PREHISTORY AND HISTORY
Glykys Limin: A Mycenaean Port in Southern Epirus?
In his study of the Bronze Age site of Glykys Limin in Epirus, Dr. Tartaron tests the material record found there against both the port-of-trade model developed by Polanyi and the conspicuous consumption model developed more recently by Sheratt and Sheratt. He is able to conclude that the two models are complementary rather than incompatible, for the former elucidates spatial and structural attributes, while the dynamic conspicuous consumption model highlights the interactive and processual. Together they provide a broad framework for the analysis of this and other, better documented, Mycenaean "trading missions."
--Thomas Tartaron, Lecturer, Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnology, MITEthnic Identity and,Aertumswissenschaft
Prof. McInerney investigates the nineteenth-century evolution of the notion of ancient ethnicity in the early Greek world. He shows that these ideas of ethnic identity are as much a function of the nineteenth century as of the ancient world itself. Twentieth-century work on ethnicity has demonstrated that "tribal" identity today is a very fluid idea, always changing in response to new contexts and new arrangements. Thus we should take a lesson from this when we approach the early Greek world, always wary of any continous notion of ethnic identity.
--Jeremy McInerney, Associate Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA"In Fertility Cyprus Is Not Inferior to Any One of the Islands": A Prolegomenon to Constructing the Economy of Iron Age Cyprus
Taking as his starting point Polanyi's "Generic Model of the Economy," as it is further refined by Rhoda Halperin in her Cultural Economies: Past and Present, Prof. Rupp attempts to apply it to early Iron Age Cyprus. A discussion of Halperin's work is followed by a careful sifting through of the evidence for production (agro-pastoral well as industrial), storage, distribution, and consumption. Although Rupp concludes that Halperin's emphasis on locational and appropriational movements is a valuable contribution, he also must admit that her underemphasis on production and consumption makes the task of profitably addressing EIA Cyprus very difficult.
--David W. Rupp, Professor of Classics, Brock University, St. Catharines, OntarioAgroskopia: Material Centripetalism and the Contingent Nature of Early Greek Economic Development
Drawing on the work first of Polanyi, but also Adam Smith, Marx, Sombart, and Weber, the author analyses the fragility of the economic development of first attested polls using consumer city theory and development theory. The first polis, Thespiae, must have had difficulty growing, since textual evidence (Hesiod) is clear on how some portion of surplus agricultural production was not being brought to market in the town, where the incremental advantage to the town could be played out.
--David Tandy, Professor of Classics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, TNNaukratis, or How to Identify a Port of Trade
Dr. Moeller's paper, drawn from her magisterial Naukratis (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), adapts Polanyi's theory of the port of trade to the peculiar Greek settlement on the mouth of the Nile. Polanyi knew about Naukratis, even wrote about later economic activity there, but he never took up the conditions of the settlement's foundation in about 600 B.C. Moeller investigates early Naukratis as a Weberian Idealtypus, and shows how well it lines up with precisely what Polanyi was onto in his work on Dahomey and elsewhere.
--Astrid Moeller, Fellow of the Center for Hellenic Studies, Washington, DC.Trade, Traders and the Economy of Athens in 4 B.C.
The primitivist-modemist debate seems to rage nowhere more clearly than in 4th-century B.C. Athens. Engen introduces important epigraphical evidence--eight previously misunderstood inscriptions--that proves that traders in grain frequently set prices not with an eye for "profit," but in order to enhance their status in the social/political world of the Athenian polis. The epigraphical materials help us to see that the debate itself is a failure because it does not recognize the fundamental dyamism of the Athens social/political/economic reality. By bringing an analytic approach, rather than a synthetic one, to the ancient Greek economy, one can coax out new meanings and understandings.
--Darrel Tai Engen, Assistant Professor of History, Gonzaga University, Spokane WA