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Urban Foundations? Colonial Settlement and Urbanization in the Western Mediterranean

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Urban Foundations? Colonial Settlement and Urbanization in the Western Mediterranean Urban Foundations? Colonial Settlement and Urbanization in the Western Mediterranean University Press Scholarship Online British Academy Scholarship Online Mediterranean Urbanization 800-600 BC Robin Osborne and Barry Cunliffe Print publication date: 2005 Print ISBN-13: 9780197263259 Published to British Academy Scholarship Online: January 2012 DOI: 10.5871/bacad/9780197263259.001.0001 Urban Foundations? Colonial Settlement and Urbanization in the Western Mediterranean Peter Van Dommelen DOI:10.5871/bacad/9780197263259.003.0007 Abstract and Keywords This chapter examines the relation between urbanization and colonial settlement in the western Mediterranean and evaluates whether the Mediterranean should be considered an urban region. It investigates the interconnection between urbanization and colonialism and analyses archaeological evidence for early colonial settlement, focusing on Greek colonization in South Italy and Sicily and the Phoenician presence on the Tyrrhenian islands and the Spanish south- east coast. The findings indicate that the urban fabric of many colonial foundations does not necessarily have to be understood in urban terms. Keywords: urbanization, colonial settlement, western Mediterranean, colonialism, South Italy, Sicily, Tyrrhenian islands, Greek colonization, Phoenicians Introduction ASSERTIONS THAT ‘THE MEDITERRANEAN IS AN URBAN REGION’ (Braudel 1972, 278) leave little doubt that the prominence of urban settlement in the Mediterranean is a powerful topos that has long dominated archaeological and historical debates. The ubiquitous presence and ancient (pre-)histories of towns and cities as well as their recurrent critical role in Mediterranean history do indeed appear to justify the proclaimed ‘urban tradition’ of its historiography. But as the primacy of this urban tradition is now being called into question (Horden and Purcell 2000, 90–2), the alleged uniformity of Mediterranean urban settlements can also be shown to be more apparent than real. In particular, there exists a very basic distinction between the eastern and western regions that is particularly important for studies of the earlier stages of urban settlement: whereas in most of the eastern Mediterranean urbanization can be Page 1 of 21 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use (for details see: http://britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy/ privacy-policy-and-legal-notice ). Subscriber: Yale University; date: 01 August 2017 Urban Foundations? Colonial Settlement and Urbanization in the Western Mediterranean traced as a home-grown development, many towns in the western basin were first established as colonial settlements. The relevance of this simple observation is readily underscored by the fact that most urban centres of the Classical and Roman periods in the western Mediterranean, just as indeed many of today’s cities in this region, first came into existence as colonial foundations. Because of their long urban histories and their colonial, usually Greek, origins, these settlements are generally assumed to have been urban in character right from the very first moment of their foundation. As a corollary, it is also frequently assumed that urbanism was a colonial innovation in the western Mediterranean that was first introduced by Phoenician and Greek colonizers from the eighth century BC onwards. (p.144) The latter claim, however, is increasingly being criticized as a colonialist one for presenting urbanization as an exclusively colonial introduction (Attema et al. 1998, 326–9). Instead, it is argued that urbanization was just as often an indigenous innovation, and increasing evidence of regional urbanization processes from many regions of the western Mediterranean supports this view. A good example are the Iberian oppida whose development is now generally discussed in terms of urbanization and state formation (Ruiz Rodríguez 1997; Cunliffe and Fernández Castro 1999). The urban nature of the earliest phases of the colonial foundations in the western Mediterranean is similarly not beyond doubt. There are good reasons for scrutinizing the character of the early colonial settlements and the conditions of the first centuries of their existence, because the study of ancient colonial settlement has long been marred by colonialist assumptions (van Dommelen 1997a). The aim of this paper is accordingly in the first place to take a closer look at the interconnections between the notions of urbanization and colonialism. The second aim is to follow up the theoretical considerations through the detailed and critical examination of the relevant archaeological evidence for early colonial settlement. Focusing my discussion on the eighth and seventh centuries, I will consider both Greek colonization in South Italy and Sicily, and the Phoenician presence on the Tyrrhenian islands and the Spanish south-east coast. In these regions, I will pay particular attention to Tharros on the island of Sardinia, Megara Hyblaea on Sicily, and Metapontum on the Ionian coast of South Italy. Urbanization and Colonialism The relationship between colonialism and urbanization is deeply rooted in their shared association with the notion of civilization. The idea that ‘power, civilization and prosperity seem always to have radiated’ from towns has a long history just as leading an urban lifestyle has long been equated with the essence of being civilized (Horden and Purcell 2000, 90): the Romans, for instance, explicitly located civilization in the towns (in Rome in particular), as is vividly demonstrated by the term urbanitas denoting ‘the polish and culture of a civilised man’ (Wallace- Hadrill 1991, 247). The absence of urban settlements in regions such as north-west Europe was similarly cause for ancient geographers to characterize them as uncivilized (e.g. Strabo, Geographia 4.1.5). More recent claims like Braudel’s that ‘it is because of the towns that man’s life has taken on a faster rhythm than it would under natural conditions’ testify no less to the critical role that modern scholarship attributes to towns. This statement also reveals a deep- rooted assumption that urban life is somehow the opposite condition to what is ‘natural’. (p. Page 2 of 21 PRINTED FROM BRITISH ACADEMY SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com). (c) Copyright British Academy, 2017. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in BASO for personal use (for details see: http://britishacademy.universitypressscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy/ privacy-policy-and-legal-notice ). Subscriber: Yale University; date: 01 August 2017 Urban Foundations? Colonial Settlement and Urbanization in the Western Mediterranean 145) Braudel was indeed convinced that ‘the history and the civilisation of the [Mediterranean] sea have been shaped by its towns’ (1972, 278; cf. Horden and Purcell 2000, 90–1). The association between colonialism and civilization is perhaps even more firmly ingrained in modern scholarship. Western thinking about civilization has long centred on European civilization, highlighting in particular its dual roots in classical antiquity and Christianity as the reasons for its perceived superiority (Rowlands 1987, 46–8). As European countries colonized the globe and encountered other cultures from the fifteenth century onwards, it was colonialism that increasingly provided the terms for asserting the superiority of European civilization. The most explicit instance of this perspective emerged in the later nineteenth century when European colonization was defined as a mission civilisatrice, insisting that it was a moral duty for Europe to spread Western civilization and to educate the uncivilized regions of the world (Pagden 2001, 143–4; cf. van Dommelen 1997a, 307). Ancient colonialism began to play a role in the European understanding of civilization by the late eighteenth century, when certain European countries started to regard Greece as the ‘birthplace of the European spirit’ (Morris 1994, 11). The well-established view that Europe had culturally and intellectually descended from the Roman Empire was founded on a clear cultural continuity, as for instance marked by the persistent use of Latin, but to claim a direct relationship between Classical Greece and Prussian Germany or Victorian England was clearly much less straightforward (Marchand 1996, 3–74; Turner 1989). The Greek colonies of Magna Graecia were seized upon, because they provided a tangible and thus seemingly incontestable link between Greece and north-west Europe through which the ancestral Greek ‘incomparable splendor and creative vigor’ had been transferred (Pugliese Carratelli 1996b, 141). The persisting influence of this view is best demonstrated by the major exhibition ‘The first western Greeks’ which was organized in Venice in 1996. In the introduction to the 800-page accompanying catalogue, in which fifty-four leading academics summarize current scholarship, Greeks are not only celebrated for their ‘remarkable humanity and intellectual richness’ but ‘colonial Hellenism’ is also explicitly identified as ‘the vehicle for the diffusion of Greek civilization in the West’ (Pugliese Carratelli 1996c). Because of this intimate entanglement
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