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When traders peddling Etruscan goods first anchored their small ships along the shores of southern France in the late seventh century B.C.E., they encountered a diverse and dynamic world of indigenous peoples whose languages and customs they did not understand. A few decades later, colonists from a Phocaean homeland at the other end of the Mediterranean claimed a space on the north shore of a small harbor on the rugged Provençal coast and began to build homes within the tiny and precarious new settlement of Massalia. Over time, various forms of economic, social, and political entanglements and transformations of culture, consciousness, and identity far exceeded anything imagined at the beginning. Recent archaeological data indicate that Mediterranean France had been undergoing a gradual process of differentiation in microregional material culture patterns since the Late Bronze Age. One other obvious question raised by the tale of the foundation of Massalia is the degree of intermarriage between Massalians and local peoples, or of other forms of gender relations between colonists and native peoples.

Food is a domain of social life that presents what should be an obvious target for investigation in seeking to understand the operation of colonialism. It is not simply a convenient index of change in colonial situations; it is an agent of change as well. And the changes produced are not confined to the semiotics of consumption: they have had a major impact on the political economy of all the societies engaged in these encounters, creating a web of profound entanglements. In ancient Mediterranean France, the possibilities for major transfers of basic food ingredients were limited. That is because well before the colonial encounter the basic global repertoires of cereal crops and domestic animals were already quite similar for indigenous societies and Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans. This chapter explores culinary encounters in Mediterranean France. First, it discusses cross-cultural consumption and the indigenization of exotic foods. It then considers the social aspects of alcohol, focusing on wine, entanglement, and the colonial political economy. Finally, it looks at other foods and foodways, cooking techniques, and dining practices in ancient Mediterranean France.

What was the nature of the encounter between seaborne intruders from distant Mediterranean city-states and the indigenous peoples of western Europe, and how did it affect the historical transformation of these societies? The answer to this question lies at the heart of conceptions of modern European identity, contemporary colonial discourse, and scholarly debates about Euro-American colonialism. This book addresses this ancient question from a new perspective. It demonstrates the curious historical process by which modern consciousness has been “colonized” by the ancient Greeks and Romans and how that colonized perspective has come to color the way archaeologists now understand ancient colonial encounters, including especially that seminal encounter represented by the tale of Gyptis. It argues that the formation of archaeology as a professional practice was a product of the broader colonization of European consciousness that it discusses there—archaeology was born already colonized, as it were. This book explains in detail why the ancient colonial encounter in the western Mediterranean, and Mediterranean France in particular, has come to play a pivotal role in modern European culture and colonial discourse.

In territorial empires (such as the Roman expansion into the western Mediterranean), organized violence is fundamental to the process of colonization and the attempt to establish sovereignty. Both archaeological and textual evidence combine to indicate that the history of the colonial encounter in Mediterranean France was marked by several kinds of interlinked violence: both periodic episodes of conflict between colonists and natives and a gradual increase in violence or insecurity within native societies beyond the zone of immediate contact. Moreover, this regional history of violence took place within the broader context of Mediterranean geopolitics that involved military conflicts on land and sea between shifting coalitions of various city-states, the gradual emergence of two imperialistic powers (Punic and Roman) vying for dominance on multiple fronts, and the eventual Roman conquest of the entire Mediterranean periphery. Archaeological evidence of violent destruction of settlements comes in the form of levels indicating widespread fire and demolition of buildings and fortifications. Gauls had a stereotypic image as fierce warriors who were willing to fight as mercenaries on any side.

The colonial encounter unfolded within an evolving set of interrelated material and conceptual spaces that both organized the flow of interactions and were reconfigured by the colonial experience. This chapter examines two dimensions of that set of spaces—landscapes of daily life and ritual—and asks what these features can tell us about the nature and consequences of the encounter. In both Greek and indigenous societies, most sites of funerary ritual (aside from infant burials) were located outside urban contexts. On the other hand, the location of other kinds of ritual places, or at least the architectonic marking of such places, offers an interesting contrast between Greeks and indigenous peoples. Greek settlements were generally centered on monumental buildings dedicated to religious ritual, while indigenous settlements generally had no monumental public buildings within the city walls. This chapter explores urban landscape in Mediterranean France, innovations during the colonial period, and transformations in urban landscapes or urbanism.

Trade, interspersed with episodes of violence, was the principal form of interaction between indigenous peoples of the Mediterranean region and Etruscans and Greeks. But even after the Roman military intrusion into the region in the late second century B.C.E., trade continued to be a major element of colonial relations and a significant factor in the history of the colonial situation. Cross-cultural trade in Mediterranean France remained for centuries almost entirely in the form of barter. Coinage, although employed for various purposes within Greek settlements, was little used in indigenous contexts until the first century B.C.E., and there were few low value coins in circulation before that period that could have served the needs of small-scale exchanges. This chapter examines the nature of trade and traders in Mediterranean France. It discusses shipwrecks and the nature of maritime trade and traders, trade enclaves and diasporas, the role of settlements located along rivers in several parallel valleys leading inland from the coast of the lower Rhône basin in trade networks as either native emporia or colonial trading posts, and piracy and trade.

People use alien contacts and goods for their own strategic political agendas and they give new meanings to borrowed cultural elements. Foreign objects are of interest not for what they represent in the society of origin but for their perceived use and meaning in the context of consumption. Hence, the colonial encounter must be very locally contextualized in the intersection of the different social and cultural logics of interaction of the specific parties involved. This is the level at which agency is potentially discernible in the archaeological analysis of colonialism, and at which its operation is historically crucial. This chapter explores why indigenous peoples of Iron Age Mediterranean France, especially in the early phases of the encounter, would have had any interest at all in Etruscan and Massalian goods or practices. To what social conditions and opportunities and to what cultural values and dispositions was the consumption of alien goods a response? This chapter first discusses the interrelationships among consumption, material culture, and colonialism. It then looks at the logic of demand, indifference, and rejection.

As late as the end of the second century B.C.E., 500 years after the foundation of the Greek colony, the inhabitants of Entremont were cooking their meals in pots that had changed little since the Bronze Age, were affixing human skulls to the walls of a sanctuary in a practice that Greeks found repugnant, and were engaged in a violent struggle with Massalia that threatened its very existence. Yet this is not a story of the parallel persistence of two static cultures through the ages. The evidence shows that centuries of colonial encounter had entangled colonists and natives in complex relationships that had far reaching unintended cultural, social, economic, and political consequences for both. The goal of the book is to apprehend the complex processes of entanglement and transformation that transpired in ancient Mediterranean France. The book is designed to reveal and comprehend agents and agency, the martial and the material, the contradictions and contingencies, the social and cultural logic of desire and indifference, and the entangling consequences of consumption—in brief, the messy multifaceted workings of colonialism.