Landscape and early farming settlement dynamics in central Greece

Abstract

Current hyperintensive surface survey in the Tanagra district of Boeotia, central Greece (J. L. Bintliff et al., 2002), together with a recent reanalysis of survey results from the Thespiae district (J. L. Bintliff et al., 1999), have led to a radical rethinking of how and where early farmers exploited the Greek landscape between earliest Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times. This new work is described, and its significance for the wider debates about the Greek landscape in this period is further discussed, to demonstrate that alongside widely spaced villages in earlier Neolithic times there were also small, short-lived farms; both were associated with wetland hand cultivation. In later Neolithic and Early Bronze Age times, these locations remained, but vestigial traces discovered by hyperintensive survey methods have identified an explosion of small, short-lived, and horizontally migrating farms across the newly cleared interfluve zones. A largely lost alluvial terrace provides a major resource for the earlier, wetland farming foci.

The role of geoarchaeology in extending our perspective

“…These studies can reveal additions to soils (e.g. Bintliff et al 2006;Guttmann et al 2006Guttmann et al , 2008Simpson et al 2006), or other techniques such as terracing (Krahtopoulou & Frederick 2008) or runoff irrigation (Sandor et al 2007), which create or improve arable land, or otherwise allowed communities to manage risk (Zaro & Alvarez 2005). Human land-use practices can have unintended consequences, however, which can be either positive or negative.…”

“…The negative consequences are unfortunately relatively common (e.g. Wiseman 2007), and often take the form of predisposing a landscape to subsequent erosion, such as in the situations described by Bintliff et al (2006) and Ayala & French (2005). This latter study described a case in Sicily where land-use practices (pastoralism v. agriculture) caused some areas to pass a stability threshold, resulting not only in erosion but also in a landscape that was resistant to regeneration after abandonment.…”