This book presents a theoretically informed, up-to-date study of interactions between indigenous peoples of Mediterranean France and Etruscan, Greek, and Roman colonists during the first millennium BC. Analyzing archaeological data and ancient texts, Michael Dietler explores these colonial encounters over six centuries, focusing on material culture, urban landscapes, economic practices, and forms of violence. He shows how selective consumption linked native societies and colonists and created transformative relationships for each. Archaeologies of Colonialism also examines the role these ancient encounters played in the formation of modern European identity, colonial ideology, and practices, enumerating the problems for archaeologists attempting to re-examine these past societies.

About the Author

Michael Dietler is Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of Consumption and Colonial Encounters in the Rhone Basin of France.

Reviews

“An important and valuable addition to current studies in postcolonial theory and the colonial phenomenon in the ancient Mediterranean.”
— Archaeological Review

“Recommended.”
— Choice

“Dietler has produced an outstanding work of scholarship that is sophisticated, intelligent, and insightful, and that deserves the close attention of scholars.”
— Journal Of Interdisciplinary History

“Dietler’s book is full of interesting . . . insights woven from a particular anthropologically driven perspective, which the theme of cultural contact invites.”
— American Journal Of Archaeology

“Dazzling. . . . What Dietler offers in this utterly captivating study is an account of a colonial entanglement like nothing you have ever read. . . . By exploring a vastly different kind of colonial experience, Dietler provides the third dimension that is needed to bring colonialism itself into sharp relief.”
— H-France Review Of Books

"An excellent account."
— European Jrnl Of Archaeology

“Substantial and highly informative. . . . A detailed study.”
— Britannia Magazine

"Archaeologies of Colonialism contributes to a new understanding of a very large body of material. Its publication will be welcomed by historians and archaeologists who study ancient Greek and Roman colonialism, Mediterranean trade, and Iron Age Europe."—Peter S. Wells, author of The Battle that Stopped Rome

"Dietler examines colonial encounters and entanglements through a variety of lenses (consumption, violence, space), elegantly deploying the rich archaeology and history of the Western Mediterranean, an antiquity that shaped our very notions of the colonial experience. This is a book as complex and nuanced as the process it explores."—Susan E. Alcock, Brown University

Awards

James R. Wiseman Book Award 2011, Archaeological Institute of America