A critical evaluation of the appropriateness of traditional ‘Hellenization’ and recently popular ‘world-systems’ interpretive perspectives on the colonial encounter in Iron Age western Europe is offered. These approaches are shown to have some common flaws stemming from shared implicit premises resulting from a profoundly embedded cultural legacy of hegemonic Helleno-centrism that permeates interpretive discourse. This legacy is a result of the construction during the Renaissance of a European identity with ancestral roots in ancient Greece and Rome and the consequent importance of these classical cultures to the definition of ‘cultural capital’ in modem Euro-American society. Additionally, world-systems models have problematic tendencies toward mechanistic structural overdetermination and reductionism. An alternative interpretive strategy, grounded in the anthropology of consumption and the historical anthropology of colonialism, is applied to the initial phase of the colonial encounter during the Early Iron Age. This brief example illustrates the necessity and possibility of restoring a consideration of local agency and culture to the archaeological analysis of colonial situations and of developing a more subtle means of understanding the relationship between local practice and global structures and processes.