Re-thinking communities: Collective identity and social experience in Iron-Age western Anatolia

Abstract

Reference to identity is ubiquitous in archaeology. Even when identity is not part of the questions driving research, assumptions about it affect interpretations of data; the terms used to designate individuals or collective groups carry implicit ideas about their identities. Default categories used to describe people, however, are often rooted in binary oppositions instead of the interactions that made up their daily social lives. In an archaeology of the ancient Mediterranean, these oppositional categories are most frequently rooted in ethnicity. This article presents the community as an ideal framework to address the problems posed by an overreliance on ethnicity for understanding ancient identities, but also to compare collective social dynamics more broadly. Laying out a methodology for communities’ archaeological study, it uses two case studies from Emporion (Spain) and Ephesos (Turkey) to illustrate the new questions and conversations facilitated by an archaeology of communities that complement ongoing identity studies.