Set in Stone? Exploring Multiple Dimensions of Petrification in Ancient Greek Cities

Abstract

This paper introduces the concept of ‘urban petrification’ in order to assess the peculiar trajectories of early Greek urbanism. It first explores the multiple dimensions of urban space, contrasting different sets of sources and their respective interpretive potential. In a second step, the case study of Metapontum in Magna Graecia (South Italy) is used to illustrate the complex ways in which urban petrification impacted on the creation, usage, perception, and transformation of public and sacred space in Greek cities. Discontinuities and interactions between ‘petrified’ urban fabric, space, and normative discourses can thus be linked to human agency and social tensions. Ultimately, it is argued that petrification, far from being a merely static or fossilizing phenomenon, should be conceived as a major factor in the creation of vibrant urban communities, located at the interface between temporal flow and structural inertia. On a conceptual level, it does not only provide a flexible framework for multi-scalar interpretation, but it also gives us the possibility to move beyond the old bias of Athenocentrism and understand the monumentalization of cities in the Greek world as part of specific urban biographies with their own chronological trajectories and peculiar local histories.