Bestattungssitten zwischen Tradition und Modifikation

This study focuses on cultural exchange and aspects of acculturation, which go back to the Greek settlement in Lower Italy and Sicily and result from the coexistence of the Italic and Sicilian population and the Greek settlers. The development of tomb types, funerary goods and funeral rites is used to study diverse influences such as the relations between the colony and the motherland, among the colonies themselves as well as between the colonies and their surrroundings and the people living nearby. The study uses three case studies – the Euboean settlements Pithecoussai and Kyme in Campania, the Achaean colony Metapontion and the Spartan city of Taras in Lower Italy, and the Rhodian-Cretan colonies Gela and Akragas in Sicily. There is no homogeneous process which is the same in all colonies, but specific local developments which result from the different activities of cultural groups in the area, the structure of the Greek colonists' society, the location and development of the colony and the natural environment. In all three of the areas studied, the Greek influence is visible in the indigenous funeral culture; however, no simple adoption of Greek customs can be observed. The "idea", the particular ritual or tomb type and the need to use it, and also to utilise it for the visualisation of different social groups, goes back to the direct contact caused by the foundation of colonies. The respective manifestation and form are then developed in the cultural framework of the indigenous people. The dissertation is published as the second volume in the newly established series "Italiká", which focuses entirely on the archaeology of pre-Roman Italy with all the research areas connected with it, and thereby responds to a current and constantly growing research interest. "Italiká" will comprise monographies and thematically unified collections from all areas of classical studies broadly dealing with sources, features and findings on the population of the territory of modern Italy in pre-Roman times, and which offer methodically and theoretically innovative approaches that illuminate exemplarily the panoply of a complex world of cultural contact.