Andrea Vianello

Globalisation and Multiculturalism: New Words for an Ancient Phenomena? The Case of the Mediterranean Bronze Age

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Abstract

Globalisation: a new phenomenon?

Recently globalisation, and to a lesser extent multiculturalism, have become familiar terms to most people around the world. The term "globalisation" has been associated with modern times through the strict linkage between modern technological discoveries; Internet and the deriving "global village" is perhaps the most famous association (McLuhan 1989).

Globalisation is not a new phenomenon in archaeological and especially anthropological theory. Amselle (2002) reminds us that its roots can be noticed in Marxism, in particular in Rosa Luxemburg's works. Nonetheless, anthropology is now focussing on globalisation because this is a new issue felt as necessary to interpret modern times. However, even if we accept that globalisation is a new phenomenon produced by present societies, we can and should be prepared to trace its origins in the past. Trends of rapid advancement or technological improvements as well as cross-cultural contacts able to influence cultural behaviours are not an exclusive to modern times, the Internet is.

Technological developments in information broadcast and particularly Internet are often regarded as the cause or the best expression of a world that is without barriers, where the same concept of nation or ethnicity is challenged every day. It must be stressed that such new technologies and conditions are not equally shared by everyone on the planet, so that globalisation is a tendency, perhaps a condition for some, a myth for others, another culture for those excluded. When we regard globalisation as a tendency, becomes easier to find parallels in the past. Globalisation can be perceived as cultural behaviour when seen externally, though a new one deriving from the combination of many others. One case is the Mediterranean Sea, which often has "connected" rather than disconnected people; here the term "connect" purposefully suggests an analogy with the role of Internet today.

A definition of the terms is required at this point, because globalisation and multiculturalism are not explained in any dictionary, and the definitions vary from individual to individual. In my view, globalisation is the cultural condition, or simply "culture", that appears with intense and continued exchanges among people of different cultures and ethnicities when the original cultures and ethnicities themselves are no more detectable. For this to happen, in the real world large scale contacts are required. Multiculturalism is a step backward; normally it is either a prelude to globalisation or stable condition contingent to insufficient exchanges because the system is too small or low-paced. Multiculturalism is detectable when different but interwoven cultures or ethnicities can be recognised in a certain geographic region.

Ethnicities and nations

Both globalisation and multiculturalism relate to the concept of cultural identity, intended as a closed set of social behaviours that make an individual recognisable in some common definition. Ethnicity and nationality are two narrower definitions of the same idea, but they are modern concepts that cannot be easily identified in past societies. Modern countries are not an expression of single ethnicities, because in that case globalisation would be the next step in an enormous loss of culture with all the nations adopting only one model. Beyond their façade of institutional expression of large homogenous groups, issues regarding the identity of the social groups within survive and grow. Some examples: Spain notoriously has problems with the Basques; Germany and Switzerland are federations; the United Kingdom in 2002 recognised its sixth official language, Cornish, a step towards the recognition of a culture and a land according to people in Cornwall; the United States have not yet sutured the division fought during the Civil War, at least culturally. There are no pure nations, as probably there are no definable ethnicities, given the enormous number of social and cultural variables that can group people. Only "groups" of people are true, but continuously changing, melting, and fragmenting.

Globalisation in the past: some problems

Nations were ideated by Illuminists, and still are partly reality in the modern world, partly utopia. They are not needed for the process of globalisation to start, and this breaks down the myth regarding globalisation as direct product of modern nations paving the way to the search of globalisation in the past.

What we can know for sure of the past is material culture, which sometimes is expression of ethnicities, sometimes of cultural behaviours and sometimes of individual behaviours. While individual behaviours can often be filtered out, it remains extremely difficult and subjective with contemporary methodologies to recognise ethnicities from cultures. And it could well be that during the Bronze Age the ethnical characterisation was not developed yet as a result of the contrasting high cultural fragmentation and need for cooperation among people.

The case of the well-known Greeks, so different and in competition, when not at war, among themselves and yet able to be a distinguishable "group" when opposed to the external world is exemplar. We should never forget that the Greek world at a certain point included the Etruscans and later the Romans, so the modern definition of ancient Greek, based on modern concepts, could have made no sense to the Greeks themselves. For us, an Etruscan was all but a Greek, for an ancient Greek a member of the Greek cultural world.

Not only do we have troubles in finding ethnicities, especially for earlier times such as the Bronze Age, but we should question their validity. Ethnicity is probably a very personal choice, deriving from the personal perception of belonging or not to a group, and willing to belong or not to a group. Therefore, of a Bronze Age Mediterranean characterised by frequent material and ideological exchanges across the sea, we know material cultures as intimate and distinguishing expression of interacting groups that perhaps did not have any self-consciousness of their identity but were more real than modern nations and ethnicities.

The case of the Bronze Age Mediterranean

During the Bronze Age, an incoming ship had to be harboured and the crew restored, as Homer's Odyssey teaches, therefore hospitality was essential. There was no option for ancient sailors but hope in the goodness of foreign people. Even Bronze Age Egypt, probably the most "ethnically" defined Mediterranean group was fully integrated in the ongoing exchange system of the Mediterranean, though anything arriving from overseas was nominally a gift to the pharaoh. Today, if you would sail to a modern country without any permission or advance agreement, police would greet you, dear clandestine immigrant! Respecting laws and trade rules imposed by national and international organisms, complying with various safety and security rules as well as using money as primary but impersonal form of exchange, are all but a few of the required conventions for a modern ship.

The Bronze Age Mediterranean was a real "melting pot" of people, where need for subsistence supported an economy, made of berates or trades, that in turn created mobile people keeping various groups in contact. In the Near East, mobile artisans are documented in the writings, but material evidence suggests that transmarine contacts were frequent. In particular, Aegean products, especially pottery, in southern and insular Italy as well as in northern Africa, Egypt and the Near East are a solid proof of cultural and material exchanges. However, the presence of foreign imports in a region often equates to direct contacts among the people that produced them to many modern archaeologists. Theoretical models about the diffusion of techniques and products have been elaborated to present a reality that increasingly seems complex. For example, these models have produced figures like "middlemen", which became popular in the archaeological literature.

The problem lies in the assumption, not always openly declared, that different cultures were. different, closed societies as those proposed by Malinowski. It is for this reason, for example, that the undeniable underlying culture, which is common to most of the Mediterranean area, is often overlooked as normality. Several elements of material culture in any site of the Mediterranean have been unconvincingly assigned to some other culture and then re-considered as direct effects of the slow diffusion of ideas, generally from the East, or proof of the contact between two different areas. However, they do suggest that at a certain point some minimal contact happened, something not powerful enough to change the local culture, yet able to watermark all the sites creating an invisible network. One example for all: the early "bossed bones", which suggest a Sicilian origin and a spread eastwards, just to invalidate the diffusionist approach, if it was necessary.

Shipwrecks

Shipwrecks are the decisive proof of the effects of the Mediterranean exchange network. Those found near Ulu Burun, Cape Gelidonya and Point Iria had on board objects and crews that appear to originate from various areas; provenance studies have competed to suggest the most unheard of places, but few researches have focussed on the fact that so many places were referenced in single ships, trying to explain the cargoes as a whole instead as a series of different items from different cultures. No route connecting even most of the referenced area was practicable. Furthermore, the range of products and materials is quite wide, suggesting that such ships were not used to send certain products from a place to another, as it would seem reading the written sources from Near East sites. Instead, likely they followed the coast along circular routes and frequently stopped to exchange items, or at least disembark some products and board others.

How this worked is difficult to say, but advanced ordering was not a viable option: it was probably impossible to list in advance available products as the ships travelled only during summer. Indeed, the sailors probably knew which products were more required in certain areas, but admitting that more tours could be completed in one season, some items could have been ordered. Yet, the system could not have worked if closed societies were involved.

The arrival of a long-distance ship was probably a welcomed event; from an anthropological perspective it should have been occasion for the same behaviours we can observe today at the arrival of ships in remote regions of our planet, where such an event is rare and the only occasion to get in touch with the rest of the world and obtain products, materials and information unlikely to be available otherwise in that area. We should remember that these ships travelled just for a few months, and that we do not have any proof of leisure travel during Bronze Age. Therefore, they were probably occasion for feasting and likely they involved all of the local community and overseas travellers.

Since the archaeological evidence suggests a high mobility of people on medium distances, the Point Iria shipwreck is particularly interesting because it was smaller than the Ulu Burun and Cape Gelydonia ships, and it was carrying almost exclusively pottery. This ship was not suitable for long-distance routes because of its fragility, but also its content was too specialised to interest many different communities. For this reason, it has been interpreted as a regional ship, one that connected various centres in a region probably also redistributing products arriving from larger ships.

In such a ship one would expect a certain degree of homogeneity within its cargo; instead the analysis of pottery has proved that the cargo included items from all over the Aegean and perhaps beyond. This proves that long-distance ships were connected to regional routes, providing an enormous degree of mobility with relatively few long and direct journeys. Thus, exchanges were not exclusively dependant on long-distance routes, a fact that included in the network virtually every human spot near the coast. Evidently, a load of pottery was probably not as welcomed as a precious and colourful cargo as that of the Ulu Burun ship by the local people, but it contributed in maintaining a contact and catch up with the latest news.

Conclusions

In conclusion, what type of culture did the sailors of the ships have if not a Mediterranean one? Shipwrecks and archaeological evidence from many sites spread across the Mediterranean suggest that there was a connection among them, though not necessarily a direct one. For this reason, I am keen to recognise processes similar to present time globalisation in the Bronze Age Mediterranean not only because there was a wide network of exchanges, but because this network, at the very least, kept any culture within aware of most of the other cultures.

The sailors are perhaps an example of this, they were not a single culture, but the sum of many others, likely a new, different one. Moreover, the exchanges affected the self-identity of most cultures, as the partial view from pottery proves. Imitations can be seen as the integration of foreign elements, while the preservation of certain shapes and motives can be seen as true expression of the cultural identity of a certain group. Certain elements of material culture inevitably made sense only for the originating culture and these could not be replaced without a loss of identity, yet the integration of new elements, which is not occasional but regular in the Bronze Age Mediterranean suggest that the exchange network was an active force changing all the cultures and this process, in my opinion, can be defined as globalisation.

Bibliography

Amselle, J-L. 2002. Globalization and the future of anthropology. In African Affairs, vol. 101, pp. 213-229.