It\'s all Greek to me (Makedonians included) ...

[Macedon]

That's one way to use it, and it' called culture-historical paradigm and it was and it is widely criticized (true, not so much in classical studies, but that's another discussion). Archaeology however can show how material culture is manipulated to create and maintain social, cultural and political (and sometimes also ethnic) identities, regardless if we have a historical reference which we can associate to it or not. And archaeology, to be sure, rather conflicts with many Greek myths of origins.

Not where literary evidence is plenty. We rely on archeology to draw conclusions regarding issues we have little literary evidence about but Greek history (as well as Roman for example) is not one of them. There is no way to know what has happened during the 2nd Punic War for example if we only rely on the non-literary archaeological evidence. Regarding the Macedonian issue, we have thousands of archaeological relics with inscriptions that help us evaluate the writings of a Thucydides, a Herodot or a Diodorus. You cannot possibly suggest that we should not rely on works written in the ancient times about a people and not base our conclusions on them. Most of the names we have regarding any barbarian ethnos for example we owe solely to literary evidence. Most things we know about these people's religions and customs we know from these too. Archeology helps us understand details, sometimes with excitement we see things about which we have read, but there would be little we could do to interpret a lost civilization's culture from what we find on the field. In these instances theories are abundant.

Of course this does not mean that we should not be critical of sources, but outright disbelief is not the same.

For instance, from Catherine Morgan's Early Greek States beyond the Polis (Routledge 2003 - a great book about Early Iron Age Central Greece and Northern Peloponnese, mostly from an archaeological perspective), page 188:

• The notion that ethne were born of the great tribal migrations of the post-Mycenaean era does a deep disservice not only to our understanding of how and why Greeks conceptualized their own group identities in terms of the past, but also to our contemporary archaeological reconstructions of these regions. It is hard to see how it can be acceptable to consider the Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age transition in Thessaly in terms of the Thessalian migration and expulsion of the Boiotians to Boiotia (Thucydides 1.12), while the archeology of the Dorians has been discarded as a flawed modern construct.

Opinions vary. Anyways, this again has nothing to do with my position nor with how we define or how the Greeks defined ethnicity. I have a feeling that you try to disprove any notion about ethnicity as an impossibility of a perfectly pure DNA. No one doubts that peoples of different "ethnoi" shared DNA. I myself have talked about the importance of barbarian DNA among prominent Athenians and about the assimilation processes that make a Pierian or a Bottiaian a Macedonian. But this does not negate the existence of a Macedonian, an Athenian, a Spartan people, whose ethnicity is determined by other factors by themselves, by their contemporaries or by us. Pericles was an Athenian no matter if he had barbarian blood in him and thus also a Hellen. The same applies to all those Macedonians whose grand grandparents were Thracians, Cretans, Athenians or anything else. Yet, assimilating surviving foreign population is not the same as refusing any type of migration or expelling of populations, especially when we are talking about very small areas, such as Pieria for example. The Indians in the Americas were expelled, countless other paradigms exist. This of course does not mean that there are no Caucasians with Indian blood, but the process with which the white man prevailed was not a bloodless one, nor did they usually tolerate the natives, letting them live in harmony among them.

Anyways... on page 10, C.M. also writes : Working from this basis, I shall therefore treat ethnicity as, to quote Orlando Patterson, "that condition wherein certain members of a society, in a given social context, choose to emphasize as their most meaningful basis of primary, extrafamiliar identity certain assumed cultural, national or somatic traits." She surely does not doubt the importance of "ethnicities" nor their existence.

I have to disagree, few centuries with no written record is simply too much and the real history becomes myth. What about the Iliad?

The conflicting myths of Macedonian origin (Makedon is either son of Aiolos or son of Zeus, and starting with 5th century or so we have their Dorian pedigree) are evidence for at best an ambiguous, at worst a made up tradition of their origins. Even the fact that most Greek tribes and cities drew their origins from an eponymous ancestor suggests a fashionable way to construct and present their regional (possibly also ethnic) identity.

So, with these words you are actually trying to disprove anything we know about history. And who says that whatever material we have is objectively written or not just lies? Of course this is your right, but you should not expect that such an argument will really disprove what we know about ancient Greece, do you? You are calling everything a myth. Do not forget that what we know is only a fragment of the literary works available to those people you doubt so much. It is one thing to talk about myths (what the ancients considered myths) and another to talk about what they considered history. The genealogy of Macedon is a myth as is the genealogy of any Homeric hero, god or demigod. This is why we did not discuss the origins of the Macedonians according to what was considered myth. On the other hand, the Temenid migration was not considered myth, even if certain details can be mythical. Of course, myths show how certain issues were viewed upon by the people of the time and are valuable to us in order to understand what the Macedonians were (or the Magnetes or anyone) and how they were perceived, so their contribution should not be underestimated. You see, it does not matter if someone someplace made up a myth about the Macedonians being Greeks, what matters is that these myths were accepted and clearly show us what the Greek community of the time of Hesiod for example believed to be the truth. So, even if we cannot say that what we know about myths is history (it is not), we can draw conclusions about things as were at the time they were considered a truth. We do not care about what the Macedonians were in the 14th century BC. Maybe they existed, maybe not, maybe they were known by another name, maybe they were building pyramids, maybe they belonged to five different tribes speaking twelve different languages. We are talking about the Macedonians in Macedonia and especially in the 5th century BC and later. In the 14th century BC, there were no Hellenes too... so what?

We respect ancient writers when they write about things within their reach. But the early history of Macedonians is obscured by myth, much as the early history of most other Greek tribes (or should I say "tribes").

So, now you are doubting the Greekness of all Greek tribes? Again you are entitled to your opinion, but saying that we should not take into account the literary works of the ancients in order for us to draw educated conclusions is strange. This is the evidence we have, so we have to work with what we have unless you have access to knowledge (literary or archaeological) we haven't.

Opposite to what? To Macedonian lineage directly from Zeus himself? From Aiolos? Or to their alleged origin from Argos? And even if we'd have only one story, would we rather believe the origin from a god or a hero, instead of anthropological and linguistic insights about the prehistoric societies?

Who said that we believe in the story of Deucalion or that Heracles killed monsters and Theseus a monster called minotaur? Again you are mixing myth and history (what they considered myth and history). Mythical accounts have many versions, historical accounts may have variations but we can compare them and reach conclusions. It does not really matter if the Temenid story is fully real or has fragments of truth. What matters, and what I meant, is that it was never disputed, not even by Demosthenes. The Macedonians claimed it was true, all other Greeks accepted it as true, non Macedonians recorded or manufactured it sometime in the far past. So? It surely gives us a good understanding of the position of the Macedonians in the Greek world at the time.[/quote]

What archaeological evidence?

Anticipating one of the possible answers, a "Greek" vase proves its owner spoke Greek, as much as today we become Cantonese speakers when we use woks, or Berber speakers when we use tajines.

Beginning with the implications of such a bold approach (so, maybe the Romans spoke Cantonese and the Greeks Zulu or maybe all Greek artifacts were imported from the Easter Island), I have to remind you that we are not talking about a Greek vase here... Are you really proposing that archeology is useless? Are you proposing that there is only a handful of archaeological evidence? I really do not wish to expand on this... this whole position sounds peculiar to say the least.

For all I care the Pieirans are the inhabitants of Pieira, regardless if they felt they were part of the same community or not. I'm not into the "tribes from gods/time immemorial" essentialist views.
I'm not sure what 'Macedonian nobility' is supposed to mean (king's philoi?), but what makes sense for me is that Macedonia was a territory settled by Greek speakers in time and not coming in one epic migration ("whole people"). Probably these Greek speakers had the upper social positions, so all non-Greeks were eventually assimilated.

So? Were the Athenians in Attica from times immemorial? Were the Lacedaemonians not invaders but locals or tourists? What if some thousand Makednoi fought against the "Pierians", butchered them, expelled them, enslaved some, raped more and essentially took over the plains? These were the Macedonians. If they were Greeks they were Greeks and they remained so, but thinking that the human species is not capable of atrocities and violence is again strange... What if those who survived and chose or were forced to remain became Macedonians in one,two or more generations? Does this mean that the Macedonians stopped being Macedonians when they decided to keep among them people who did not descend the mountains with them or that they lost their Greekness in the process? Do you really suggest that everything we know about any tribe in history is a lie and that in reality people freely entered any tribe they chose any time? Do you suggest that all peoples are in reality autochthonous tribes changing names propagating lies about wars and conquests? I guess that Greek colonies could be explained as local tribes importing too many Greek vases? Do you really suggest that the conquering Macedonians were just a handful knights among a disproportionally large peasant population of conquered laymen?