Wandering Cities: Alternatives to Catastrophe in the Greek Polis

Mackil, Emily

doi:10.3764/aja.108.4.493

Cited by 23 publications

(14 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Mackil (2004) examined a number of cases of polis collapse that occurred because of physical catastrophe. In Greece, the polis of Helike was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 373 BC, completely, according to the literary (but not archaeological) sources, and it ceased to exist as a political unit (Mackil 2004, pp.…”

Section: Collapse and Neocatastrophismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

Middleton

2012

J Archaeol Res

121

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The study of the collapse of past societies raises many questions for the theory and practice of archaeology. Interest in collapse extends as well into the natural sciences and environmental and sustainability policy. Despite a range of approaches to collapse, the predominant paradigm is environmental collapse, which I argue obscures recognition of the dynamic role of social processes that lie at the heart of human communities. These environmental discourses, together with confusion over terminology and the concepts of collapse, have created widespread aporia about collapse and resulted in the creation of mixed messages about complex historical and social processes.

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Section: Collapse and Neocatastrophismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

Middleton

2012

J Archaeol Res

121

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“…When migrants choose where to travel based on population size alone, the resulting dynamic is one of nucleation and stratification. This phenomenon is ubiquitous in the archaeological record, from the coalescence of Hohokam communities in the US Southwest (Hill et al 2004), to Jomon-era Japan (Crema 2013), and the synoikism of classical Greek poleis (Mackil 2004). Several factors can lead to apparent aggregation and the formation of settlement hierarchy in the archaeological record (Duffy 2011), but many are special cases of this population-based dynamic.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Trade, migration, and the dynamics of spatial interaction

Gauthier¹

2019

Preprint

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Archaeological settlement patterns are the physical remains of complex webs of human decision-making and social interaction. Entropy-maximizing spatial interaction models are a means of building parsimonious models that average over much of this small-scale complexity, while maintaining key large-scale structural features. Dynamic social interaction models extend this approach by allowing archaeologists to explore the co-evolution of human settlement systems and the networks of interaction that drive them. Yet, such models are often imprecise, relying on generalized notions of settlement "influence" and "attractiveness" rather than concrete material flows of goods and people. Here, I present a dis-aggregated spatial interaction model that explicitly resolves trade and migration flows and their combined influence on settlement growth and decline. I explore how the balance of costs and benefits of each type of interaction influence long-term settlement patterns. I find trade flows are the strongest determinant of equilibrium settlement structure, and that migration flows play a more transient role in balancing site hierarchies. This model illustrates how the broad toolkit for spatial interaction modeling developed in geography and economics can increase the precision of quantitative theory building in archaeology, and provides a road-map for connecting mechanistic models to the empirical archaeological record.

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“…81 Greek coastal poleis developed various social and political strategies for reducing the human costs of natural catastrophe. 82…”

Section: At the Junction Of The Human World And The World Of Fishmentioning

confidence: 99%

Between rivers and the sea: The Hellenic aquatic divisions

Kostuch¹

2015

International Journal of Maritime History

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It would seem that the view of the river flowing into the sea was, for the Greeks, a natural phenomenon, unworthy of special attention -as it is for us. Nothing could be further from the truth. A careful analysis of the extant sources leads to the conclusion that the Greeks perceived a strong distinction between the rivers and the sea. Moreover, they perceived this distinction as part of the natural mechanism, not some quirk of nature that could only be recorded in the realm of paradoxography. Moreover, in terms of géographie imaginaire, the innate 'disagreement' between the rivers and the sea -naturally predestined to each other's existence -went beyond the usual aquatic division and opposition between the land and sea. This raises the question of how important this natural disagreement was to Greek culture. It turns out that perceptions about the organization of water resources reveal the Hellenic tendency to use the spatial location to explain cultural differences, political particularism and the fear of loss of historical memory. Thus, the strong distinction between the rivers and the sea is part of the Greek cultural heritage.Researchers of antiquity agree that the ancient Greeks saw nature through the lens of politics, culture and religion. Conversely, the nature simultaneously shaped the same spheres of activity of the Greeks who perceived landscape as three harmonized, complementary and inseparable dimensions: natural (physical), human and imaginary. In modern terms,

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Wandering Cities: Alternatives to Catastrophe in the Greek Polis

Cited by 23 publications

References 29 publications

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

Nothing Lasts Forever: Environmental Discourses on the Collapse of Past Societies

Trade, migration, and the dynamics of spatial interaction

Between rivers and the sea: The Hellenic aquatic divisions

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