doi: 10.2143/AWE.15.0.3167477 AWE 15 (2016) 279-301 ON ‘PRE-COLONIAL’ LINKS, ONCE AGAIN GOCHA R. TSETSKHLADZE Abstract Recent publication has put forward (new) pottery evidence from Berezan (Borysthenes), supposedly dated to the second third of the 7th century BC, to buttress unsustainable argu- ments about Greek ‘pre-colonial’ contacts with locals in the Black Sea despite all that has been written to rebut such interpretations. Once again, pottery equals people (or so it seems), and a single example indicates more contact than it is reasonable to suppose. Here, briefly, I revisit this theme and discuss this evidence and its interpretation. ‘One swallow does not a summer make.’ Yet again, we are coming back to so-called pre-colonial links, a theory very com- mon mainly in the last century.1 A.V. Buiskikh has recently produced two articles with similar titles on the same subject (one in Ukrainian,2 the other in Russian3): they publish a fragment of a Subgeometric skyphos from Berezan (Borysthenes), in the northern Black Sea (Figs. 1–2). It was found by V.V. Lapin in 1963 when he excavated on Berezan as Director of the Berezan team of the Olbia Expedition of the Institute of Archaeology of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Nobody was aware of the existence of this sherd, deposited with other material in the depot of the Institute of Archaeology, until it caught the attention of Buiskikh and was brought to wider attention by her articles. This piece raises more questions than it answers: 1. There is still much debate about the establishment date of Berezan. Do we believe the archaeological material or the date given by Eusebius (see below)? In this context, it is very difficult to believe that such an experienced excavator as Lapin did not pay attention to the present important fragment, or that others who worked 1 Cf. Bouzek 2013, with bibliography (not known to Buiskikh, like many other recently published works cited in this article). The Black Sea is not the only region where so-called pre-colonial contacts are discussed (see, for instance, Denti 2013, which addresses the question from a completely different perspective and angle – but what he presents does not allow us to describe the situation as proto- colonial in the way that the term is usually understood). Some have convincingly suggested that the notion of pre-colonial links should be discarded. See Ridgway 2000; 2004; etc. 2 Buiskikh 2015a. 3 Buiskikh 2015b. In this contribution I shall cite exclusively this Russian version of her paper. 280 G.R. TSETSKHLADZE Fig. 1: Major Black Sea colonies and local peoples. Fig. 2: Skyphos of Subgeometric style from Borysthenes (after Buiskikh 2015b, 251, fig. 1). ON ‘PRE-COLONIAL’ LINKS, ONCE AGAIN 281 with him and/or on his Berezan collection, housed at the Institute of Archaeology, never noticed it in the intervening 50 years. 2. The dating of the sherd is not as straightforward as Buiskikh presents it. Accord- ing to her, the piece was found during the cleaning of a wall of the Building with an Apse that belongs to the second building phase of Borysthenes,4 which dates to after the middle of the 6th century BC.5 It was not found in situ. Buiskikh dates the sherd to the second third of the 7th century BC and states that it was manu- factured probably in Miletus. For this dating Buiskikh uses works by M. Kerschner and U. Schlotzhauer, two scholars who made a painstaking study of East Greek pottery, especially Milesian, and formulated a new chronology based on these detailed examinations.6 They themselves have underlined in their writings that their scheme was a provisional one. Its most characteristic feature of their chronology is that previously accepted dates were shifted back by commonly 20–30 years, sometimes more. Some observers have already commented on this aspect of it.7 Furthermore, numbers of scholars have ignored the authors’ warning of the provisional nature of their findings8 and have used the new chronology as a firm framework for dating and re-dating pottery finds. Moreover, when such scholars seek to draw historical conclusions, they pay attention to the upper date in a given date range at the expense of the lower. This is the case with the dating of the Berezan skyphos. It is not the only early piece found around the Black Sea. Buiskikh uses as comparative material a fragment of a vessel from Nemirovskoe,9 previously dated to about the middle of the 7th century BC but raised by Kerschner to the second–beginning of the third quarter of the 7th century BC (Fig. 3.1). M.Y. Vakhtina dates this to ‘possibly the third quarter of the 7th century BC’. Another piece of North Ionian production, a bird bowl, was found at the Trakhtemirovskoe city site (Figs. 4–5).10 While Buiskikh accepts Kerschner’s dating of this to the first third of the 7th century BC, the literature offers dates other than Kerschner’s: second half of the 7th century BC; and middle–second half of the 7th century BC.11 Thus, not to go into further detail, 4 For the latest on Berezan, see Chistov and Krutilov 2014; Chistov 2015. 5 Buiskikh 2015b, 239. 6 See Kerschner 2006; Kerschner and Schlotzhauer 2005; Schlotzhauer 2001; etc. 7 Tsetskhladze 2012 (not known to Buiskikh), which presents a considerably enlarged and reworked version of Tsetskhladze 2007b. 8 Kerschner and Schlotzhauer 2005, 52. 9 Buiskikh 2015b, 244. On East Greek pottery from Nemirovskoe, see Vakhtina 2000; 2002; 2004a–b; 2007a–b; 2009; Vakhtina and Kashuba 2014. 10 Buiskikh 2015b, 244–46. 11 I am not giving here the bibliography for the different dating of this material. It can be found in Tsetskhladze 2012, Table 1, 354–56. 282 G.R. TSETSKHLADZE Fig. 3: Pottery from the Nemirovskoe settlement (after Tsetskhladze 2012, 319, fig. 3). ON ‘PRE-COLONIAL’ LINKS, ONCE AGAIN 283 Fig. 4: Two fragments of a bid bowl from Trakhtemirovskoe – see Fig. 5 (after Tsetskhladze 2012, 323, fig. 9). Fig. 5: Bird bowl from Trakhtemirovskoe (after Buiskikh 2015b, 252, fig. 2). 284 G.R. TSETSKHLADZE the dating of the Berezan skyphos seems to be too early, and it should be dated at least twenty years later.12 3. Much has been written about pre-colonial contacts around the Black Sea.13 Matters seemed settled in the aftermath of the debate between the late John Graham14 and John Boardman15 when early pottery from Histria and Berezan proved not to have been from these sites at all. Buiskikh is sceptical about how a piece from Histria kept in the Cambridge University Museum of Classical Archaeology could be mixed up with other material and other boxes, although she is aware that this was a teaching collection and those of us involved in teaching know how easy it is for students to mix up samples. Robert Cooke, who was teaching in Cambridge and made use of the collection, confirmed this to Boardman. I share with many of my colleagues doubts about the myth of the Argonauts: we regard it as a literary source, not an historical one.16 But from time to time works continue to appear that believe in such pre-colonial contacts. Vakhtina and M.T. Kashuba based their article on bronze fibulae dated to the second half of the 10th/end of the 10th–9th century BC from the north-western Black Sea and the Caucasus on them: they proposed that these objects had come from the Aegean world. First of all, they are very few in number17 – and one does not need Aegean prototypes for objects so simple that they could have appeared independently. The Caucasian examples even have parallels in Urartu and other neighbouring areas. The terms pre- and proto-colonial links imply the existence of a local population with whom contact could be established. Absent such a population and no such links could be forged by Greeks or anyone else. The vast majority of scholars, with- out reflecting, imagine that the territories around Berezan and Olbia were heavily populated by local peoples. As modern studies demonstrate, the reality was differ- ent.18 These lands were unpopulated and the Greeks were the first to settle them: Olbia was one of the earliest colonies on the northern Black Sea coast. It is still not known exactly why Miletus, which had extensive experience of founding colonies, located this new colony at this point of the practically uninhabited Pontic shoreline. The results of our research of new sets of finds of handmade pottery, as well as repro- cessing old collections using modern methods of data-base treatment, allow us to take a fresh look at the problem of the origin and further development of Olbia. Olbia’s 12 Cf. Lemos 2002. 13 See, for instance, Bouzek 2013; Tsetskhladze 1994a, 113–15; 1998a, 10–15. 14 Graham 1980. 15 Boardman 1991. 16 See, for instance, Tsetskhladze 1994b. 17 Vakhtina and Kashuba 2013. 18 See, for instance, Melyukova 1989; 2001; 2006. ON ‘PRE-COLONIAL’ LINKS, ONCE AGAIN 285 handmade pottery (from the sectors ‘Temenos’, ‘UZA’, ‘NGS’; Berezan and chora set- tlements) of the Archaic period was divided into several groups. These were similar to the ceramic complexes of the Dniester-Danube basins and the forest-steppe of the northern Black Sea area. Museum collections and a mass material from field schedules (more than half a million pieces and unbroken vessels) were analysed. A special ‘bathy- metric’ method of analysing the mass material was developed. Handmade pottery appeared in Olbia at the turn of the 6th/5th centuries BC.