Locating the Middle Ground: Culture Contact in the Ancient North Pontic

Abstract

The North Pontic, consisting largely of the lands internationally recognized as the sovereign territory of the Ukrainian people, was in antiquity home to a diversity of lifestyles and peoples who were attracted to the region by the unique qualities of the Pontic Steppe, which fostered the flourishing of nomadic pastoralism and sedentary agriculturalism alike. In the Archaic period, Greek colonists began to found settlements along the coastline, bringing them into contact with various groups of Iranic peoples, of which the Scythians are the most familiar. Greek literacy vividly preserved their memory, albeit clouded by the biases of the outside observers, and archaeological fieldwork has unearthed great treasures of Greco-Scythian contact. This thesis applies Richard White’s model of the middle ground to this contact situation between Greek colonists and the indigenous populations of the North Pontic from the Archaic to the early Hellenistic period. In drawing explicit connections to White’s original case study, I argue that a middle ground existed in the ancient North Pontic and that White’s model is an insightful heuristic for understanding cross-cultural phenomena that are otherwise not fully captured by other models of culture contact that emphasize the transformation of identity. This argument is supported by archaeological and textual evidence that reflects a system of cultural exchange that was consistent with the criteria established by White, included the presence of an infrastructure that institutionalized this interaction, and yielded new meanings and practices that were the result of each culture behaving in ways that were traditionally uncharacteristic of their own societies in order to further their own aims by gaining the cooperation of the other.