Households, hierarchies, territories and landscapes in Bronze Age and Iron Age Greece

This chapter investigates how the socio-political meanings and the practical significance of land were entwined in Bronze and Iron Age Greece to shape landscapes and territories by approaching settlement hierarchies from a new perspective. In virtually all ‘Mediterranean’ societies, in all periods, it is households, in dialectic relationships with community, state and other agents, that inhabit, cultivate, exploit and, ultimately, shape a major portion of both rural and ‘urban’ landscapes. The aggregate of household decisions, therefore, plays a key role in the formation of the archaeological landscape record for any specific society or period. Local concepts of household, property and succession varied, along with the socio-political conventions that regulated access to land and labour: households were set in quite different kinds of political systems over the course of the Bronze and Iron Ages. It was the enactment of these local habits in their spatial and political settings that built territories. ‘Territory’, however, was not the monolithic imposition of omnipotent state power penetrating all sectors of a landscape, even in the relatively centralized states of the Aegean Bronze Age. Rather it is more of a spectrum with fuzzy edges, with more or less control over particular places or people.