Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece: Some Focus

One of the goals of this blog from its very early days is to give an insight into how the academic sausage is made. As a result, I’ve published working and rough drafts, pre-prints, and sometimes published papers to this blog as they appear.

I’ve been working on a paper for the celebrateCHAT conference next month in Patras, Greece. My paper is titled “Survey Archaeology and Modern Greece” and I started to draft something last week which I tried to refine on Monday and took another substantial swing at today. 

Here’s the most recent and perhaps best draft:

In the Anglo-American tradition, intensive pedestrian survey in Greece involves the systematic scrutiny of the surface of the ground. In its contemporary form, intensive survey samples an area divided into survey units and the artifacts present on the surface in each unit. Since a single survey unit might produce artifacts from the Final Neolithic, the Roman period, and 1964, intensive survey has tended to be diachronic, at least in theory. In practice, intensive survey projects have adopted sampling methods designed to tease out the “hidden landscapes” often obscured by subsequent depositional events. Moreover, survey archaeology in Greece has tended to avoid areas where the modern period was particularly visible. Intensive survey is almost synonymous with the study of rural Greece in antiquity and in the present as well. Its focus on the rural is often both practical — the countryside is better suited to a method focused on documenting the surface of the ground at scale — and loosely ideological — generations of scholars looked to rural Greece, often in problematic ways, for evidence for survivals of antiquity. 

Curiously, intensive survey methods are ill-suited for the study of modern villages where the abundance of contemporary and recent objects and blurred lines between systemic and archaeological contexts complicated sampling method designed to capture faint traces of the past rather than control for the hyper abundance of the present. As a result, survey projects have documented villages using ethnography, data derived from censuses, state economic and agricultural reports, or tax records. In other words, the modern period rarely benefits from the intensive practices characteristic of Anglo-American survey. This paper argues on the basis of work with the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey and the Western Argolid Regional Project that intensive survey methods can provide important insights into the modern period in Greece by documenting non-village sites in the countryside. 

These projects, of course, are not the first offer this perspective. In fact, the approach on both projects is indebted to Nick Kardulias’s work with Claudia Chang and Pricilla Murray in the Southern Argolid and his subsequent efforts on Cyprus, various Saronic islands, and in the Eastern Corinthia. Kardulias and colleagues documented sheepfolds, shrines, threshing floors, lime kilns, storehouses, and farmsteads — virtually any modern feature other than villages — as part of the Southern Argolid Project. This work revealed a “contingent countryside” (or a liquid landscape) and reflected the ebb and flow of seasonal and situational exploitation of rural space.

Kardulias’s work contributed directly to a study that I conducted with David Pettegrew in the southeastern Korinthia where we documented the rural site of Lakka Skoutara. This site consisted of over a dozen houses situated in a valley and loosely arranged around a rural crossroad and a church. The houses feature baking ovens, large cistern, and threshing floors. The valley bottom features massive stone clearance piles and the slopes feature extensive terracing and simple rock windbreaks which preserve evidence for pastoralists who operated in the region or moved through the area. Unlike Chelmis, the settlement at Lakka Skoutara produced a more robust and chronologically diverse assemblage of ceramics perhaps owing to its physical and social proximity to the village of Sophiko. Nineteenth-century able wares from Çanakkale in northwestern Turkey or and slip-painted ware from Didymoteicho in Thrace appeared alongside less diagnostic unglazed utility wares, modern glazed yoghurt pots, modern flower pots, glass bottles, and metal tableware. The presence of Koroneiko pitharia indicates a substantial investment in ceramic storage vessels. The character and the quantity of material at Lakka Skoutara indicates longer periods of more intensive occupation.

We also returned to the site regularly over the course of the next two decades. While we did not conduct another intensive survey, we continued to document the use of the houses over time. In some cases, we were able to watch individual structures collapse as their owners removed their tile roofs and exposed their mud mortar walls to rain. One house disappeared entirely as the result of efforts to widen a modern road that passed through the area. Other cases, however, reflected the ongoing value of these rural structures. Objects left in ruined houses appeared on year and were gone or replaced by other objects the next. In one case, a house saw extensive renovation and remodeling. Other homes saw consistent maintenance. The overall picture here was of a modern landscape that continued to play a role in contemporary life of the residents of the nearby villages, while at the same time, standing just outside of modern documentation practices associated with state.

A similar story describes the situation of the cluster of houses at the site of Chelmis in the Western Argolid. Like at Lakka Skoutara, we conducted intensive survey around the remains of over a dozen largely abandoned buildings which featured threshing floors, ovens, enclosures for animals, and paths. The settlement was founded by seasonal pastoralists who moved their flocks from around the village of Frosiouna to the site of Chelmis near the village of Schinochori in the winter months. At some point during the early 20th century they also cultivated grain in the area as the terraces and threshing floors show. The site appears in the 1951 census with 119 people and declines by around 50% each decade until registering no inhabitants in 1991 and during our time at the settlement in 2016 and 2016, Chelmis had no permanent residents. By the 1970s, the settlement had a connection to the village of Schinochori via a road, electricity, and children at the site attended the local school. Today, the site appears largely abandoned but for one large, flea infested goat fold, and a few houses maintained as storerooms and seasonal shelters during the olive harvest. 

The artifact assemblage around the houses of Chelmis produced a massive quantity of roof tiles, suggesting at least some of the houses were abandoned with their roofs intact. The appearance of several different kind of tiles — one type local and roughly made and the other mass produced and from a regional tile manufacturer — suggested both ad hoc repairs and the reuse of older tiles as wall chinking, in the construction of ovens, and to patch holes. It also reflects the residents’ engagement with both regional and highly local economic networks which likely varied over time and perhaps correlated to the postwar period when Chelmis became linked to the village of Schinochori by road. The scatter of artifacts at the site was sparse with metal and glass objects more common than ceramics. The ceramics that were present were a Marousi Ware storage jar from Attica and small vessels made of either porcelain or imitation porcelain. A mug made of aluminum and glass bottles indicate that these materials replaced ceramic objects for daily use. The general absence of table and utility wares at the site, however, suggests both periodic use of the site, perhaps initially seasonal, the modest material means of its residents, and its relatively short existence as a site in the countryside. The residents of Chelmis likely took most high value objects with them when they stopped living at the site. 

When we turn the modern gaze of intensive survey archaeology on sites such as Lakka Skoutara and Chelmis, we reveal rural activities that operated outside of village life and the efforts to rationalize rural life by the Greek state. Access to Chelmis came via a series of routes situated to avoid field and established villages in the Inachos valley. The site of Lakka Skoutara was connected to its nearest villages by a rugged routes through the hilly interior of the southeastern Corinthia. Even modern bulldozers have only made the routes partly passable for occasional vehicular traffic. The remote location of Lakka Skoutara made it suitable for residents of the village of Sophiko during the Greek Civil War and German Occupation, suggesting that its status at the margins of the modern state served a valuable purpose for local residents. Chelmis’s role as an extension of the mountain village of Frosiouna with access the marginally arable land, but nevertheless proximate to schools, markets, and employment opportunities on the Argive plain likewise hinted at the limits of the village as a category of analysis and as a historically essentialized settlement type. It is worth noting that these sites were obviously dependent on regional, national, and global markets, employment opportunities, services, and routes. That said, they appear to exist contemporary to, but nevertheless outside persistent nodes of both capital and administration mediated by state involvement in rationalizing rural life.