Chapman and Forvm MMX

The Chapman Excavations at Cástulo (CEC) project began in 2014, following an invitation from Forvm MMX to collaborate. After an initial discussion about the location and nature of the CEC intervention, excavation began in Area 3 in August 2014, and continued in 2015 and 2016. The goal of CEC’s work is to uncover one or more houses from the pre-Roman (i.e., Iberian) period, and thereby to understand the relationship between local and imported goods in domestic contexts at the site. CEC is led by Prof. Justin St. P. Walsh, RPA (Department of Art, Chapman University), and includes American and Spanish team-members, as well as volunteers from other countries. The CEC project has received generous financial and logistical support from the Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University, the National Geographic Society, the city government of Linares, the provincial government of Jaén, and the Linares Chamber of Commerce.

Background

In 2014, Walsh published Consumerism in the Ancient World: Imports and Identity Construction (Routledge), a study of the distribution of Greek pottery in western Europe between 800 and 300 BCE. The book, whose theoretical basis came from the study of Athenian pottery at Morgantina in Sicily, attempted to understand the reasons why people far from Greece expended resources on the acquisition of imports from Greece. Cástulo formed an important part of this study because of the quantity of Greek pottery found in the tombs by the team from the Complutense University in the 1970’s and the 1980’s. Unfortunately, it was not possible to include non-Greek wares in the study database. But Cástulo offered the perfect opportunity to investigate a site where large amounts of Greek pottery were known to have arrived in antiquity, and, by excavating houses, to make a comparison between the roles of imports and local products in different contexts of Iberian society. For the results of work to-date, please see the page for Area 3.