A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient Mediterranean

Mediterranean Archaeology and Ethnicity 43

This cannot have been a large-scale migration of people who established dominance
over the Cypriotes, as the material culture tells a very different story, one punctuated
by the mixing and “inbetweenness” so characteristic of hybridization practices (similarly,
Leriou 2011). Indeed, as Sherratt (1992: 325) stated: those Aegean peoples who came
to Cyprus:

...were more in the nature of economic and cultural migrants moving from the periphery

to the core, from the Provinces to Versailles...for them acculturation and integration to the

cosmopolitan society of Cyprus...was a desired and desirable process, and there is every

reason to believe from the archaeological record that—assuming they were there at all—this

is what they achieved.

Beyond insisting that this was a comparatively small, low-key migration, we cannot define
or explain it any more clearly. Even if we accept an “Aegean” ethnic background for
the people involved, their identity became as thoroughly altered as the material that
represented it. In time, after negotiations and realignments among all those living on the
island, a new identity emerged, one that had meaning for all Early Iron Age Cypriots.
Some of those people were speakers of Greek, and ultimately their entanglement with
local Cypriotes led to the “pan-Cypriankoinéculture” of the eleventh–tenth centuries
BC(Iacovou 1999b: 150).

Conclusion

In my view, all such meetings and mixings of people and things are better treated in the
trajectory of “third space” (Bhabha 1994: 53–5), one aspect of hybridization practices.
People involved in such practices renegotiate their identities at least in part by revamping
their material culture. Thinking about migration or colonization in terms of hybridiza-
tion practices, rather than the movements of problematic “ethnic” groups, enables us to
understand better the dynamics involved in the collapse of Late Bronze Age cultures in
the eastern Mediterranean, and the emergence of Early Iron Age polities in the region,
in most ways distinctively different from everything that preceded them in both material
and social terms. Establishing viable cases for ethnicity and social identity will continue to
challenge archaeological thinking and interpretation, but as the case of the “Philistines”
discussed briefly here shows, it may well be a challenge worth meeting.

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