Between the Aphrodite-Temple and the Late Archaic House III

Did phases of globalization exist before globalization? Aside from the epochal signature left by todays digital World Wide Web, earlier epochs and mega-spaces can clearly be regarded as forerunners of todays 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 todays 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?

The project investigated the early- Mediterranean period (900-450 BC) as a (pre-)global world - but from the opposite end of the scale of globality. Using Monte Iato as a case study, we focused on the production of the local in its entanglements with an increasingly globalised outside world. The settlement was located amidst the interior of western Sicily. We investigated how the seemingly contradictory interplay of the traditional, the self-centred, and the cosmopolitan affected local formations of power, groups, and identities in such rural regions as early as 500 BC. To this end, we examined the traditional cult place at the Aphrodite Temple as a locus of becoming native and on the Late Archaic House as a hotspot of the cosmopolitan politics of the new masters at archaic Monte Iato. Using a combination of archaeology, natural sciences, and cultural studies, we revealed that three local discourses predominated in this western Sicilian community: cosmopolitanism, localism, and traditionalism. These created the following socio-cultural settings and consumptionscapes (grasped by their material dimensions, as recorded in the archaeological layers): Cosmopolitanism or open-mindedness, global connectivity, and urbanity were markers of the elite at archaic Monte Iato and shaped the Late Archaic House as a palatial residence in Greek-style architecture. It was equipped with fashionable salons to energise cosmopolitan conviviality. In addition, remnants of plants and seafood, dip-sauce dishes, and highly specialised cooking pots attest to a sophisticated cuisine. Localism, a discourse incorporating communally shared customs, shaped everyday life and gave the Monte Iaitinians their own cultural centre of gravity. However, this heritage was not 'frozen'; it was updated in response to the changing outside world. Such a 'soft modernisation' was reflected, for instance, in local pottery production: local potters, orientated towards the traditional, integrated the particular forms and decorative styles of modern ceramics into their repertoire of production. In this way, the local pottery craft was constantly 'modernised'. In contrast with the 'modernisation' of local customs, traditions seem to represent unchanging practices codified into rituals. However, a deeper examination shows that traditions are 'invented,' particularly in phases of upheaval, to give new power structures the appearance of old-established institutions. Such a traditionalist vigour dominated the consumptionscape around the Aphrodite Temple. Rituals were performed with old or old-fashioned ceramics or with antique stone tools, creating the illusion of a time before contact with the outside world, thus evoking the feeling of autochthonous authenticity. In sum, our research on Monte Iato indicated that the production of the local in a rural region such as western Sicily's interior was shaped (as early as 500 BC) by the interplay of localism, cosmopolitanism, and traditionalism, which are still characteristics of the 'borderlands' of the global world of today.