Greek migration to the West Pontic coast: A social history

This project addresses an aspect of Greek migration to the Black Sea that has not attracted adequate scholarly interest so far, despite its major implications in the shaping of regional socio-economic relations and its overarching impact on connectivity with the rest of the ancient world. The focus will thus be on a particular network system that emerged among the Ionian colonies at the western Pontic coast during the Archaic and early Classical periods. This network system is manifested in the consistent use of certain religious and economic institutions. The cult of Apollo Ietros and the exchange of certain pre-monetary signs were invented and exclusively practiced in that region, marking a new collective identity that was shaped via Greek and native colonial encounters. The projects main objectives are (a) to reconstruct the chronological and spatial pattern of colonial foundation in the western Pontic region, (b) to provide additional evidence about the function and organisation of the colonial network system, (c) to examine how exploitation of copper ores at the major mines of Medni Rid, and other ware exchange, drove migration and shaped organisation of the colonial network system, (d) to understand the uneven development of migration as a function of the variable origin of migrants (Ionians/Dorians), and host societies that may have developed more advanced modes of production than those of the migrants. New data obtained by means of modern archaeological and archaeometric studies at major colonial and native sites will be integrated into the historical dialogue through the methodological tool of path dependency. This will allow a new approach to the emergence and continuous variation of paths of ware exchange and knowledge transfer and may ultimately elucidate what were earlier understood as migration pull factors. A dialectical treatment of the patterned archaeological record at metropolises and colonies will highlight social contradictions and opposing forces that have commonly been perceived as migration push factors. The originality of this project lies neither in its modern archaeometric and archaeological methods nor in its theoretical and methodological perspectives, which move beyond the postcolonial focus on identities by centring on the modes of production and exchange. Instead, the innovation lies in the combined use, for the first time, of all these approaches in the study of past migration. The project will involve numerous researchers based at some of the most renowned institutions in our focal region (Bulgarian, Romanian and Ukrainian Academies of Sciences and Turkish universities) as well as at other European institutions, who have directed fieldwork at all sites considered.