Aspects of ancient Greek trade re-evaluated with amphora DNA evidence

Ancient DNA trapped in the matrices of ceramic transport jars from Mediterranean shipwrecks can reveal the goods traded in the earliest markets. Scholars generally assume that the amphora cargoes of 5th-3rd century B.C. Greek shipwrecks contained wine, or to a much lesser extent olive oil. Remnant DNA inside empty amphoras allows us to test that assumption. We show that short ∼100 nucleotides of ancient DNA can be isolated and analyzed from inside the empty jars from either small amounts of physical scrapings or material captured with non-destructive swabs. Our study material is previously inaccessible Classical/Hellenistic Greek shipwreck amphoras archived at the Ministry of Culture and Tourism Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities in Athens, Greece. Collected DNA samples reveal various combinations of olive, grape, Lamiaceae herbs (mint, rosemary, thyme, oregano, sage), juniper, and terebinth/mastic (genus Pistacia). General DNA targeting analyses also reveal the presence of pine (Pinus), and DNA from Fabaceae (Legume family); Zingiberaceae (Ginger family); and Juglandaceae (Walnut family). Our results demonstrate that amphoras were much more than wine containers. DNA shows that these transport jars contained a wide range of goods, bringing into question long-standing assumptions about amphora use in ancient Greece. Ancient DNA investigations open new research avenues, and will allow accurate reconstruction of ancient diet, medicinal compounds, value-added products, goods brought to market, and food preservation methods.     

Socialist statuary as post-socialist hybrids: following the statues of Dr Petru Groza in Romania

This paper is concerned with the post-socialist lives of Communist statues. While acknowledging that post-socialist transformation frequently involves searching for new identities based on the disavowal of the communist past and the de-communisation of cultural landscapes, the paper stresses the importance of exploring complex continuities from the state-socialist period. This is illustrated by a case study of the fates of three socialist-era statues of the Romanian Communist leader Dr Petru Groza which were erected in Bucharest, Deva and B?cia. The paper examines how these socialist-era statues have been de- and re-contextualised, translated and re-valued into ‘post-socialist hybrids.’ The analysis explores the complexities of the historical geographies of these statues after 1989, particularly the way that they continue to play a role in the shaping of identities, societies and politics.     

Creating the world: the origins of all things in ancient Greek myth and medicine

Abstract

In the sixth and fifth centuries BC, a series of dramatic shifts in science and the arts took place in the Greek world, and history, medicine, philosophy, and science came into being. This paper examines 'the Greek miracle', looking at how new ideas about 'the origin of all things' were rooted in traditional mythic patterns of thought. In particular, it examines how medical writers thought about the origins of the cosmos, and of disease. The multiple creations of the world present in Greek myth, where the origin of all things was seen as a process of differentiation out of original similarity, may have predisposed the Greeks to be open to the new theories of early scientific thinkers.     

Chasing Aleck: the story of a dorm

A student raised a hand in class and asked, "Why is this dorm named after Alexander Graham Bell?" On a deaf campus, this was a loaded question. Bell was an oralist, opposed to sign language. He was a eugenicist, opposed to deaf marriages. Indeed, the more I thought about it, the better this question got. Why did the school name a dormin after him? Unfortunately, I hadn't the foggiest idea. With apologies to that student, I offer this article as a belated answer.     

Of public houses and private lives: female hotelkeepers as domestic entrepreneurs

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, women played a key role in the control and management of the Australian hotel industry. Their importance as publicans has often been overlooked by historians of drinking culture and the liquor trade, due to the representation of the pub as a male domain to which women were either socially peripheral or actively opposed. Rather, the complex spatial arrangements of the public house, where domestic and commercial activities were deeply interconnected, allowed many women the opportunity to earn a respectable and prominent living as hotelkeepers.     

Social memory and ethnic identity: Ancient Greek drama performances as commemorative ceremonies

This paper is an ethnographic account of ancient Greek drama performances that take place in contemporary Greece. The material presented here is part of the data that were collected, mainly through participant observation, interviews and newspapers, during 1997 and 1998 in Athens. The paper illuminates an aspect of modern ancient drama performances that has not been taken into account until today: it treats them as commemorative ceremonies that produce, reproduce, and transmit social memory. The interrelation and interdependence between social memory and ethnic identity construction processes are analyzed and is shown that ancient drama performances, due to specific characteristics, constitute something more than mere theatrical events (as they are defined within the Western tradition). These performances, which convey, sustain, and transmit perceptions of a glorious culture of the past, become, for their creators and spectators, as members of an ethnic group, occasions for consciously remembering their ethnic past, and coming, in a way, to a "mythical identification" with it.     

Perfectly absent: the emergence of the Modern Greek perfect in Early Modern Greek

Abstract

This paper traces the emergence of the Standard Modern Greek perfect ?χω + infinitive in the Early Modern Greek period. It shows that the construction appears in written sources towards the very end of the seventeenth century. Special attention is given to ‘phantom’ perfects, which can be found in editions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary and non-literary texts as well as in the bibliography and which distort the picture of its emergence.     

The urban ecology of Iron Age Tel Megiddo: using microvertebrate remains as ancient bio-indicators

The potential of microvertebrate remains for reconstructing the paleoecology of urban sites remains largely untapped except for extensive research carried out at Roman and medieval sites in Britain. We apply taphonomic and ecological approaches to analyzing an assemblage of microvertebrate remains from the Iron Age IIA of Tel Megiddo, Israel. Sampling in a dense residential area including house floors and various fills produced 1080 identifiable specimens including fish, mammal, reptile and bird remains. The mammalian remains show a number of distinct patterns pointing to accumulation from the community of small animals which lived and died on-site. These patterns include evidence for fragmentation due to trampling and presence of burned specimens. The mammalian remains also differed in their taphonomy from an assemblage from Early Bronze Age II Megiddo which originated from predator accumulation during a period of abandonment. These analyses point to an especially low taxonomic diversity in the Iron Age residential assemblage suggesting that the urban environment of Megiddo supported a unique community of small mammalian animals. This differs markedly from ecological conditions in modern day cities which in some cases show greater than background levels of diversity and suggests a dense, homogenous urban environment. We suggest that reconstructing the evolution of urban fauna in greater detail will provide a sensitive tool for tracing historical processes of growth, decline and increasing complexity of urban sites in the Near East as well as other regions of the world.     

希腊神灵伦理缺位现象探源——以神妒观念为例

从历史文化角度看,希腊神灵伦理缺位现象产生于操希腊语的游牧印欧人征服土著农业民族之后,是多种异质宗教文化冲突融合的结果。在融合过程中,被征服者信奉的神灵被剔除、降格或吸纳。同时作为宗教文化竞争中处于劣势的一方,被征服者所信奉的神灵被征服者强加以诸多伦理缺陷,嫉妒是其中最引人注目的一个方面。     

Western Identity,Barbarians and the Inheritance of Greek Universalism1

This paper argues that a particular philosophical and historical understanding of Ancient Greek thought is used to establish a superior Western identity of universal prevalence. Starting with the terminological differences between ethnocentrism and Eurocentrism, I then reconstruct the rise of Eurocentrism by examining the changing conceptualizations of Greeks and Barbarians in Ancient texts from Homer to Aristotle. The third section explores how Western historians of philosophy and culture have used this Greek self-understanding to legitimate the view of Western cultural superiority based on universalism. Finally, I discuss several possibilities to counter this form of Eurocentric Western identity-politics.