The Archaeology of Ptolemaic Garrison Supply in the Early Hellenistic Aegean

This dissertation explores the economic resources and mechanisms that supplied Ptolemaic garrisons in the Aegean with ceramic goods and foodstuffs in the early Hellenistic period (c. 323-220 BCE). Using evidence for ceramic consumption and depositional behaviors, I identify the material culture and its provenance at eight Ptolemaic garrisons in mainland Greece and the Aegean. The analysis begins with a contextual study of the material from Koroni in east Attica, occupied during the Chremonidean War (267-262 BCE). Comparisons with other contemporary and early- to mid-Hellenistic Ptolemaic garrisons (c. 323-145 BCE) illustrate patterns with socioeconomic implications. The use of the local ceramic assemblage indicates that shared practices linked garrison and civilian communities. Although Koroni has some important exceptions, fine, cooking, and coarse wares at Ptolemaic short-term wartime stations and long-term installations were sourced locally or along established trade routes. Certain wartime conditions, however, facilitated new trade networks to supply an increased military population. I refine and supplement prior interpretations of the transport amphoras associated with the Ptolemaic military during the Chremonidean War, disputing a previously believed connection to Thasos and instead highlighting the amphora types from the Dodecanese and Central Italy. The security of the Ptolemaic maritime empire allowed their military to acquire resources from burgeoning agricultural and shipping industries from these regions of the Mediterranean. The remainder of the study interrogates the ways in which war and social power in the early Hellenistic Mediterranean enabled economic change. I examine harbor infrastructure, landscape modifications, and shipwrecks in the regions that supplied the Chremonidean War garrisons—the southeast Aegean, central Italy, and the Euboean Gulf. Local initiatives in agricultural production and export infrastructure processed the products and prepared them for shipping, but Ptolemaic military investment secured the routes that enabled these goods to reach the Chremonidean War zone. Socioeconomic links among elite communities created trade connections between military and mercantile systems in and around the Mediterranean. This type of collaboration at the local, regional, and imperial scale, enacted to support wartime conditions, foreshadows the economic infrastructure that became integral to the movement of goods in the late Hellenistic and Roman periods.