The Greek expansion in the Adriatic Sea: mobility, insularity and cultural contact in Central Dalmatia during the Classical and Hellenistic periods

Abstract

In the studies on Greek colonization or Greek expansion, the Adriatic Sea appears in bibliography as a zone of peripheral Greek presence, which still receives less attention from scholars to the detriment of other areas, such as Sicily and Southern Italy, mainly because these regions offer more historical and archaeological evidence about the Greeks and their process of expansion. The goal of this research is to bring, for the first time to Brazilian academic circles, the debate on the specificity of the Greek expansion in the Adriatic Sea, focusing on the area of Central Dalmatia (current Croatian coast), where Greek cities were founded between the Classical and Hellenistic times. Over the last twenty years, the archeology of these Greek settlements has revealed a number of new data on its urbanization, the territorialization of the Greeks and the interaction between them and the indigenous Illyrian population. From the most contemporary historiographical approaches to the ancient Mediterranean, such as mobility, insularity and cultural contact, the intention is to analyze these data and try to offer new explanations about the dynamics of the Greek presence in central Dalmatia - how apoikiai and emporia worked, the cultural contact between Greeks and Illyrians and between the Greek "Dalmatian" foundations and those located in other areas of the Adriatic, such as the coast of Italy and Albania. In this research, it will be treated questions such as: 1) the formation of the Greek hinterland and the process of territorialization of the Greeks to the interior in the continent and in the islands; 2) the influence of Greek urban planning in the Illyrian centers and vice versa; and 4-) the characterization of Greek identity in this confine area of the Greek world.