Landscape Archaeology and the Medieval Countryside in Greece

Effie Athanassopoulos of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln examines how regional survey has reshaped the study of the medieval and post-medieval countryside in Greece and the Aegean, with a case study from the Nemea Valley in the Peloponnese.

She begins by tracing the growth of Mediterranean surface survey from the 1950s South Etruria project and the Minnesota Messenia Expedition to the intensive surveys of the 1980s and 1990s in Boeotia, the Argolid, Laconia and the islands. These projects shifted attention from major Byzantine monuments to rural settlements and off-site pottery scatters, raising questions about dispersed versus nucleated settlement and ceramic visibility. Athanassopoulos notes how glazed tablewares shifted from centralized Constantinopolitan white wares in the 9th to 11th centuries to urban and rural workshops in the 12th and 13th centuries, evidenced by kiln rods and stacking devices from Thessaloniki, Chalkidiki and Nemea.

Turning to the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project and the University of California, Berkeley excavations at the Sanctuary of Zeus, she presents the 12th- and 13th-century revival of the valley: a rural kiln site (Site 510), large village scatters (Site 600), farming plots around the temple, and refuse pits in the stadium and over the Early Christian basilica filled with sgraffito, amphorae, flasks, cooking pots, pithoi and a terracotta wine siphon. She relates this growth to large estates and Italian trade before and after 1204. In the late 13th to 15th centuries, open villages gave way to fortified hilltop settlements (castra) such as Polyphengi. She closes by comparing the sparse archaeological trace of the Ottoman period in Corinthia with Ottoman tax registers in Boeotia, Pylos and Nemea, before discussing late 13th-century pottery and settlement shifts with Athanasios Vionis.