Archaeological Review from Cambridge

V o l u m e 2 8 . 1 . A p r i l 2 0 1 3

Archaeology and
Cu l t u r a l M i x t u r e

Edited by W. Paul van Pelt

About ARC Contents
The Archaeological Review from Cambridge is a bi-annual journal of archaeology.
It is run on a non-proit, voluntary basis by postgraduate research students at the
Introduction 1
University of Cambridge.
W. Paul van Pelt
Although primarily rooted in archaeological theory and practice, ARC increasingly invites From Hybridity to Entanglement, from Essentialism to Practice 11
a range of perspectives with the aim of establishing a strong, interdisciplinary journal Philipp W. Stockhammer
which will be of interest in a range of ields.
Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road: How to Put the Genie Back into its 29
Archaeological Review from Cambridge Bottle and Where to Go from There
Department of Archaeology Eleftheria Pappa
University of Cambridge
Downing Street Beyond Creolization and Hybridity: Entangled and Transcultural Identities in 51
Cambridge Philistia
CB2 3DZ Louise A. Hitchcock and Aren M. Maeir
UK
Convivencia in a Borderland: The Danish-Slavic Border in the Middle Ages 75
http://www.societies.cam.ac.uk/arc Magdalena Naum
Volume 28.1 Archaeology and Cultural Mixture Problematizing Typology and Discarding the Colonialist Legacy: 95
Approaches to Hybridity in the Terracotta Figurines of Hellenistic Babylonia
Theme Editor W. Paul van Pelt Stephanie M. Langin-Hooper

Production W. Paul van Pelt Signal and Noise: Digging up the Dead in Archaeology and Afro-Cuban Palo 115
Monte
Cover Image Designed by Beatalic, 2013 (www.beatalic.com; hola@beatalic.com) Stephan Palmié

Hybridity at the Contact Zone: Ethnoarchaeological Perspectives from 133

Printed and bound in the UK by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King's Lynn.
the Lower Omo Valley, Ethiopia
Marcus Brittain, Timothy Clack and Juan Salazar Bonet
Published in April 2013. Copyright remains with the authors. Opinions expressed in con-
tributions do not necessarily relect the opinions of the editors. Considering Mimicry and Hybridity in Early Colonial New England: 151
Health, Sin and the Body "Behung with Beades"
All images are the authors' own except where otherwise stated. Diana D. Loren
ISSN 0261-4332
Our Children Might be Strangers: Frontier Migration and the Meeting of Cultures 169
Committee, Archaeological Review from Cambridge across Generations
April 2013 Hendrik van Gijseghem

General Editors Editors Publicity and Events Ethnogenesis and Hybridity in Proto-Historic Period Nicaragua 191
Katie Hall Tessa de Roo Renate Fellinger Geofrey G. McCaferty and Carrie L. Dennett
Danika Parikh Georgie Peters Leanne Philpot
Bi-Directional Forced Deportations in the Neo-Assyrian Empire and the 215
Treasurer Book Reviews Back Issue Sales Origins of the Samaritans: Colonialism and Hybridity
W. Paul van Pelt Penny Jones Sarah Evans Yigal Levin

Networking the Middle Ground? The Greek Diaspora, Tenth to Fifth Century BC 239
Secretary Subscriptions IT
Carla M. Antonaccio
Kate Boulden Sarah Musselwhite Kathrin Felder
Mat Dalton
Cultural Mixing in Egyptian Archaeology: The 'Hyksos' as a Case Study 255
Bettina Bader

Mixing Food, Mixing Cultures: Archaeological Perspectives 285

Mary C. Beaudry

Book Reviews—EDITED BY PENNY JONES

The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion edited by 299
Timothy Insoll
—REVIEWED BY PAMELA J. CROSS

The Idea of Order: The Circular Archetype in Prehistoric Europa by Richard 307
Bradley
—REVIEWED BY JOHN MANLEY

The Funerary Kit: Mortuary Practices in the Archaeological Record by Jill L. Baker 311
—REVIEWED BY VAN PIGTAIN

The Ten Thousand Year Fever: Rethinking Human and Wild-Primate Malaria by 317
Loretta A. Cormier
—REVIEWED BY LEONIE RAIJMAKERS

Human Adaptation in the Asian Palaeolithic: Hominin Dispersal and Behaviour 322
during the Late Quaternary by Ryan J. Rabett
—REVIEWED BY PATRICK J. ROBERTS

Ethnozooarchaeology: The Present and Past of Human-Animal Relationships 328

edited by Umberto Albarella and Angela Trentacoste
—REVIEWED BY JANE SANFORD

Archaeological Theory in Practice by Patricia Urban and Edward Schortman 333

—REVIEWED BY VALERIA RIEDEMANN L.

Ancient Egyptian Technology and Innovation: Transformations in Pharaonic 338

Material Culture by Ian Shaw
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Subscription Information 345

Available Back Issues 346

Archa e o l o gic al R ev iew f ro m C amb r i d g e - 28 .1 - 2013

20 From Hybridity to Entanglement, From Essentialism to Practice

Yasur-Landau, A. 2005. Old wine in new vessels: Intercultural contact, innovation and
Aegean, Canaanite and Philistine foodways. Journal of the Institute of Archaeology
of Tel Aviv University 32(2): 168–191.

Yasur-Landau, A. 2010. The Philistines and Aegean Migration at the End of the Late Bronze
Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Young, R.J.C. 1995. Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race. New York:
Routledge.

Zuckerman, S. 2007. '…Slaying oxen and killing sheep, eating lesh and drinking wine…':
Feasting in Late Bronze Age Hazor. Palestine Exploration Quarterly 139(3): 186–204.

Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road:

How to Put the Genie Back into its Bottle and Where
to Go from There
Eleftheria Pappa
Department of Archaeology, Classics and Near Eastern Studies, VU University Amsterdam
e.pappa@let.vu.nl

Introduction

I n recent years, a proliferation of conference topics, monographs and

museum exhibitions across the humanities and the social sciences have
shown a cataclysmic presence of what McClintock (1992: 85), during the
early stages of the phenomenon, called an "almost ritualistic ubiquity of
'post' words". McClintock attempted to halt an emerging shift in academia
towards the millenarian rhetoric that popularized postmodernism
and its semantically lawed consort, postcolonialism. Both conceptual
frameworks seem to reveal a haunting concern for beginnings and
ends in a linear development that replaces the "binary axis of power"
(e.g. colonizers vis-à-vis colonized in the case of postcolonialism) with
"the binary axis of time", which renders the understanding of modern
sociopolitical dynamics and economic contexts particularly problematic.
A r c h a e o l o g i c a l R e v i e w f r o m C a m b r i d g e 2 6 . 2 : 11–2 8

Archa e o l o gic al R ev iew f ro m C amb r i d g e - 28 .1 - 2013

22 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
As McClintock demonstrated there is nothing that warrants the preix
'post' in the 'postcolonial' era that its supporters zealously advocate (cf.
also Appiah 1991). Large swathes of the Earth's nations continue to be
colonized either by their erstwhile European rulers via economic policies
and/or political inluence or by emerging neocolonial powers (McClintock
1992: 90).1 Despite this state of afairs, the "prematurely celebratory and
obfuscatory" concept of postcolonialism met with academic success
(McClintock 1992: 92).
In the English-speaking world, postcolonialism entered the
anthropological and archaeologically scene with full force, penetrating
and ultimately looding the theoretical frameworks of these disciplines.
From the subversive, rogue stance of deconstructing an intellectual
order-airming authority, it eventually became a successor 'regime' that,
like its predecessors, understood the world within a set framework with
ixed dimensions, constructing a peculiar system of logic that illogically
"proved its own postulates" as postmodernism had done before (Sangren
1988: 407). In archaeology, postcolonial theory has gradually marginalized
other theoretical approaches and viewpoints, thus stiling pluralism and
dismantling the polyphony it had avowed to uphold. More worryingly,
it wore the mantle of social and anthropological theory in order to
add gravity to its new theoretical concerns. Yet, in the course of time,
postcolonialism often kept adjusting or shifting the very same body of
theory from which it claimed to draw its legitimacy. A clear example of
this is the employment of the term 'hybridity', a concept which developed
within postcolonial studies, but which in recent archaeological studies
is often found with diminished potential as an epistemological tool. Its
usage in the study of culture contact (whether through trade, population
mobility or in colonial settings) in Mediterranean prehistory ofers an
eloquent example of an erupting revolution that broke down barriers
of thought and interpretation, seeking out the underrepresented in the
archaeological record and those silenced in the textual sources—i.e.
those people and cultures largely ignored by Western-centric views.
1 The preix 'neo' stands in clear semantic contrast to that of 'post'. Within archaeology see Gosden (2004: 152–159)
for similar considerations on a 'neo-colonial world'.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 23
However, like many other theoretical vogues in the discipline (Bintlif
2004: 397), postcolonialism is itself a product of its time that projects,
more unconsciously than not, contemporary predicaments, problems
and ideas, such as multiculturalism, globalization and the transnational
individual, onto the past.2 These are all contemporary social trends with
which academics often have to grapple in their own personal lives, as
in many cases mobility and its symptomatic outcomes are linked to an
academic career. In this contribution, I shall illustrate how developments
that at irst breathed fresh air into archaeological thought through the
application of postcolonial ideas have gradually led to the disigurement
of the theories' underlying premises and saturated interpretations of the
archaeological record. As a result there exists a great need to confront
and break free from the trappings that the application of postcolonial
ideas has engendered.
Out of the Bottle: From the Liberating Revolution to the Alleged
Polyphony of the Single Voice
The advent of postcolonialism in archaeology in the late 1990s marked
a critical stage in the development of archaeological thought in the
context of culture contact, especially colonial encounters. From the study
of prehistory to the Early Modern period, there was a surge in approaches
that sought to emphasize multivocality. 'Colonizer' and 'colonized' came
under the microscope as semi-artiicial constructs that did not relect
the grand gamut of interactions and power relations between groups.
Populations and communities formerly subsumed under these binary
rubrics became accessible with the use of new theoretical tools through
which to approach their situations, experiences and power dynamics.
Gosden's (2004) exploration of some of these theoretical tools (i.e.
colonialism in a shared cultural milieu, middle ground and terra nulliae)
2 See, for example, recent debates on 'globalization' in the ancient Mediterranean. The impossibility to be a neutral,
'value-free' observer of the past remains one of the acknowledged, inbuilt biases of the discipline. Yet the conscious pro-
jection of contemporary realities onto the past refers more to the pressure under which archaeologists ind themselves
from recent trends in research funding to render their work (into the past) 'relevant' to society (sadly misconstrued as
'analogous'). On contemporary transnational social spaces and their implications, see Kleinschmidt (2006), Pries (2001)
and Kim (2011) respectively.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
24 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
in studying culture contact and colonialism from prehistory to modern
times typiies these approaches.
Such approaches proved almost revolutionary for the theorizing
of the colonization movements of the Greeks and the Phoenicians
in the central and western Mediterranean during the irst half of the
irst millennium BC. From Sardinia (van Dommelen 1998, 2002, 2005,
2006a, 2006b) to France (Dietler 1997, 2010), Sicily (Hodos 2009, 2010a,
2010b; Malkin 2004) and Spain (Domínguez 2002; Vives-Ferrándiz 2005,
2007, 2008), postcolonial approaches gave voice to the indigenous
populations as an active component of the formation of social relations
in colonial realms and other culture situations. In tandem with earlier
postprocessualist approaches, the roles of various social groups and of
people within these groups were scrutinized, leshing out the individuals
who had previously lost in general notions of 'societies' and 'populations'.
With the empowerment of the individual, relected in 'agency', came
'hybridity' as another crucial concept in these forays into postcolonialism.
Having repudiated its racist connotations of 'racial purity', hybridity
found fertile ground in the social sciences, becoming inextricably linked
with 'ambivalence' and 'ambiguity' in the work of Bhabha (1994), a
literary theorist, whose work lent to archaeology much of its postcolonial
theoretical panoply (van Dommelen 2006b: 136–137). Bhabha built
on the work of Said (1978), another literary critic, whose seminal work
Orientalism criticized the construction and reproduction of the 'other'
in anthropology.3 Said's thesis shook the foundations of the discipline as
it witnessed its epistemology, aims and methodologies ravaged by the
fundamental concern over its inbuilt Western-centric authority.4 In an
archaeology largely undeterred by these criticisms, hybridity and agency,
rather belatedly, in the late 1990s, were allied with 'habitus', another social
theory concept that Bourdieu (1972, 1977) had elaborated in his social
practice theory (van Dommelen 2006b: 140–141). The latter explained
3 A later book by Said (1994) also had an inluence on the intellectual production of the West.
4 A critique not without its opponents, but one which, decades on, stills reverberates in the discipline (cf. Argyrou
1999, 2002).
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 25
human behaviour as created by the dynamic and mutually changing
responses between structure and agency.
Substantive weaknesses in the concept of hybridity, some inherent
and some acquired in the process of employing the term in diferent
contexts by diferent theorists, gradually shifted its meaning. Bhabha's
(1994)use of the term, which is the staple reference for archaeologists,
is a politicized one. For Bhabha, hybridity becomes "the symbol of the
strategies that the subalterns and migrants develop in colonial and post-
colonial contexts to deal with their particular situations" (Stockhammer
2012: 45). Yet in archaeology, despite the extensive use of Bhabha's work
as a legitimizing force for adopting hybridity as a theoretical stance, the
concept is often deprived of its political semantic substance. As recently
observed by Stockhammer (2012: 53), a clear example of this misuse of the
concept is found in Voskos and Knapp's (2008: 661) application of hybridity
to intercultural dynamics between Eteo-Cypriots, Greeks and Phoenicians
in Iron Age Cyprus. They treat hybridity as a mere cultural fusion resulting
from 'interaction' and 'negotiation' in a sense that is diametrically opposed
to Bhabha's deinition of the concept as a subversive, counter-hegemonic
strategy for undermining the role and demands of the colonial (or other
established) order. Despite this, Bhabha's interpretation of hybridity is
implied in Voskos and Knapp's study through the systematic referencing
of other archaeologists' work on hybridity, modelled after Bhabha. It is this
misconstruing of the concept that led Cañete and Vives-Ferrándiz (2011:
124 and passim) to use the Phoenician colony of Lixus in Morocco (ig. 1)
as a case study of both hybridity and 'hegemony' as "two sets of tenets"
that are not "contradictory" in an attempt to inoculate hybridity against
the criticism of power neutrality. Yet this creates an obvious paradox,
for hybridity, as an epistemological tool, not only inherently embodies
power, but also expresses it as the counter-hegemonic response of the
suppressed, not of the order-airming authority.5
5 This goes beyond the obvious problems in Cañete and Vives-Ferrándiz's study (2011: 138) of tracing hegemony in
the remains of a thick terraced wall with evidence for "ritual activities", coupled with the anthropomorphic igurines of
body representations, which allegedly relects social heterogeneity.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
26 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
Fig. 1. Map of the western Mediterranean showing sites with Phoenician material culture in nortwest Africa (Morocco) and Spain.
This repetitive misconstruing of concepts reveals the frequent
practice in social archaeology of invoking an anthropologist's or social
theorist's name, often en passante, as a (token) reference to their work,
in an attempt to imbue the application of a particular concept with
substance, albeit often stripped of epistemological meaningfulness. This
tendency normally manifests itself in an of-hand mention of a concept
or theory developed by such-and-such luminary of anthropological
or social theory, as if the mention of his or her name alone suices
to guarantee the universality, permanence and absoluteness of the
axiomatic truth encapsulated in it. This occurs in archaeology regardless
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 27
of the fact that the concept does not go uncontested within its parent
discipline. Thus reliant upon a clear appeal to authority as a rhetorical
device for the valorization of persuasion power in many archaeological
writings on postcolonialism, the disjunction between malleable theory
on the one hand, and the archaeological record on the other, produces
an unbridgeable chasm that diminishes the explanatory potential of the
theory as applied to the evidence. This is doubly paradoxical since, on the
one hand, postcolonialism in its essence sets out to provide the counter-
hegemonic voice vis-à-vis the previous intellectual establishment as
the legitimating force behind the use of a particular understanding of
reality (thus belittling the authoritarian Western-centric voice). On the
other hand, it is itself subject to sharp critique from within the ranks of
social theory, where no trump card of authority is played to shield it from
criticism. The same tendency can be noted with regard to the notion
of habitus, which in archaeology often appears in brief references as
if a universal absolute, rather than as a contestable concept based on
ethnographic work in Algeria.6
A commonly cited criticism of hybridity as currently employed
remains its allegedly implied essentialism, the presupposition of an
imagined 'purity' of discrete, bounded cultures.7 Eriksen (1993: 134), in
discussing the anthropological concept of 'cultural islands', succinctly
notes that "no society is entirely isolated, that cultural boundaries are not
absolute, and that webs of communication and exchange tie societies
together everywhere, no matter how isolated they may seem at a irst
glance". Each and every culture can be conceived of as hybrid in the
sense of having been formed in interaction with its cultural environs,
whether to a small or large extent. For Stockhammer (2012: 53), a broader
understanding of hybridity "reduces it to a metaphor". So then, to what
extent can a culture that has contact with and borrows from other
6 For a critique of habitus as a central concept in social theory see King (2000). Criticism has even come from its use in
the ethnographic context for which it was developed, the Kabylia region of Algeria (cf. Goodman 2003).
7 I shall refrain from rehearsing in detail one of the most tenacious tropes of the critique against hybridity. For the
quest of an imagined authenticity for the precolonial past, see van Dommelen (2006b: 138) and Jones (1997).
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
28 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
cultures be regarded as a hybrid in a non-Bhabhan sense? The question
does not only refer to the degree of cultural permeation alone.
At the heart of this question lies the issue of agency, which
remains pragmatically elusive in hybridity, despite being systematically
implied.8 This results from a particular overlooking of agency's temporal
dimensions, the speciics of time and the individual. Is the person
partaking in practices that we deine as 'hybrid', conscious of their
actions or were these actions already so deeply embedded in an (already)
hybrid cultural context that no such consciousness could have been at
play? Is the hybridity of practices or material culture hybrid through
the archaeologist's eyes or did it appear in such a way to their agents
too? In the former case, can the material culture or cultural practices
still be referred to as hybrid, since the objective of the term is to show
a conscious stratagem (or in its misuse in many archaeological studies,
'negotiation')? De Groot (2011: 35) alludes to this critical concern when
studying the allegedly hybrid ceramic group of Gray Ware, a wheel-made
type of pottery that was supposedly the fusion of Phoenician pottery
making technology and indigenous ceramic shapes. If what is at play is
an unconscious reproduction of mixed socio-cultural traits that had been
already formulated and crystallized in a culturally diverse environment,
then are not these reproductions no diferent to all others, none of which
can claim an one-dimensional cultural derivation?
To address this potential shift in the meaning of hybridity towards
essentialism, and as an expression of an increasing dissatisfaction with
terminology, 'hybridization' was coined in an attempt to capture time,
freezing a snap of the on-going mixing of diferent cultural elements
(though occasionally used coevally with or in lieu of hybridity). For van
Dommelen (2006: 139–140), hybridization is preferable, for it nuances the
local contexts and emphasizes the actor during the process. Yet even with
8 Agency here refers to humans. For the relection of human attributes (personhood, life cycles, biographies) on things
and the resulting theory of their agency (i.e. the less-tainted 'materiality' of both anthropology and archaeology), see
Holbraad (2011) and Malafouris (2010) respectively. For the more radical (and incredulous) call to eface the ontological
distinction between human and thing, see Latour (1993).
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 29
hybridization, the temporal dimension of agency remains problematic,
at least in archaeology. Since hybridization has to be gauged through
material culture, strict time limits should be applied for its production
to warrant that it relects self-conscious decision making. For in the
opposite case of an unconscious production and perpetuation of ideas
and material culture, hybridization is reduced to a mere continuation of
previous traditions deriving from hybrid states which therefore no longer
index hybridization. This is a constant setback for archaeologists willing
to use hybridization, if the desire is to stay true to its routinely quoted
deinition as the process of hybridity (as subversive strategy), rather than
as a mere fusion or the often heard 'mixture'. This necessary and often
overlooked condition of a speciic time frame engenders the paradox of
searching for the outcome of a process (hybrid identities) in the material
remains of its process.
The increasing dissatisfaction with terminology has led to the
concurrent use of other terms such as 'entanglement' (Dietler 2010) or
'middle ground' (Antonaccio, this volume). The latter asserts the creation
of a new culture from diferent groups, diferent from the sum of its parts,
resulting from a series of misunderstandings of the other group's culture
and the subsequent accommodation of the misperception of the other.
The concept of middle ground, which difers from hybridity in that no
subversion is implied, was applied to the Greek overseas settlements
(Malkin 2004, 2005), but not to the Phoenician ones. This is somewhat
paradoxical, since a power neutral concept seems less suited to the
more formally colonial character of many Greek settlements than to the
Phoenician trading outposts. Evidently, the distinction—hybridity with
Phoenician contacts, middle ground with Greeks—relates more to the
particular preferences of people working on these subjects, rather than
an innate suitability of the ancient context—if anything, the contrary is
the case. Entanglement (Dietler 2010) has also surfaced as a staple word
in the theorizing of culture contact. The semantic import here is that it
seems to point to appropriation, rather than mixing, albeit it remains
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
30 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
unclear if the distinction with 'appropriation' is merely one of degree
(alteration vs. complete transformation).9
Thus, like other 'unfortunate' terms that were introduced to help
guide thinking along a particular path only then to be discarded for
the implications with which they were laden,10 these terminological
preoccupations seem to fuel incessant discussions in an ever-spiralling
attempt to ind the 'optimal' term—a term that would nuance circumstance
and feature, and would encapsulate all particular characteristics of
a context and period, exhausting the discussion of archaeological
phenomena on trite pursuits on the semantics of individual words. This
attempt is futile for it always results in an evanescent term, one that
cannot hold up to describe precisely and fully each colonial or culture
contact context and period and which will always be deicient in one
semantically-charged implication or the other, for no circumstance is the
same. This fetishism of words adds little to our understanding of the past
and diverts the debate from the interpretation of the archaeological record
towards a petty game of semantics, which, in the long run, crystallizes
into a particular kind of jargon—and a conditio sine qua non for anyone
writing on the subject at that. As an efect, this creates a kind of barrier
in the scholarship of culture contact for it introduces a particular kind of
scholarly 'realm' into which only certain members of the archaeological
discipline are admitted, even if the core of the approach is the same. This
often translates into a schism depending on the geographical locus of the
archaeologist,11 since such terminological pursuits have acquired much
substance in Anglophone scholarship, but have little meaning for those
working in most other languages, let alone those using other approaches
to the past.
9 Cf. Hayne's (2010) study on Early Iron Age Sardinia where 'entangled' refers to the use of foreign objects by the
nuraghic society, but strictly as part of the latter's traditions. Over a long period of time and with an increasing degree of
intercultural interactions desired by both participating parties, the appropriating culture's habitus is altered, producing
'entangled identities'. Presumably, as in the case of objects appropriated, the altered identities are entangled—as op-
posed to hybrid—due to the (low) degree of said alteration.
10 Cf. Hofmann's (2008: 552) criticism of the term 'Orientalization' (vs 'Orientalizing') for "it has outlived its func-
tion". In a similar spirit, Mattingly (2010: 285) addresses the "-ization problems", postulating that terms such as 'Helleni-
zation' and 'Romanization' are problematic in nuancing identity and describe both "process and outcome".
11 A Western-centric perspective of these currents has been noted elsewhere (cf. Bintlif 2004: 398).
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 31
A diferent problem of hybridity, not inherent to it but symptomatic
of its application, is the overarching emphasis it has conferred on cultural
or ethnic identity at the expense of other forms of categorization. For
example, Antonaccio (2010: 50), in deining and deconstructing the ethnic
dimension of material culture in Italy during the Greek colonization,
notes that "the mixing of genealogies and origins of things that is at the
heart of the concept of hybridity makes the discourse of things inherently
ethnic". This overemphasis results in a neglect of other factors and other
categories of social dynamics, including social or gender diferences. For
example, Mac Sweeney (2009) already drew attention to the "overlooked
identities" that often get lost in the debates about ethnic or cultural
identity that have dominated our theoretical concerns during the past
years.
Efectively, this results in a problem of exclusivity and often
tautology, consisting in the circumscribed space of interpretation
allowed by hybridity—for if culture contact has to be seen under this
light (and it is immaterial if no hybridity can in the end be detected), the
questions asked are very limited by virtue of the theoretical framework
that is adopted. This can be aptly illustrated through articles that seek
out to explore the hybridity of material culture, intentionally looking for
ambivalence, negotiation and ambiguousness, and tautologically ending
in their conclusions with exactly these very same observations. It is after
all hardly diicult to spot hybridity in the archaeological record, for no
cultural element is born out of itself. For example, Counts (2008) applied
hybridity to the representation of the divine type he calls 'Master of Lions'
as known from statues and igural representations in Cyprus from the
sixth and ifth centuries BC, asserting that "hybrid forms and recomposed
identities are perhaps the most distinguishing features of Cypriote [sic]
cult during the irst millennium". He refrains from using the common name
'Herakles' or 'Melquart' for the type, for these are "culturally speciic" and
goes on to conclude that the 'Master of Lions' could claim authority over
a wide range of "divine spheres":
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
32 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
...this collective, hybridised iconography served the
needs of local Cypriote communities (whether identiied
as Greek, Phoenician, or Eteocypriote), who embraced
the deity without needing to reference external cultural
contexts or meanings (Counts 2008: 19).
The statement is unwarranted, since the generic "divine spheres" of
which Counts talks are conjecture and more so than it can be deemed
conjectural to call a divine type with a lion's skin and a club Herakles.12
To contextualize the representation of this god into a generic context is
legitimate, but to proceed in depriving it of its name and attributes is
not, regardless of how many layers the god may have had in diferent
contexts and periods. In this way, the application of hybridity does not
clarify the local context, but obfuscates it with the generic. Admittedly
the representation of the human igure with the two lions had ceased to
be a foreign Phoenician or Egyptian one by being translated into a Cypriot
context. But the Cypriot context itself was not one immersed in oblivion
and dedicated to the generic: the type was adopted either because it
found a correspondence in a local deity or as the representation of an
adopted one. To claim that the type can only be referred to as Master
of Lions in an attempt to move away from nineteenth-century culture-
historic paradigms does not elucidate the issue, but adds another
layer of interpretation that needs to be deconstructed so as to ind out
something about a particular historical reality. Even if the god was shared
among the culturally diferent communities of Cyprus, it was bound to
have a speciic name and identity, which can be glimpsed through its
predecessor and later mutations. To simply describe it as 'hybrid' with
the generic characteristics known from two or three millennia of ancient
Near Eastern religious history (i.e. the wide range of "divine spheres"
Counts loosely describes) ofers little clarity to the issue. This results in an
obvious loss of heuristic value. By the end of the article, we have no new
12 Especially given the attested self-conscious quest for the origins of many of the deities venerated in ancient Greece.
For example, the list of ancient hypotheses as to the origins of Herakles are many and diverse (Hdt. 2.4; cf. also Shapiro
1983: 14), suggesting that people did, in fact, "reference external cultural contexts or meanings" unlike Counts's (2008:
19) suggestion of people unrelectingly contending to hybridized forms.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 33
insights and know nothing more other than that a god was venerated
in Cyprus, it served (some of) its communities and had a long past that
could be traced to the Near East. Employed in this way, the concept of
hybridity has become merely descriptive, not explanatory and adds little
to our understanding of a historical process.
Rebottling the Genie: A Case Study of Argued Hybridity in
Phoenician Archaeology
In contemporary archaeological practice, pottery can no longer be (mis)-
identiied with a speciic cultural or ethnic group, but it can unlock secrets
as to the social practices particular groups performed. This is where
Bourdieu's practice theory comes in to link a reconstructed habitus with
speciic groups of people and their identities. However, the archaeological
record is often too poor to allow the reconstruction of social practices
to a degree with which we can really 'get' to the people represented by
the material culture. In such cases, a ladder of inferences often leads us
full circle to the same association of material culture with cultural/ethnic
identity that has been justly anathema to modern archaeology. Thus, the
veneer of a theoretical background that supposedly moves beyond the
crude identiication of the cultural/ethnic identity of people with pottery
(or other types of material culture that are used as insignia of identity)
can often be swiftly brushed of to expose the underlying, almost
unaltered, way of utilizing types of material culture as identity markers. In
postcolonial archaeology, where identity has become a central issue, this
shortcoming acquires signiicant dimensions.
Where is the line to be drawn then between adoption of material
culture, adoption of technology and actual hybridized cultures? An
example will help illustrate the point here. Delgado and Ferrer (2007:
25–29) attempted to dissect cultural encounters and identity construction
at Cerro del Villar in Malaga (ig. 1), a Phoenician colony in south Spain.
Their study encompassed "local cultures or hybrids" connected to
'maintenance tasks' in domestic contexts, tasks that are culture speciic
and are resilient to change, including, allegedly, the preparation of food.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
34 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
The notion is derived from Bourdieu's theory as we are told. Examining
the ceramic assemblages from domestic contexts, they postulate
the presence of two diferent "culinary traditions" associated with
Phoenician and native customs based on the presence of spherical bowls
"characteristic of…native communities" and plates and trays associated
with colonists, despite their acknowledgement that they do not "know
anything about how food preparation and cooking were practised in
colonial communities" (Delgado and Ferrer 2007: 28). Speciically in
House 2 at the colony, they see a household unit "composed of people
of diferent origins" on the basis of typologically Phoenician and local
coarse tableware. The latter, being fewer than the Phoenician plates and
found with other types of material culture (e.g. ostrich eggshell, perfume
bottles), apparently suggest that "colonial identity was in the process
of being constructed" with the indigenous women of the household
"expressing their membership in the Phoenician community" (Delgado
and Ferrer 2007: 29).
Efectively, while purportedly employing the use of postcolonial
ideas (emphasizing hybridity, mixture and a new identity) and citing
Bourdieu, the authors identiied the hand-made pots with indigenous
people, and women at that, violating any notion of gendered analysis.
The syllogism not only entails conceptual, but also factual (i.e. related
to the archaeological record) shortcomings. The following ladder of
inferences can be discerned:
1. The coarse, hand-made ware, deemed 'indigenous', is connected
to cooking. Therefore the pottery must have been used by people
involved in an indigenous cooking tradition.
2. People involved in indigenous cooking traditions must have been
indigenous themselves.
3. Since the pottery related to cooking preparation, it must have
involved women.
4. The wheel-made, Phoenician-style tableware was introduced by
other occupants of the house that were Phoenician.
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 35
This syllogism highlights where the weakness of this application of
hybridity lies: in a hardly less brazen manner than the straightforward
identiication of pots with people, it actually returns tout court to that. The
indigenous cooking pots signify indigenous women and the concurrent
presence of some Phoenician pots indicates the presence of Phoenicians
(men?). In this case, the evidence is tailored to the theory so as to appease
archaeology's newly found interest in postcolonialism and practice
theory.
Overlooking factors of availability, immediacy and eiciency critically
undermines the assumptions made about user identity as relected in
material culture. Only hand-made coarse ware was used at Cerro del Villar
for direct cooking above the ire until later periods (Delgado and Ferrer
2007: 26)—in this line of thinking, every house at the colony must have
boasted indigenous women! In my opinion this fact says a lot more about
functionality than identity, since the more expensive, wheel-madepottery
would have been reserved for less demanding tasks. Empirical evidence
shows that people are very adaptable and will make use of the resources
that do exist; as a result, the preparation of food is far less rigid than the
authors make it out to be. Escacena (2011: 169) recently criticized the
insistence in the archaeology of Iberia to equate hand-made pottery with
indigenous people, especially given the dearth of information regarding
precolonial indigenous contexts. In addition, and crucially, deep bowls,
which in Delgado and Ferrer's (2007: 28) argument were used for serving
the liquid foods of the indigenous "culinary tradition", are actually known
from contemporary Phoenician communities in the homeland (Núñez
2004, 2008). Conclusively, pottery alone is not a suicient indicator of
cultural or ethnic identities as Arangeui et al. (2011: 315) already remarked
in a similar investigation in contemporary Lixus.
Where to Go From Here?
The foray of postcolonial studies into dusting of old ways of thinking,
into bringing to the forefront the unprivileged people of history and
of giving voice to those who did not write history is an achievement
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
36 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
that drastically redrew the epistemological boundaries of archaeology,
widening the ield of enquiry and revising old assumptions. Hybridity
armed archaeology not only with the inspiration and motivation to look
for the hidden and the socially oppressed, but it also gave it a theoretical
tool with which to analyze their positions and situation. Yet in time, the
transformation of a particularly politicized concept into a ubiquitous,
quasi-universalist theory, into which all interpretation of culture contact
was expected to it, turned the victory of postcolonialism into baggage,
relected in the inlexibility of its totalizing presence. In that way, the
explanatory potential was soon lost and there remained the a priori
description: of mixture, negotiation and ambivalence that structures both
the description of the evidence and the analysis of the situations studied,
as if positioned on a time-less, place-less plane of human interaction
without speciic content and possibilities of deviating from a constantly
reiterated pattern of abstractly-perceived negotiation and ambivalence.
What is then the tactical advantage of maintaining the concept of
hybridity? The saturation of the ield of colonial studies in Mediterranean
prehistory with an obsession of hybridity, middle ground and the re-
invented habitus as a de facto one-way interpretation of the archaeological
evidence detracts from the multiplicity of viewpoints one may be willing
to explore in the material record. Additionally, it restricts not only the
way the available material culture can be viewed, but the availability of
material culture itself, since it ixes the boundary of the discourse within
the limits of its own preoccupations, hence limiting the datasets used. In
essence, it has become a straitjacket.
The observation that diferences in material culture relect social or
gender diferences is not new, nor is the concept that these diferences
can provide information about identity (Heymans 2010: 53). Postulating
hybridity from changes in the material culture, however, has little meaning
unless accompanied by other correlates that could be used as identity
markers. In using hybridity as cultural fusion, deprived of its particular
meaning regarding power, the term denotes any degree of cultural mixing.
But ambivalence in actual reality would have manifested in very diferent
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
Eleftheria Pappa 37
terms from context to context, for example from trade to violence (be
that coercion or war), to neighbourly relations to intermarriage, to cite
but a few. Identity markers express social identity not merely by habitual
forces, but also by an act that is intentionally performed and which may
be intended to be received in diferent ways by diferent individuals
(Hodos 2010a: 11–12). As such, our own understanding of past identities
through the material remains of what may have been polysemic actions
can only ofer a circumscribed and at times lawed picture.
A call for emancipation from debates following trajectories that
lead to trite interpretation is much needed. The irony cannot be lost
that in such a plea, one merely replicates the past. The obsession with
postcolonial ideas, more than being conceptually lawed in that the era
of postcolonialism is yet to arrive (and so no perspective can be 'post-
postcolonial' in actuality), reproduces the trajectory and fate of previous
ephemeral trends in archaeology. Do these trends then represent an
empty vogue by the "chattering academic classes" in Bintlif's words
(2004: 404), devoid of any value that survives the passage of time? In
the latter's critique (Bintlif 2004: 398–399) of the excesses of "thinking…
about how we think" within the discipline (rather than on its subject), the
value of this ephemeral theory is placed on the enrichment it ofers to the
collection of archaeological data for "the desire to treat contemporary
issues in our research often means we have to collect diferent kinds
of data to previous researchers, so new kinds of evidence appear".
For example, if we adopted a Western-centric attitude, known for its
historical sympathies with ancient colonizers as sources of inspiration and
legitimization, to Phoenician settlement in the western Mediterranean,
much of the knowledge of the indigenous society would have been lost
as peripheral or mere 'clutter' to the importance of the 'superior' culture
brought by the easterners who had by that stage developed an alphabet
and were skilled merchants. Other modern preoccupations with gender
equality led us to search for women in the Early Iron Age, which again
would not have been achieved unless the people studying this past were
living in societies and eras that were conducive to the emergence of
those ields of enquiry. The value of these new theoretical trends lies in
Archaeological Review from Cambridge 28.1: 29 –50
38 Postcolonial Baggage at the End of the Road
the widening of datasets and approaches that lead us to question what
we took for granted, to enrich with new data, to revise older theories, to
nuance, to broaden the horizons and to re-interpret, thus "enabling the
past reality to come gradually into sharper focus" (Bintlif 2004: 398). For
this to occur and for the theory to have this knowledge-bearing capacity,
intellectual dogmatism (whether implicit or otherwise) of the approaches
adopted should be avoided and the theory should not be turned into a
universal template.
As an efect, and despite the hype of hybridity, the concept does not
ofer the only, nor always the most appropriate way of interpreting the
evidence in every culture contact situation in the ancient Mediterranean.
Freeing interpretation from the straitjacket of looking for that ubiquitous
(and because of this, hardly informative) ambivalence and negotiation
will allow for a more balanced or nuanced way of seeing what was after
all, a particular, speciic historical reality. Theory will always be a cultural
product of the theorist's time and place and should be self-consciously
seen as that. Only with this relativism in mind can one proceed to apply
the theory onto the material culture of the past, knowing that our
viewpoints and ideas are only a facet of many possibilities, many of which
will be replaced by others in the lapse of time.
Acknowledgements
Research for this article was carried out within a project inanced by the
Netherlands Organisation for Scientiic Research (NWO), entitled 'Merging
Boundaries. Phoenician communities in the western Mediterranean and
the Atlantic: cultural consumption and adaptation strategies circa 750–
550 BC'.
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Introduction: Narrativizing the Philistines
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D espite thirty years of new discoveries and scores of new publications
on the Philistines, for the most part the narrative about them has not
altered substantially.1 To a large extent, the appearance, definition and
transformation of the Philistine culture of the Iron Age southern Levant
('Philistia') has been seen as part of the incursions of the so-called 'Sea
Peoples', which took place at the transition between the Late Bronze and
Iron Ages (fig. 1).2 The Philistines were largely portrayed as an intrusive,

1 Notable exceptions are Gilboa (2006–2007) and Russell (2009).

2 The Sea Peoples or Peoples of the Sea are believed to be multi-ethnic groups of disenfranchised and/or displaced
peoples from around the Mediterranean that inter alia engaged in piracy and attacks in the Aegean and the East and
served as mercenaries in various late Bronze Age kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean. Some eventually settled in
Anatolia, Cyprus and the Levant. It is possible that as the Sea Peoples moved around the region they acquired additional
followers from the places they were in contact with and in fact when settling down may have readily intermixed with
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