316 Gocha R. Tsetskhladze
Scythian Animal Style objects are common finds (Tsetskhladze 2011: 96–115). Colchian
culture also exhibits Greek and Achaemenid influences: Colchis, too, had been part of
the Achaemenid Empire (Tsetskhladze 2010–11).
Even greater uniformity is revealed in the southern Black Sea: a general pattern of
deep local hostility to the Greeks. This is why there were no Greek settlements at all on
the long stretch coast between Byzantium and Heraclea Pontica, despite several good
harbors and fertile lands that might have attracted them (Xen.,Anab. 6.4.2–6). Dorian
Heraclea Pontica was founded in the territory of the Mariandynoi, whom the Thracians
came to assimilate, and who, according to Strabo (12.3.4), were forced by the colonists
“to serve as Helots,” though not outside their own country, “for the two peoples came
to an agreement on this”!
The peoples of the south-eastern Black Sea were the Tibareni, Chalybes (few in number:
Xen.,Anab. 5.5.1), Drilae (living in wooden dwellings in wooden-fortified settlements
inland of Trapezus: Xen.,Anab. 5.2.2; 5.3.3), Mossynoeci, Macrones, and the Colchians,
most of whom had fallen under the sway of the Achaemenid Empire. Not much can be
discovered about them from archaeology; indeed it is impossible to determine whether
these Colchians (living in villages around Trapezus and sharing the general animus toward
the Greeks: Xen.,Anab. 4.8.20) shared a material culture with those of Colchis itself. The
Mossynoeci, who inhabited numerous villages in the mountains between Cotyora and
Cerasus and lived in seven-level wooden towers (Xen.,Anab. 5.4.26; Diod. 14.30.6),
were “the most uncivilized people whose country [the Greeks] traversed, the furthest
removed from Greek customs” (Xen.,Anab. 5.5.34).
This mosaic of peoples and cultures, local and colonizing, in contact with each other,
raises the question frequently posed by classical archaeologists: how do we excavate
ethnicity? Archaeology can rarely identify a people, and ancient authors, as we have
already seen, become somewhat confused by the meeting of cultures. The central part
of the southern Black Sea in particular, but the whole of that coast in general, is a fog.
Whereas Xenophon offers a fair amount of information about the local inhabitants of
the southeastern Black Sea, there is no archaeological material with which to identify
their material cultures and link these to any named population group. Were the local
people of the Central Black Sea Region of Turkey simply Paphlagonians, as some believe
and which would seem perfectly logical (Saprykin 1991)? Or do we accept that, in the
possible displacement of people in the Dark Age after the collapse of empires, some
groups might perhaps have migrated from North Syria to Anatolia, underpinning the
otherwise confusing information of ancient authors? According to Herodotus (1.72),
the Greeks called the Cappadocians “Syrians”; Strabo believed they were Paphlagonians,
but the contemporary label was “White Syrians” (a name also deployed by Herodotus
[1.72, 76] for some folk hereabouts); and they were just plain “Syrians” outside the
Taurus Mountains. Were they any more Syrian than the Colchians were Egyptian? Were
they Hittite or Phrygian in origin? In what sense, if any, were the labels actually ethnic
(Summerer 2007: 28–9; Tsetskhladze 2012b)? Ikiztepe is the one site in the Central
Black Sea Region to have enjoyed extensive excavation: there were no Early Iron Age
occupation levels here and scant evidence of extensive occupation even in the Middle
Iron Age. However, up to around 650BC,this territory was, it is believed, home to the
(semi-)nomadic Kashka people, hence the lack of evidence of occupation (Bilgi 2001:
40–5; Dönmez 2006).