{"id":867,"date":"2018-01-15T17:57:45","date_gmt":"2018-01-15T21:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.westernargolid.org\/pro\/?p=867"},"modified":"2018-01-15T17:57:45","modified_gmt":"2018-01-15T21:57:45","slug":"contingency-roads-and-formation-processes-in-the-greek-countryside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/?p=867","title":{"rendered":"Contingency, Roads, and Formation Processes in the Greek Countryside"},"content":{"rendered":"

[Ed: reposted from Bill’s blog<\/a><\/em>]<\/p>\n

This last week I\u2019ve been working on transforming a paper that\u00a0Dimitri Nakassis and I wrote from the 2016\u00a0Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting. The paper was for a panel organized by Deb Brown and Becky Seifried on the topic of abandoned settlements<\/a>. Dimitri and I wrote not so much about settlements as about roads and routes through the Greek countryside using the Western Argolid as an example.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve worked to transform the paper into a proper article, I\u2019ve started to try to weave together two complicated little strands related to regional level intensive pedestrian survey. One strand understands the countryside as contingent and dynamic and challenges the perspective that rural Greece was backward or unchanging guide to ancient practices. The view of the Greek countryside as stagnant and conservative drew heavily on both contemporary Western views of conservative\u00a0rural life as well as Orientalist ideas that the East was resistant to change and, as a result, and\u00a0unreceptive to the forces of progress (and perhaps resistant to the transformative power of capital). The most obvious expression of this among\u00a0Classicists was the tendency to look to rural life and practices as a place that preserved\u00a0ancient culture. Efforts to conflate ancient\u00a0places with modern villages by the modern Greek state reinforced the plausibility of a conservative countryside. This, in turn, supported the nationalist\u00a0narrative advanced by\u00a0both the West and the Greek state itself that the modern Greek nationstate had it roots in the\u00a0Ancient Greek world. By changing Slavic, Albanian, or Turkish place names to the names of Ancient Greek places, the modern state sought less to overwrite the more recent history of the region and more to restore the authenticity of\u00a0the Greek countryside.<\/p>\n

For archaeologists, this confidence in a stable Greek countryside arrived with the early travelers who took ancient texts as their guides and\u00a0consistently noted practices that evoked those in\u00a0ancient sources. By the 1980s and 1990s, however, intensive pedestrian survey and processual archaeology had begun to produce evidence for a more dynamic view of\u00a0rural settlement patterns where even major settlements expanded, contracted, appeared, and vanished over the centuries. Attention to the Early Modern and\u00a0Ottoman Greek landscape by the\u00a0Argolid Exploration Project<\/a>\u00a0and in the Nemea Valley demonstrated that far from being ossified and unchanging, rural life, economic strategies, and settlement in the northeast Peloponnesus was in constant flux as denizens of the countryside adapted to local and regional economic and\u00a0political opportunities. To put their conclusions in starkly contemporary terms, scholars like Susan Buck Sutton demonstrated that\u00a0precarity of capitalism was alive and well in the Greek countryside throughout the Early Modern and Modern periods. While this may initially feel like something to celebrate as it makes clear that Greece was not an Oriental\u00a0backwater, it should also\u00a0give us pause as it reminds us that the self-sufficient farmer so celebrated for their independence was every bit a product of larger economic\u00a0forces as any kind of individual will. Removing the condescending (and racist) burden of the Oriental conservatism from the backs of the Greek peasant and replacing it with forces of capital does not, necessarily, impart more agency in the Greek villager, farmer,\u00a0or pastoralist. Agency within the capitalist system may appear more \u201cmodern,\u201d but in some ways, it is only an\u00a0inversion of an\u00a0Orientalist\u00a0reading of Greece\u00a0by\u00a0hinting\u00a0that the instability, contingency, and precarity of rural life anticipates\u00a0progressive modernity.<\/p>\n

Whatever the larger metanarrative at play, contingency\u00a0is now a significant paradigm for understanding Early Modern and Modern Greece, and understanding the\u00a0process of abandonment plays an important roles in recognizing change in the Greek countryside. Attention to abandonment involves a greater commitment to reading artifact scatters in the countryside as the products of archaeological and natural formation processes rather than palimpsests of settlement or other rural activities. As we come to privilege the\u00a0contingency and dynamism of the countryside more, we also lose some of our confidence in assigning tidy functional categories to rural survey assemblages. Low density scatters of\u00a0artifacts, for example, may well represent short-term habitation, low intensity rural activities, or even redistributive practices like\u00a0manuring or dumping.<\/p>\n

For our paper, the significance of contingency and our reading of formation processes intersect in our analysis of two seasonal\u00a0rural settlements in the process of abandonment and the routes that connected these sites to larger networks of travel in the region. In traditional reading of the landscape of the Inachos Valley and the Western Argolid, scholars have tended to see modern routes along the flat valley bottom as more or less following ancient routes. In this context (and putting aside the role played by topography and geography, for example), long-standing\u00a0roads serve\u00a0as\u00a0indicators of persistent\u00a0patterns of movement, settlement, and the political relationship between places. A more contingent view of the countryside, however, forces us to consider the more ephemeral routes through the landscape that leave only fleeting traces in the landscape and\u00a0connect less persistent settlements.<\/p>\n

Moreover, and this to my mind is really neat, roads and routes through the countryside also shape the formation processes at individual sites. For example, the proximity of an\u00a0structure\u00a0to an unpaved dirt road seems to have influenced whether\u00a0that structure was maintained and\u00a0used for storage or provisional discard. The dirt road, however, may not have any relationship to the earlier,\u00a0simpler path that originally connected the settlement to other places in the region. Access by modern dirt road shaped the\u00a0formation processes at play in the\u00a0settlement. Structures only reached through footpaths tend to see less modern activity.<\/p>\n

For our paper, we present an example from the Western Argolid to demonstrate the presence and significance of these contingent routes through the countryside, to unpack the relationship of roads to\u00a0formation processes\u00a0at abandoned settlements, and to suggest that the contingent countryside is not simply about places, but also about all the interstitial spaces that define social, economic, and political\u00a0relationships in the changing landscape.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Ed: reposted from Bill’s blog] This last week I\u2019ve been working on transforming a paper that\u00a0Dimitri Nakassis and I wrote from the 2016\u00a0Archaeological Institute of America annual meeting. The paper was for a panel organized by Deb Brown and Becky Seifried on the topic of abandoned settlements. Dimitri and I wrote not so much about … More Contingency, Roads, and Formation Processes in the Greek Countryside<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":869,"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":[9],"tags":[128,130,129],"class_list":["post-867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bill-caraher","tag-contingency","tag-formation-processes","tag-roads"],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/01\/reaping_argos_plain_LoC.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867","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=867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/869"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/westernargolid.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}