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.
History
Citation
Foxhall, L, Households, hierarchies, territories and landscapes in Bronze Age and Iron Age Greece, ed. Knapp, AB;van Dommelen, P, 'The Cambridge Prehistory of the Bronze and Iron Age Mediterranean', Cambridge University Press, 2015, pp. 417-436
Author affiliation
/Organisation/COLLEGE OF ARTS, HUMANITIES AND LAW/School of Archaeology and Ancient History