According to the definition of SFB 1070 ResourceCultures, resources are based on cultural practices and evaluations of social actors. Accordingly, resources are socio-cultural constructs, but they also endow, maintain or change social and cultural relationships, units and identities. In project C 03, this concept of resources is used to investigate the social and cultural identities of two historically important settlement areas on the Italian peninsula in the 1st mill. BC. Chr. Dominant research discourses are thus to be expanded by alternative explanations of material phenomena of settlement and cultural contacts in relation to the formation and change of identities.
The cultural contexts of the regions of the Etruscan cities on the Tyrrhenian Sea and the Greek cities on the Tyrrhenian and Ionian Seas will be examined comparatively. The focus is on identity-forming practices with monuments and objects in ritual or sacred contexts, those central spaces in which valuations of resources were negotiated, but on a lower scale than that of the usual supposedly homogeneous state or ethnic units.
In the first two phases, the focus was on the periods from the 8th to the early 5th cent.BC and then the 5th and 4th cent. BC, which are usually regarded as times of 'colonisation' and 'decolonisation' or also the formation and 'crisis' of Etruscan and Greek identities. In the third phase, the research on ResourceCultures of both regions of the Italian peninsula will be completed with regard to their integration under Roman rule, i.e. with regard to social and political conditions that have once again changed considerably. The two regions of comparison were increasingly understood as political or cultural units (Etruria and Magna Graecia) during this time frame.
In the archaeological project C 03, the cultural, symbolic and memorial dimensions of resources are targeted with contextual analyses of objects, monuments and images in public and sacred spaces. Resources are regarded by the SFB 1070 ResourceCultures as components of networks or bundles of interwoven, interdependent material and immaterial elements. In accordance with the project division C. Valuations, the focus of the investigations from this spectrum is not on raw materials and 'natural' environments, but on contexts of things and monuments that are integrated into cultural or ritual practices and represent orders. Through the perspective of the analytical tools ResourceComplex and ResourceAssemblage, the linking of material and immaterial aspects of the formation and transformation of social and cultural identities can be recognised.
Project C 03 examines ResourceCultures using selected, archaeologically well-documented case studies of resources related to the foundation, preservation and transformation of identities over the entire period from Archaic to Roman times. For this time frame, the project during the previous phases primarily worked with the concept of cultural memory according to Aleida and Jan Assmann, which sees knowledge and the construction of pasts as linked to specific media and social spaces. In the last phase, Ian Hodder's concept of entanglement will also be applied, according to which the interconnectedness of people and things can be understood in terms of enabling dependencies or restricting dependencies. Transferred to resources in the sense of project C 03, this means that objects, such as grave monuments, buried objects or sacred spaces, enable the construction, preservation and transformation of identities, but at the same time, as their resources, they determine structural path dependencies.
During the first two phases, several spedific contexts of sacred spaces in both regions have offered themselves as case studies. In the last phase, these will continue to be the focus for the investigation of continuities and preservation, but also change and transformation in the temporally expanded framework. For the region of the Tyrrhenian Sea, monuments and objects from the necropolises of Pontecagnano in Campania and Cerveteri in Etruria from the 8th cent BC to Roman times will be pursued as media of identity formation or monuments of constricting dependencies. Another case study analyses and summarises the Heroon of Poseidonia in the changing political, social and cultural contexts from the Greek foundation, the 'Lucanised' settlement to Roman Paestum. The aspect of the cross-cultural dissemination of sacred figures and concepts around agricultural resources will finally be explored in this extended framework by means of the images of Dionysus and Demeter and the Demeter sanctuaries of Magna Graecia.
