{"id":1025,"date":"2019-08-28T14:53:43","date_gmt":"2019-08-28T18:53:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.westernargolid.org\/pro\/?p=1025"},"modified":"2019-08-28T14:53:43","modified_gmt":"2019-08-28T18:53:43","slug":"chelmis-and-historical-archaeology-in-greece","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/?p=1025","title":{"rendered":"Chelmis and Historical Archaeology in Greece"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

[Ed.: this was originally published on Bill’s blog<\/a><\/em>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This fall, we received some really helpful reviews on an article that we submitted to the Journal of Field Archaeology<\/em> on our work documenting the Modern site of Chelmis in the Western Argolid. Among the comments was the suggestion that we develop the relationship between our work and historical archaeology more fully. Fortunately, I\u2019ve been reading a good bit of historical archaeology over the past couple of years mostly for a project on the archaeology of the contemporary world. Below is my first effort to locate our work at Chelmis in this context. It\u2019s rough, but very fun to write.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

First, historical archaeology has emphasized the impact of capitalism on our material environment. In fact, capitalism is one of Charles Orser\u2019s famous \u201chaunts\u201d of historical archaeology along with colonialism, Eurocentrism, and modernity. While the\u00a0archaeology of the modern Greek landscape remains in its infancy, there is a clear interest in how capitalism in both the recent past and in the 19th century shaped land use and settlement. [I blogged a bit on some related work yesterday<\/a>, but one should include here\u00a0Mark Groover\u2019s survey of the archaeology of North American Farmsteads<\/a> as well as\u00a0his important work at the Gibbs farmstead<\/a>\u00a0as representative of the interest in capitalism.]\u00a0\u00a0The famous \u201cContingent Countryside\u201d of the Southern Argolid<\/a>\u00a0embodied the changing strategies of Greek communities as they adapted to\u00a0the demands of\u00a0regional and transregional\u00a0markets.\u00a0A. Vionis work in Boeotia<\/a>\u00a0has likewise recognized cycles of economic boom and bust in the Ottoman countryside that along with various political\u00a0and environmental\u00a0factors\u00a0shaped the countryside in the 18th and 19th century.\u00a0Changes in the furnishing of Greek houses, for example, paralleled the rise of Western bourgeois sensibilities that demonstrated both access to a wide range of middle class goods,\u00a0capital to purchase these objects, and leisure time to enjoy small luxuries (Vionis 2012<\/a>, 335-336).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The appearance\u00a0of\u00a0mass produced\u00a0goods in Chelmis, like milled nails and tools, aluminum pots and pans, and plastics,\u00a0demonstrates\u00a0this community\u2019s\u00a0changing relationship to markets,\u00a0to the networks that supplied manufactured goods to the Greek countryside, and to rural practices. The relatively small assemblage of household goods, particularly ceramics, suggests that the buildings at Chelmis were primarily used for seasonal\u00a0habitation prior to the appearance of mass produced goods at scale across the Greek countryside. A similar trend occurs throughout Western Europe and North America where the assemblages associated with the rural buildings change significantly in response to market penetration in the countryside.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The study of settlement in the\u00a0Greek countryside also represents an interest in the archaeology of\u00a0rural settlement and the countryside that emerged in the UK and, to a lesser extent, in\u00a0Western Europe. These studies are not necessarily separate from the longstanding interest in\u00a0capital, but have tended to focus particularly on the role of modernity in shaping the use of the activity\u00a0countryside.\u00a0Chris Dalglish\u2019s book<\/a>, for example, focused on changes in rural life in Scotland brought about by various rural\u00a0\u201cimprovement<\/a>\u201d programs of the 18th and 19th century.\u00a0Charles Orser, on of the grand old dudes of historical archaeology,\u00a0studied three Irish rural houses<\/a>\u00a0from the the same period and considered the changes to the rural landscape as part of the larger process of rationalizing the landscape. In fact, much of the work on the British landscape, as\u00a0Matthew Johnson has unpacked<\/a>,\u00a0seeks to capture the relationship between the modern and premodern world in the countryside and understand not only the world that was lost but also the processes of change.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While the settlement at Chelmis is almost certainly later than many of the rural landscapes that underwent improvement, rationalization, and modernization in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain, it nevertheless, was also shaped by efforts of the Greek state to transform the landscape. The development of settlements like Chelmis\u00a0on\u00a0land between the steeply terraced fields of the mountain villages and the fertile field of the Argive plain reflected efforts by the Greek government to encourage private ownership of formerly state lands.\u00a0Transhumant pastoralists often\u00a0developed these lands which were near their winter pastures and allowed themselves greater economy and social\u00a0flexibility\u00a0by creating relationships with villages on the plain.\u00a0The end of seasonal use of the settlement\u00a0reflects several trends and policies as well. The\u00a0decline of transhumant pastoralism in Greece, for example, which\u00a0scholars have documented over the last 40 years<\/a>\u00a0reflects changing attitudes toward\u00a0the movement of flocks through fields and toward the place of pastoralists in the economic and environmental\u00a0life of the countryside. Mechanized agriculture has also changed the Greek rural landscape. It\u2019s made\u00a0temporary rural\u00a0housing largely\u00a0unnecessary and made it increasingly convenient for farmers to live\u00a0full time\u00a0in\u00a0villages\u00a0that also provided\u00a0state and private\u00a0amenities ranging from banks, to post offices, grocery stores,\u00a0cafes, schools\u00a0and government offices. Finally, urbanization and the inexorable draw of regional urban centers, like Argos and Nafplion, as well as Athens drew population from the countryside and away from rural life ways.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These processes are not unique to Greece but the material evidence for these changing practices and relationships in the Greek countryside remains underrepresented in archaeological literature and rarely articulated in the context of either the broader fields of European (and particularly British) landscape and rural archaeology or (largely North American) landscape archaeology. Instead, there\u2019s a particular strand of landscape archaeology in Greece which tend to look to Classical antiquity as its point of reference and contact, and this tends to imply a kind of continuity in the Greek countryside. At the same time, Greek scholars have a long standing interest in folkways, vernacular architecture, and historical studies of the countryside that often serves the development of national narratives. Our work at Chelmis is situated at the intersection of these analytical paradigms and also looks to historical and landscape archaeology to complicate our perspectives on the modern countryside. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Ed.: this was originally published on Bill’s blog] This fall, we received some really helpful reviews on an article that we submitted to the Journal of Field Archaeology on our work documenting the Modern site of Chelmis in the Western Argolid. Among the comments was the suggestion that we develop the relationship between our work … More Chelmis and Historical Archaeology in Greece<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1026,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[149,9],"tags":[154],"class_list":["post-1025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-149","category-bill-caraher","tag-modern-greece"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/08\/chelmis.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}