The culture of connectivity on archaic and classical Rhodes

This thesis assesses the role of maritime connectivity in shaping the material culture of Rhodes during the Archaic and Classical periods. It brings together and evaluates archaeological material from the settlement of Kamiros, now kept in the British Museum and Rhodes Archaeological Museum, offering the first comprehensive study of Rhodian material culture in the context of the island’s maritime network, which stretched throughout the Aegean and beyond. In doing so, the finds from the pioneering nineteenth-century excavations of Alfred Biliotti and Auguste Salzmann at Kamiros are sorted into their original find-spots using archive documentation. These finds have not previously been studied in their archaeological contexts, comprising of over 300 grave assemblages and two votive deposits. Focusing on small votives, pottery, and terracottas produced on the island, this thesis argues that Rhodes developed a material culture in which consumer choice proliferated, storage became a conspicuous practice, and division in consumption patterns came into being across territorially defined units known as ktoinai. This material culture, which was part of a wider shared material culture of an insular arc running through the eastern Aegean, witnessed four developments that were encouraged by Rhodes’ maritime connections: the innovation of locally made votives, the agglomeration of pottery workshops, the tradition of paired grave goods, and the distinction of female grave assemblages at Kamiros. The cumulative effect of the island’s maritime network during the Archaic and Classical periods was to stimulate, sustain, and constrain local production, on the one hand, and to accentuate local consumption patterns, on the other. These maritime connections also contributed to the eventual decision to temper island division and progress new political structures through the synoisicm of Rhodes in 408 BC