{"id":229,"date":"2014-06-12T15:46:46","date_gmt":"2014-06-12T19:46:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.westernargolid.org\/pro\/?p=229"},"modified":"2014-06-12T15:46:46","modified_gmt":"2014-06-12T19:46:46","slug":"ignorant-farmers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/?p=229","title":{"rendered":"“Ignorant farmers”"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning, I got all riled up about a comment <\/a>on the blog for\u00a0Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews<\/em> in which an anonymous Briton decried the “ignorant farmers” who, by plowing their own fields (imagine the gall!), have destroyed ancient and Ottoman roads. I know that such things shouldn’t upset me, but they do.<\/p>\n

The comment appeared as a response to Graham Shipley’s\u00a0review of Yannis Pikoulas’ magisterial study of the ancient road network of Laconia<\/a>. Pikoulas’ methodology in this book (as in his past work) is to talk to locals (most\u00a0of whom are, of course, farmers), who then show him sites of interest, especially but not exclusively ancient roads. So these farmers are in fact helping Pikoulas to document and preserve antiquity.<\/p>\n

Our experience in the field has been that local farmers are friendly, generous, and interested. They’ve helped us to locate areas of interest (local toponyms that show up in old archaeological reports but aren’t on the Greek army maps). They seem genuinely curious about, and interested in, what we’re doing. They do plow their fields, not out of ignorance, but because it’s their job to grow and sell agricultural produce. In fact, we’ve often wished that they plowed their fields more often, as it would make it easier to navigate the countryside, map survey units, and to find artifacts!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning, I got all riled up about a comment on the blog for\u00a0Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews in which an anonymous Briton decried the “ignorant farmers” who, by plowing their own fields (imagine the gall!), have destroyed ancient and Ottoman roads. I know that such things shouldn’t upset me, but they do. The comment appeared … More “Ignorant farmers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[3,10],"tags":[29],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-3","category-dimitri-nakassis","tag-farmers"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","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=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}