Archaeologies of Colonialism: Consumption, Entanglement, and Violence in Ancient Mediterranean France

9. Conclusion and Imperial Epilogue

333 This book began with a passage by the Gallo-Roman historian Pompeius Trogus extolling the radiant civilizing influence of Massalia and claiming that the progress of the surrounding barbarians was so brilliant that it seemed as though Gaul had essentially been transformed into Greece (fig. 9.1). In subsequent chapters, analysis of archaeological data covering the six centuries of colonial encounters that preceded the account of Pompeius Trogus have shown how wildly inaccurate his statement was. As late as the end of the second century BCE, five hundred years after the foundation of the Greek colony, the inhabitants of Entremont, a mere twenty-six kilometers to the north, were cooking their meals in pots that had changed little since the Bronze Age, were affixing human skulls to the walls of a sanctuary in a practice that Greeks found repugnant, and were engaged in a violent struggle with Massalia that threatened its very existence. Clearly, Entremont had not been transported to Greece; nor did its citizens have any desire to be like Greeks. Yet neither is this a story of the parallel persistence of two static cultures through the ages. The evidence shows that centuries of colonial encounter had entangled colonists and natives in complex relationships that had far reaching unintended cultural, social, economic, and political consequences for both. The goal of the book is not simply to expose the fiction of Pompeius Trogus’s selfserving observations. Rather, the objective is to apprehend the complex processes of entanglement and transformation that transpired in ancient Mediterranean France and to use this colonial situation to engage a broader set of theoretical issues central to the 9 CONCLUSION AND IMPERIAL EPILOGUE 334 • C O N C L U S I O N A N D I M P E R I A L E P I L O G U E comparative study of colonialism in anthropology and postcolonial studies. The point is to move beyond the well-known event history of the expansion of Etruscans, Greeks, and Romans into the western Mediterranean toward a more subtle understanding of the implications of this history of encounter and interaction for the daily lives of people who were experiencing and fashioning this process. The book is designed to reveal and comprehend agents and agency, the martial and the material, the contradictions FIGURE 9.1 Poster of the Gyptis legend from the twenty-fifth centenary celebration of the city of Marseille (courtesy of the Musée d’Histoire de Marseille). C O N C L U S I O N A N D I M P E R I A L E P I L O G U E • 335 and contingencies, the social and cultural logic of desire and indifference, and the entangling consequences of consumption—in brief, the messy multifaceted workings of colonialism. Achieving this goal requires first understanding why a perspective very similar to that of Pompeius Trogus had come to exert such a powerful influence in the formation of modern European cultural identity and colonial ideology, and how the legacy of that perspective has come to constrain the ability of archaeologists to approach this ancient encounter. It also requires developing an analytic strategy that would enable one to circumvent some of the difficulties posed by these intellectual constraints. I have suggested that these ancient colonial encounters in the western Mediterranean pose some particular challenges for us because of the traditions of European cultural ancestry invented during the Renaissance and the Romantic Hellenist movement of the eighteenth century. Those movements constructed these ancient encounters as a seminal event in the history of the nations that were in the process of becoming the major colonial powers of the modern world: the moment of the spreading of “civilization ” to the western barbarians by Greeks and Romans. This vision of ancestral enlightenment enabled European nations to imagine themselves both as models of the success of the civilizing process and as heirs to the civilizing mission of Greece and Rome; their own colonial ventures were thereby construed as a duty imposed by history . The ancient colonial encounters, known exclusively through the texts of colonists, were seen as prototypes of modern colonial ventures and they furnished the symbolic raw material for the development of modern colonial discourse and practices. Even as archaeologists in the postcolonial era have gradually distanced themselves from older notions of emulative “Hellenization” and “Romanization” as explanatory frameworks, many of the alternative perspectives...