Consumerism in the Ancient World

This book focuses on the Greek pottery consumed by people in the western Mediterranean and trans-Alpine Europe from 800-300 BCE, attempting to understand the distribution of vases, and particularly the reasons why people who were not Greek decided to acquire them. This new approach includes discussion of the ways in which objects take on different meanings in new contexts, the linkages between the consumption of goods and identity construction, and the utility of objects for signaling positive information about their owners to their community. The study includes a database of almost 24,000 artifacts from more than 230 sites in Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, and Germany. The new approaches explored in this book mark a movement away from reliance on fragments of ancient authors’ descriptions of western Europe, remains of monumental buildings, and major artworks in order to investigate ancient Greek social life and more ‘ordinary’ forms of material culture.