ABSTRACT
Mimesis forms a central idea in archaeological studies of cultural transformation in the Mediterranean. Explanations for resemblances in material culture from different regions have always been closely tied to the idea of copying and emulation. ˆis concept is often implicitly associated with changes we are able to track in the material record, whether to explain the spread of techniques and ideas, to analyse processes such as ‘Orientalisation’, ‘Hellenisation’, ‘Punicisation’ and ‘Romanisation’, to theorise about the relationship between centre and periphery or to describe the path from barbarism to civilisation. Scholars studying the classical period in particular have traditionally perceived the Mediterranean as the ‘natural’ geographical framework within which to trace the spreading of an ‘original’ model to a wide network of regional replicas. It is not by chance that such histories revolve, usually quite literally, around cities situated in the middle of this sea, namely Athens and Rome. It is indeed likely that the allegedly Graeco-Roman roots of Western civilisation are at least in part to blame for the construction of a ‘Mediterraneanism’ in classical studies quite similar to Said’s ‘Orientalism’ (Herzfeld 1987; de Pina-Cabral 1989; 1992, quoted in Blake and Knapp, 2005: 2; Harris 2005: 2). It is important, however, to point out that the concept of ‘the Mediterranean’ is just as slippery as others usually taken for granted, such as ‘Europe’, whose margins seem to be no easier to define in geographical or ecological terms than those of the Mediterranean. ˆe very fact that the notion of the Mediterranean as a cultural construct makes sense both in Greek and Roman times (when the region was called the oikoumene or mare nostrum) and
in the present (Horden and Purcell 2000: 27-8) turns it into an interesting object of study within a critical and postcolonial analysis that looks beyond currently perceived frontiers between Europe and Africa, Orient and Occident or Islam and Christianity (van Dommelen 1998; 2006; Morris 2005; Vives-Ferrándiz 2006; Jiménez 2008a; see also Blake and Knapp 2005: 3). Comparing ancient and contemporary discourses on the Mediterranean is, moreover, of interest in its own right, because the notion of modern Europe as the principal heir of classical culture sits uneasily in the vast regions of North Africa that were once part of the Roman world.
