Regional Markets and Distribution Patterns of Laconian Pottery in Crete and Beyond: The Aeginetan Hypothesis (6th–5th Centuries B.C.)
Résumé
While Crete has been strangely absent from distribution maps of Laconian pottery in the Mediterranean, the renewal of archaeological evidence on the island appears to show that it played a pivotal role in the organization of Laconian exchanges as part of a larger regional market that extended from the Peloponnese to Cyrenaica but was also connected to Egypt and the West via Kythera. The aim of this chapter will be to propose an overview of the underlying distribution networks, their actors, and their successive reorganizations. Beyond the use of the concepts of networks and connectivity, the chapter emphasizes the value of the regional market scale, the still-useful Braudelian long-term perspective, and the need for a careful consideration of physical parameters and human savoir-faire in mercantile interactions. In the end, the goals will be, first, to put Crete on the distribution map of Laconian pottery and, second, to propose a new vision of a Spartan Mediterranean, connecting regional markets at different geographical scales and drawn extensively from archaeological data.