguments are undertheorized. The presence of iron spits (obeloi) in Early Iron Age tombs at Knossos, for example, should not automatically be considered evidence of elaborate funeral feasting without further discussion. Such an interpretation is certainly possible, but obeloi appear in many Late Geometric and Early Archaic sanctuary and funerary contexts in the Aegean and may have functioned as votives or symbols of elite prestige (Heymans, Reference Heymans2021: 181–84).
Several papers deal with the issue of time in archaeology. Sturt Manning's (Ch. 9) compelling presentation of the new and higher radiocarbon dates for Tell el-Dab'a clearly illustrates the important implications that a revised absolute chronology has for the writing of Mediterranean history—in this case, demonstrating the previously neglected importance of the rise of the Hyksos world to contemporary developments in Cyprus and the Aegean in the seventeenth century BC. Manning ends his paper with a thoughtful discussion of the potential gains and pitfalls that can occur when trying to link paleoclimatic data (often of low chronological resolution) to historical events such as the end of the Late Bronze Age; further research that carefully and critically integrates paleoclimatic studies is surely an important new direction for Mediterranean archaeology. In contrast to the large-scale, synthetic phenomena discussed by Manning, Lisa Nevett (Ch. 10) demonstrates through a case study of Olynthos how archaeological techniques like geochemistry, soil micromorphology, and study of micro-debris from house floors can unlock cyclical processes on the daily or seasonal scale, over the lifetime of an individual, as well as the generational processes of Braudel's conjonctures. Michael Given's (Ch. 12) often poetic discussion of slag in Cyprus underscores the many transformations Iron Age and Roman industrial waste undergoes over time, as slag heaps become associated with religious monuments or slag cakes are built into modern threshing floors and terrace walls.
Snodgrass would be the first to acknowledge that arguments about social and economic trends require firm empirical grounding, and multiple contributions explore Early Iron Age and Archaic history and archaeology through detailed regional case studies. In a new examination of the evidence from the sanctuary of Zagora on Andros, Alexandra Coucouzeli (Ch. 3) mounts a convincing hypothesis that the polis deities consisted of a Heracles-Hera dyad partly inspired by the Phoenician couple of Melqart and Astarte. Sara Owen (Ch. 6) uses the Parian ‘colonization’ of Thasos to interrogate the tensions between the literary, epigraphic, and archaeological evidence for Archaic Greek colonization, while Gillian Shepherd's (Ch. 7) study of sixth century BC Sicilian cemeteries suggests that the location of burials played an important role in expressing social difference in these communities. In a more explicitly theoretical contribution, James Whitley (Ch. 4) invokes the concepts of human-thing entanglement and agency to discuss two categories of artifact that have often been studied as art objects rather than as components of archaeological assemblages: Cretan and Cyladic relief pithoi and Attic black and red-figure cups and kraters in Etruria. While I appreciated Whitley's effort to consider the nuanced cultural meaning of these vessels in their archaeological contexts, I was surprised to see ‘pithos’ and ‘krater’ ascribed a simple set of binary associations in his final analysis, with pithoi described as ‘household, female, local’ and kraters as ‘sympotic, male, Mediterranean-wide’ (p. 70, Table 4.6). The use of ‘Archaic’ Cretan relief pithoi in Hellenistic houses is a fascinating phenomenon (Galanaki et al., Reference Galanaki, Papadaki and Christakis2019), but it is difficult to make firm claims about pithoi as matrilineal heirlooms or the amount of time from manufacture to deposition without more well-published examples of Archaic and Classical Cretan assemblages.
Of particular value are several chapters that discuss the history and archaeology of modern Greece, a field that has been traditionally overlooked by classical archaeologists. Thomas Gallant's (Ch. 13) contribution, which describes preliminary results of the Kefalonia and Andros Social History and Archaeology Project (KASHAP), sounds a welcome call for a ‘vibrant and thriving field of Historical Archaeology in Greece’ that engages with broader trends in social history, material culture studies, and environmental humanities (p. 177). KASHAP's documentation of modern Greek rural infrastructure, domestic architecture, and material culture, when fully published, will be a valuable addition to other recent work on these topics (e.g. Vionis, Reference Vionis2012; Papadopoulos, Reference Papadopoulos2013). Other chapters explore the connections between past and present in Greece. Jonathan Hall (Ch. 16) focuses on the concept of diaspora in both ancient and modern Greek contexts. He moves from the role of Greek émigrés in the War of Independence to the exile and repatriation of Messenian refugees in the Archaic and Classical periods and back again, emphasizing common issues of identity construction and integration. In a chapter that will be of particular interest to survey archaeologists (Ch. 11), Paul Halstead uses ethnographic interviews of traditional Mediterranean farmers to shed new light on the relationship between manuring and the ‘off-site scatters’ so commonly observed in archaeological survey in the Aegean. His results show that regional variation in climate, diverse forms of animal husbandry, and cultural attitudes towards garbage greatly affect the relationship between manuring and refuse disposal. Jeremy Tanner (Ch. 14) and Giovanna Ceserani (Ch. 15) both place Classical history and art on a world stage: Tanner through a comparison of the notions of ‘rebirth’, ‘revival’, and the agency of the artist in Roman antiquity, Late Ming/Early Qing China, and early modern Europe, and Ceserani via a historiographical survey of the study of ancient Greek women in eighteenth-century Europe.
The book is well-edited and produced, with few typographical errors and high-quality figures. Personal anecdotes from Snodgrass’ students throughout the volume display a genuine respect and affection for their teacher and mentor, and James Whitley's bibliographic essay helpfully tracks Snodgrass’ intellectual development over more than fifty years of contributions to the field (pp. 255–56). On the whole, the volume sits between a Festschrift and a thematically organized set of papers. While some papers reference other contributions in the volume, either in the main text or footnotes, more effort could have been made to draw out common themes. Readers should also be aware that many of the contributions describe preliminary or partial results of larger projects rather than presenting definitive conclusions. The stimulating plurality of theoretical orientations and methodological approaches represented, however, are a testament to Anthony Snodgrass’ ability to inspire a wide array of scholars working to expand the disciplinary boundaries of Classical archaeology.
