People are increasingly obsessed with their “identity” and the process of “othering”. The question, though, is: who is in charge of the labelling? People themselves? Or their surroundings? Archaeology in Galicia has a story to tell

People from Northwest Iberia. Thos labelled as Celtic underlined and coloured red © Samuel Nion Alvaréz. Source: Texts, Politics and Identities: New Challenges on Iron Age Ethnicity. A Case from Northwest Iberia. Samuel Nión-Álvarez
In: The Archaeological Journal 11.03.2024. Open Source

The concept of ethnogenesis has a long tradition in literature, history and archaeology. Originally, it was the title of a war poem from 1861. In the aftermath of WW2 – especially after the 60s – the concept was developed inside history, anthropology, and sociology. The point was to move the focus from any racial allusions towards the ethnization process and the formation of ethnic groups and entities as part of what Frederik Barth called “Ethnic Osmosis”. In this perspective, ethnic identity became a question of the formative processes and the preconditions for the invention of ethnic traditions. Hence, ethnic identities were seen as adopted and “lived out”. Today, anthropologists and historians will agree that the processes involved in the identification of identities must primarily be analysed as part of systems of cultural theories. This approach left archaeologists in a fluid world where the identification of “specific material cultures” might no longer be identified as Roman, Germanic or Frankish. Instead, objects – for instance grave goods – became tokens of inter-cultural contacts, rather than identifiable anchors for identities. In the words of “Jenkins”, ethnicities and their significant material cultural markers became part of a process of “continuous becoming”. As part of this perspective, archaeology became interested in identifying the dynamics of collective self-classification through the wheeling and dealing with material artefacts and the emic perspectiv

Recently, however, archaeology has renewed its interest in what might be termed “political centrality”. To some extent, this new approach may be recognised in the identification of social fabrics such as they are revealed by aDNA. For instance, recent studies of the aDNA of eight elite Avar burials – as identified by their glittering golden grave goods – have revealed a deliberative matrimonial indigenous approach among the core elite and continuing for more than a hundred years. It appears that the etic identification of these people as “Avars” corresponded to their identification as such, and witnessed by their collections of grave goods.

Along similar lines, a recent paper presents a new approach to the study of European Iron Age ethnicity in the Iberian Peninsula, more precisely the present-day Galician corner, the Finis Terrae. In this study, a review of some of the uncertainties involved in the archaeology of ethnicity is presented: the introduction of political identity as a major focus of study, the reassessment of the etic perspective as an inner part of the processes of collective differentiation, or the need for a holistic approach to join and combine different forms of expression, both emic and etic.

The paper takes its point of departure in the “otherization” invoked by the Romans towards the “noncivilized” Celts, a contested identification, used for instance by the Greeks to identify all and any Barbarians. In this sense, writes Samuel Nión-Álvarez in this engaging article, “Celt is not a valid ethnonym to represent Iron Age identities”.

The study evolves around a recently noted difference between Iron Age communities at the sea and in the rural hinterland. While the domestic compounds in the coastal communities were “oriented towards internal hierarchization” those in the rural hinterland persisted in non-hierarchical traditional lifeways, which has earned them to be labelled as “deep rurals” surrounded by walls identifying the closed-off communities. Based on the studies of González-Ruibal, Samuel Nión-Álvarez writes about three different types of societies – the Heroic, the House, and the Rural Societies. Of these, it was only the coastal communities, which the ancient authors felt deserved the Celtic epithet, marking them out as sporting hierarchical yet disorganised and clannish social models given over to warfare and overly consumption of prestigious golden objects (torques). The rural hinterland escaped the designation as “others”, perhaps being considered nothing but “pagans” (living in the “pagus” or countryside)? Thus, the ethnonym “Celts” –as used by the writers in Antiquity – was used to designate those people trying to organise themselves, yet living in the periphery in “failed states”; as opposed to those in their own centre, who lived in well-organised and -ordered societies aka the Greek and Roman city-states.

This study presents a fine example of the need for archaeologists to not just approach the question of ethnicity from a processual and emic point of view – as ethnogenesis – but include the etic perspective, seeing their cultural formation as political “others” in a centre-periphery perspective such as the one developed by the Anthropologist, Jonathan Friedman.

SOURCE:

Texts, Politics and Identities: New Challenges on Iron Age Ethnicity. A Case from Northwest Iberia
Samuel Nión-Álvarez
In: The Archaeological Journal 11.03.2024. Open Source

Abstract:

This paper presents an approach to the study of European Iron Age ethnicity, a core topic for several decades which has begun to lose interest in the last years. A review of some of the uncertainties involved in the archaeology of ethnicity, focused on several key issues, is proposed. Moreover, some relevant topics that are usually undermined are suggested in order to address new challenges in the discipline: the introduction of political identity as a major focus of study, the reassessment of the etic perspective as an inner part of processes of collective differentiation, or the need for a holistic approach to join and combine different forms of expression. Finally, these approaches will be explored in a case study based on the northwest of the Iberian peninsula. This region has been chosen because of the feasibility of combining the results of different studies about social and political organizsation with relevant textual evidence to extract information about their ethnic dynamics.

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People are increasingly obsessed with their “identity” and the process of “othering”. The question, though, is: who is in charge of the labelling? People themselves? Or their surroundings? Archaeology in Galicia has a story to tell

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