Consumption and Colonial Encounters in the Rhône Basin of France. A Study of Early Iron Age Political Economy, (MAM 21), 2006, 257 p. - Monographie d'Archéologie Méditerranéenne - MAM

This volume examines the colonial encounter between indigenous peoples of the lower Rhône basin of France and alien intruders (Etruscan and Greek) from city-states of the Central and Eastern Mediterranean that occured during the Early Iron Age (late 7th to mid-5th centuries BC). The book forges an explicitly anthropological approach to this colonial situation, with a theorical framework constructed through engagement with the comparative historical anthropology of colonialism and the anthropology of consumption. This initial stages of the encounter are targeted for analysis in order to understand the social and cultural logic of interactions that gradually entangled indigenous and exogenous societies in broader colonial economic and political relations. The book focuses particularly on the examination of cross-cultural consumption as a way of explaining the significance of a highly selective pattern of indigenous demand (centered on wine and drinking paraphernalia) and the unintended consequences of the consumption of alien goods. The work offers a broad synthetis of archaeological data exploring the relationship between cross-cultural consumption and transformations of indigenous settlement patterns and funerary practices throughout the Provence and Eastern Languedoc, and it provides a comparative analysis of contemporary developments in the Hallstatt domain further north. It concludes that, contrary to earlier models based on the concept of « Hellenization », the cultural influence of Greek, and Etruscan colonists was extremely limited in the region during the Early Iron Age. Instead, alien objects were consumed selectively according to patterns of demand stemming from local social relations and practices and local cultural perceptions and dispositions. Nevertheless, such consumption had complex unintended consequences for all the parties involved.