This chapter addresses the need for clarity of definition and identifies the various fields in which hybridity operated in the Greek world. Recent work in monster theory emphasizes the role of monsters in policing the borders of what is normative. Monsters have repeatedly been interpreted as threats to the order created by classification. Hybrids are better understood not as threats to order, but as expressions of anomaly. As a mode of cultural production hybrids are a means of coping with that which defies neat classification. This may veer towards the monstrous, as in the case of the demonic female figure, the gorgon, but equally it can tend towards the curious and the wondrous, like Pegasos alighting at the Peirene Fountain in Corinth or the horses of Achilles grieving for the death of Patroklos. In trying to understand how and why the Greeks generated hybrids in their mythology it may seem that we are putting the Greeks on the psychiatrist’s couch, but Freud’s conception of the Uncanny sheds some light on how hybrids function. They represent the challenge of the anomalous.

Examination of pottery production has always been of major importance for the understanding of colonial enterprise in the western Mediterranean during the Middle Geometric II period. Neutron Activation Analysis carried out on ceramics dating from this period to the Early Archaic period and exchanged between Pithekoussai, Kyme and the necropolises of the Valle del Sarno now elucidates the origin of some of the earliest Greek pottery used in the Phlegraean area. Analytical studies further demonstrate the complexity of Pithekoussan-Kymean pottery production and the modes of its consumption and diffusion in Campania and beyond. It was possible to ascertain the dominance of local over imported ceramic wares, and the high degree of specialisation achieved by the Phlegraean workshops from a very early phase. This allows us to clarify the dynamics of the contacts between the motherland and the colonial cities, and therefore between the colonies and the Indigenous and Etruscan hinterland.