Containers, Commodities and Greek Colonisation in the Mediterranean of the 8th Century BC

Podcast of seminar available here.

The 8^th century BC is particularly important for Mediterranean history. The Greeks placed there the beginning of their history, and the Romans dated the foundation of Rome then. This paper focuses on the Greek colonisation that began in this century and its impact on the regeneration of Greek and Mediterranean economy. This seminar reviews the traditional ‘agrarian’ and ‘commercial’ models of Greek colonisation. It evaluates the relevance of the understudied ware of transport containers and the commodities that they contained. Recent research has demonstrated that the widespread production and circulation of many Aegean amphora-types dates from the 8^th  century, thus largely synchronising this phenomenon with the beginning of Greek colonisation. The seminar demonstrates how a general consensus on the ‘agrarian’ model of colonization of a region can be reassessed on the basis of transport containers and the commodities they contained.