ABSTRACT
This chapter uses the concept of assemblage to rethink the role that other-than-human elements––pomegranates––played in the urbanism of the ancient Pamphylian city of Side, a city named after the pomegranate. Growing abundantly in the landscape, appearing on coins, statuary, and architectural reliefs, pomegranates, and their material representations were ubiquitous in the ancient city. As Side is a city named after a thing, Gunderson seeks to uncover how pomegranates’ thingly qualities defined the urban atmosphere. Marshaling insights from New Materialist approaches that highlight the agency of materiality, she traces how the material affects (and effects) of pomegranates combined with histories, memory, divinity, economics, politics, and entertainment to bind and bundle the city together. Gunderson argues that Side was enmeshed in vegetal relations. Pomegranates were not simply passive ornaments symbolizing civic prosperity, but territorializing elements holding the Sidetan civic assemblage together by joining people, places, and objects in a place-specific sociality.
