Cultural Encounters

In The Western
Mediterranean:
Archaic Greek Drinking
Culture & Native Sicilians

By Alessandro
Guaggenti

OUTLIN
ELooking at the Cultural

exchange and interaction

through a primarily social, but
also religious and economic
activity.
Wine drinking
Different ethnicities, different
societies, different cultural
practices
Objects & meaning within society

A Study Area

Sicily earliest
formal
colonisation by
Greeks
The 3 natives
groups of
Sicilians
Eastern Sicily
largely looked
at
Focus on
South Central
Sicily

GELA
WHY?

Mentioned by
Ancient sources:
Herodotus,
Thucydides,
Diodorus Siculus.
FOUNDATION

Founded in 688
B.C
Rhodian and
Cretan colonists
SURROUNDING

Surrounded by a
number of
excavated native
sites showing
examples of
native and Greek
culture
AREA

Wine Drinking & The

Syposium
Material culture

Pottery shapes related with wi

drinking

What pottery shapes

were already
employed by native
societies
Tradition of wine drinking in bot
Greek and native societies

ETHNICITY
SICILY

IN

What is considered native and foreign?

Who are the natives?

How do these different societies express themselves through material culture?
How do we identify this and see this in the archaeological record?
What are the processes of interaction between societies, and how do they effect them?
How are these ancient societies presented to us in the primary literary sources?

ETHNIC
I
T
Y
The primary sources
-

Thucydides

- Herodotus
- Pausanius
- Diodorus Siculus

- Elymians
- Sicanians
- Sikels

ETHNIC
I
T
Y
The primary sources

The Sicanians appear to have been the first to have settled in

it (Sicily)... indeed, as they themselves assert,even before
them (cyclops), being the aboriginal population; but as the truth
behind is found to be, they were Iberians, and were driven
from the river Sicanus, in Theria, by the Ligurians. And it was
from them that the island was at that time called Sicania,
having previously been called Trinacria.

- Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War

ETHNIC
I
T
Y
The primary sources

Gela was colonized by emigrants from Lindos in Rhodes, led b

Herodotus

Gela, again, was founded by Antiphemus from

Rhodes, and Entimus from Crete, who led a
common colony, in the forty-fifth year after the
founding
of Syracuse
Antiphemos who built
Gela, having
plundered Omphake, a
Thucydides
small city of Sicanians, took
away with him to Gela a statue
made by Daedalus

Pausanius

ETHNICITY
The secondary sources

- The Archaic Period

- Emegence of colonial
Greek poleis in a
foregin
land
- Dislocation of foreigners
- Emergence trade,
political
organisations
- Amid long-standing
religious traditions.

ETHNICITY
The secondary sources

- Instrumentalist Approach
- Primordialist

Key
approa
Approachches

- Deliberate decision
to
emphasize one form
of identity over
others
- The manipulation of
material
culture
- The identification of
much more fluid
boundaries of

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Edinburgh

Slater, W.J. 1991. Dining in a Classical Context. The University of Michigan

Press. Michigan.
Lissarrague, F. 1990. The Aesthetics of the Greek Banquet: Images of Wine
and Ritual. Princeton University Press. Princeton, New Jersey.
Leighton, R. 1999. Sicily Before History: An Archaeological Survey from the
Palaeolithic to the Iron Age. Duckworth. London.
Murray, O (ed.). 1990. Sympotica: A Symposium on the Symposion.
Clarendon Press. Oxford.
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proceedings of the first Australian Congress of Classical Archaeology held in
honour of Emeritus Professor A. D. Trendall, Clarendon press. Oxford.
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