A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

Ethnicity and Language in the Ancient Mediterranean 21

In an overall scheme for comprehending the collective identity of populations in pre-

history and antiquity, the following elementary parameters can be distinguished:

(a) Descent

Genomic profiles may offer the opportunity of specifying those anthropological

features as markers of ethnicity by which local populations distinguish themselves

(although this remains controversial and runs the risk of creating a new reduction-

ism, according to which researchers might produce the very communities they seek

to identify genetically; see Reardon 2001: 378)

(b) Constituents of human ecology
(i) The relationship of natural environment and cultural space (“landscape”)
(ii) Types and styles of dwellings
(iii) Layout of settlements
(iv) Architecture
(v) Technologies (e.g., tool industry, pottery, weaving, metalworking, construction
work, etc.)
(vi) Trading networks (i.e., local versus long-distance trade relations, raw material
versus manufactured goods)
(vii) Imagery (i.e., genres of representational art: rock carving or painting, mobile
art, ornaments, and decorative motifs)
(c) Sociocultural markers of ethnicity
(i) Kinship (i.e., nuclear family, extended family, lineages)
(ii) Behavioral constituents (i.e., customs and traditions: dress, organization of daily
life, etc.)
(iii) Formal activities sustaining community life (i.e., chanting, dancing, rites of pas-
sage, etc.)
(iv) Enculturation (i.e., socialization of the young generation under the auspices of
specific cultural traditions)
(v) Instructive activities (i.e., division of labor, professional training and specializa-
tion, etc.)

(d) Communication systems
(i) Visual communication (i.e., body painting or tattooing, emblemic and heraldic
systems, notational systems for measuring time, space, and weight)
(ii) Language (i.e., constructing culture by wording human ecology)
(iii) Ethnonym (i.e., origin and structure of the peer group’s name)
(iv) Knowledge construction (i.e., accumulating, sharing, and applying knowledge
for enhancing the sustainability of the community)
(v) Language-related visual communication (i.e., writing technology)
(e) Interaction and social behavior
(i) Interactional strategies (i.e., behavioral conventions in social contact, in-group
and out-group interaction, customs of interethnic contacts)
(ii) Language-related behavior (i.e., ethnic styles in discourse, oral tradition: chant-
ing, myths, storytelling, etc.)