Mediterranean Historical Review

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Mediterranean Historical Review

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Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the

Mediterranean World
Lin Foxhall
Published online: 07 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: Lin Foxhall (2003) Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the Mediterranean World, Mediterranean
Historical Review, 18:2, 75-92, DOI: 10.1080/0951896032000230499
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Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities
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in the Mediterranean World
L I N F O X H A LL
This paper explores how élites and non-élites in ancient Greece might
have perceived agrarian landscapes. On the basis of several
archaeological case studies and a wide range of comparative
ethnographic and historic material, it is argued that the archaeological
evidence for land division in early Greece reflects agrarian rather than
‘urban’ ideologies. The widely accepted belief that ‘colonization’
reflects a shortage of land is likely to be wrong. Rather, there were
practical limits on the amount of land individual households could have
cultivated without additional resources of labour.
Mediterranean landscapes are human artefacts in which complex cultural

histories are firmly embedded. These landscapes should be interpreted as
manifestations of historically specific identities shaped by different human
societies over many millennia according to deep-seated cultural principles.
However, without privileging environmentally based explanations or taking
refuge in environmental determinism, it is clear that these landscapes are also
shaped by the practical constraints of climate, geography and geomorphology,
and the biology of plants and animals. Technological practices and
developments – complex combinations of culturally shaped elements
and practical constraints – are critical for understanding how human societies
exploited these landscapes. Technology can be viewed as one kind of
mediation between people and the environment in which they live: a means
of interacting via material culture with the natural world, which is formulated
within human social institutions but is simultaneously moderated in form by
factors external to any particular society. Within complex societies different
technologies (or different modes of utilizing technologies) are often associated
with different wealth and status groups: technology is not politically neutral.
This paradigm generates the question of whether we can legitimately connect
particular kinds of landscapes with the social and economic practices and the
cultural identities of specific groups. For example, can we find specifically
‘Greek’, ‘Roman’, or ‘Ottoman’ landscapes? Can we find ‘peasant’ or ‘élite’
landscapes? Or should we be seeking to understand these landscapes as
Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.18, No.2, December 2003, pp.75–92

ISSN 0951-8967 print
DOI: 10.1080/0951896032000230499 q 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd.
76 M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W
an interconnected whole, diachronically and culturally, through the features

they have in common?
These issues have been at the heart of the study of Mediterranean

paradigms since Braudel’s great study1 and remain critical to our
interpretations of cultural, social, and economic history in the Mediterranean.
In this paper I want to explore these issues through a single case study: the
problem of understanding sociocultural perceptions of agricultural land
and its exploitation by élites and non-élites in archaic Greece. Utilizing
comparative data from a range of Mediterranean societies, I will focus
particularly on the matrix of relationships between the socially and politically
constructed exploitation of labour, technology, and the environmental context
of agriculture.
There are, of course, many different kinds of landscape, and any particular
landscape embodies a multiplicity of facets. My focus here is primarily on
agrarian and productive landscapes in a broad sense. In no way should this
perspective be understood to indicate that these are the only kinds of
landscapes or aspects of landscape sensu lato which are significant in the
examples I cite.2
THE EXPLOITATION OF LAND
The question of agricultural production in archaic and classical Greece3

formed the original starting point for this investigation. Farming must have
been the main source of wealth for developing and aspiring élites in virtually
all types of communities in the archaic Greek world, as it was in earlier and
has been in more recent periods. Although Hesiod’s Works and Days
provides only very limited information on agriculture, it does confirm, in
conjunction with the archaeological evidence, that the basic repertoire
of crops and techniques of Mediterranean farming remained intact from
the Bronze Age.4 Hesiod was a man who survived on bread, not meat.
In the precapitalist societies of the Mediterranean region, as well as in the
noncapitalist (or ‘less capitalized’) sectors of more recent Mediterranean
societies, agriculture, in Braudel’s words, ‘was the leading industry of the
Mediterranean’, and land was the most important and most coveted economic
resource.5
Agriculture, broadly speaking, must have been the core economic activity
and the main foundation for the (relatively) large-scale generation of wealth in
archaic Greece. Even in mixed farming regimes (as must have been practised
in most places), cereals would have been the fundamental staple6 and essential
for the generation of the ‘agri-wealth’ which underpinned élite families.
This is not to say that élites and others did not engage in many other
‘economic’ activities which generated considerable amounts of wealth.
CULTURES, LANDSCAPES, AND IDENTITIES 77
Plainly, they were active in trade, craft production, and so forth, and there is
abundant archaeological evidence for all of these pursuits. All of these other
activities, however, when they flourished, were enmeshed in stable and

productive agricultural regimes.
AVAILABILITY OF LAND IN THE ARCHAIC GREEK WORLD
It is still regularly maintained that during the archaic period land resources
came under pressure as a result of increasing population (this is still frequently
cited as an explanation of Greek ‘colonization’):
The population growth of the archaic period, with a consequent increase
in the number of very small property holdings, took the Athenian
population towards the limits of the environmental carrying capacity of
Attica by the time of Solon.7
The original catalyst for the change from Dark Age pastoralism and
concentration on cereals was. . . population pressure and the scarcity of
good bottomland.8
Archaeological evidence suggests, however, that shortage of land, in any

absolute sense, is unlikely to have been a problem for farmers in the seventh
and sixth centuries.9 As noted above, ‘archaic landscapes’ are poorly
understood compared with classical ones. Settlements abandoned early and
not reoccupied later (e.g., Zagora, abandoned at the end of the eighth century;
Koukounaries on Paros, abandoned in the seventh century; the Incoronata site
at Metaponto, abandoned in the third quarter of the seventh century) are
generally small but show no sign of population pressure on local resources.10
Archaic remains at places which later developed into classical settlements are
frequently poorly preserved, and it is difficult to assess their full extent
for the earlier period through either survey or excavation.11 Again, there is no
evidence to suggest that such places outgrew the local resource base in archaic
times, since most appear to have been at least as large in classical times
and later. Corinth, Athens, Halieis, Megara Hyblaea, and many other cities
provide examples.
In the countryside, too, traces of archaic-period occupation may well be all
but obliterated by later activity. The chora of Metaponto, where it has been
possible to excavate a number of small rural sites, offers a good example.
Scholars regularly cite Metaponto as an example of a rural landscape filling up
with farms in the sixth century.12 In fact the vast majority of ‘farmstead’ sites
are really only properly documented as fully functional farmhouses in
classical times (most are fifth- and fourth-century). In the words of Joe Carter,
‘little is known of the 6th-century BC Metapontine farmhouses. Though about
30 per cent of the Classical sites have produced Archaic pottery,

very few purely Archaic farmhouses have come to light’.13 Few of these
farmhouses date to earlier than the middle of the sixth century. Some of
the Metaponto farmhouses of the archaic period were plainly quite substantial
and had tiled roofs. However, evidence for archaic occupation was often
limited to sherd material. It is not clear at this stage how these sites were
utilized or whether the nature of occupation and land use changed over time.
It may be significant that some of the purely archaic farmhouses are located at
a considerable distance from the city site, perhaps suggesting a different kind
of exploitation of the countryside than in later periods (e.g., the Cugno del
Pero farmhouse, exavated by the Soprintendenza di Reggio Calabria, dating
to ca. 550 BCE).14 Certainly it is clear that the peak periods for the occupation
of the countryside are the first half of the fifth century and the second
half of the fourth century, not the archaic period.15 This conclusion is
supported by the palynological record: high levels of thistle, plantain, and
grasses suggest that a considerable amount of the land was fallow or
uncultivated in the sixth century.16
The difficulties of identifying ‘the archaic’ in archaeological survey in
Greece independently of earlier and especially later periods has been
addressed by John Bintliff and others.17 In the countrysides of southern Greece
which have been explored via intensive survey, for example, Keos, Laconia,
the Southern Argolid, and Methana, it has been difficult to determine the full
extent and the nature of specifically archaic-period exploitation as distinct
from that of classical times.18 Nonetheless, survey data from southern Greece
do not appear to present a picture of an overused countryside in crisis in
archaic times. Small nucleated settlements at the beginning of the period are
followed by (at different times in different areas) the sprouting of a few small
farmsteads in the countryside (rarely earlier than the mid-sixth to early fifth
century BCE). Few surveys, with the exception of those for Keos and
Metaponto, show any significant amount of dispersed rural settlement in the
archaic period, and both these areas show more rural activity in classical
times. It seems prima facie unlikely that any of these Greek landscapes were
more heavily exploited than in later periods when they appear to have
been more densely occupied – in classical times, the late Roman period, or
the later nineteenth century CE. Landscapes, even in the Mediterranean, are
remarkably responsive to intensification (though they may suffer over the long
term in consequence). In none of the latter periods, not even the last, does it
appear that the Greek countryside was unable to support its population.
In archaic times, by comparison, it seems that there was no pressure on land in
any absolute sense, although there certainly may have been social and political
restrictions on access to land, especially the best land. The limited
archaeological evidence available suggests that generally the most productive
land was farmed for arable and that marginal areas may have been exploited
but were not intensively cultivated.19
THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF AGRARIAN LANDSCAPES
Recently Morris has suggested what he calls a ‘new model’ of exploitation

starting in the sixth century in which homesteading, ‘middling’ citizen farmers
lived in the chora of their polis on consolidated plots of roughly the same size.20
This is a model very much in line with his egalitarian vision of Greek civic
life, in which he views the archaic period as a time of conflicting ideologies: the
‘old élite’ moral order promoted by lyric poets such as Alkaios and Sappho in
antithetical opposition to the majority ‘middling ideology’ of moderation and
continence expressed by the elegaic poets (e.g., Solon, Theognis).21
Morris suggests, on the basis of archaeologically attested land divisions, that,
as at Halieis, Metaponto, and Megara Hyblaea and in the Crimea, ‘concentrated
blocks of land 5–15 ha in area were normal by classical times’22 and that plots
of 4–5 hectares were ‘close to the minimum viable’.23 Similarly, Carter arrives
at an ‘average farm size’ of 21.2 hectares, of which 16.6 hectares were arable,
by dividing the total number of farm sites discovered in the surveyed area by the
total area surveyed. He notes that this is large by the standards of modern peasant
farms (4.5 hectares via the Agrarian Reforms of 1954).24
I leave aside the question of whether non-élite households cultivated
consolidated plots, though I am dubious about its feasibility over the long term for
many reasons, not least the process of partible inheritance, unless specific social
or political forces intervene to keep plots consolidated. Most critical, however,
access to labour placed practical constraints on the cultivation and exploitation of
land. As Le Roy Ladurie said of the state of agriculture in fifteenth-century
Languedoc (southwestern France), ‘what capitalistic agriculture lacked at the end
of the Middle Ages was not land and buildings, but money and labor’.25 This was
true of a great number of Mediterranean societies in the past. In the landscapes of
archaic Greece, the amount of land a small household could cultivate as
arable must have depended largely on how much human labour and resources
(notably traction animals) it could mobilize. Comparative ethnographic and
historical data strongly suggest that there are real, fixed limits on the amount of
arable cultivation a single household can accomplish.26 The critical factors are
time limits, weather, draught animals, and labour. This in turn has implications
for both the political structure of agricultural wealth and the cultural
conceptualization of rural landscapes in archaic Greece.
TECHNOLOGY, LABOUR, AND LAND
In both southern Greece and southern Italy the main sowing of arable crops
(cereals and legumes) takes place in the autumn. In archaic and classical
Greek times,27 the soil would have been broken up by an ard plough pulled by
draught animals, normally a team of two cattle. Depending on the heaviness of
the soil and the weed growth, it might need to be ploughed before sowing
commenced as well as at sowing time. If only a single ploughing was
necessary, the seed would be sprinkled on the ground by the sower, while the
ploughman moved along behind, ploughing in the seed so that it would
be buried and birds would not eat it. The purpose of ploughing was to break
up the soil so that seed sown broadcast could germinate and put down roots
easily in the moist soil. The plough used would probably have been made
entirely of wood, without even a metal share, similar to the one described by
Hesiod (Op. 427– 35).
Ploughing can only be done after the autumn rains have begun and the soil
is no longer rock-hard. Exactly when conditions become right is highly
variable and depends upon the weather and the year, as well as upon the local
climate and soils. Generally it is not feasible to start ploughing much before
mid-October, and seed sown too early may sprout and then wither from lack of
moisture. By mid-December, once the weather has turned very wet, cold, and
possibly frosty, soil conditions are also unsuitable for ploughing, and seed
sown late will rot. These parameters effectively leave a window for ploughing
and sowing of about two months (give or take a couple of weeks): from
mid-October to mid-December. During this time, not every day will be
suitable for ploughing because of rain, and a number of days may be occupied
with other urgent jobs (e.g., pruning trees and vines), illness, festival days, etc.
Rarely could one expect to have more than about 30 days available for
ploughing, and 20 is probably a more realistic estimate.
There is also the matter of the capacity of draught animals. The normal
traction animals for ploughing from classical antiquity to modern times were
plough cattle: slow but sure-footed and relatively inexpensive to feed. In many
parts of Greece and southern Italy horses are not suitable for ploughing, being
both expensive to keep and unable to cope with the terrain (although many of
the places utilized for arable cultivation in archaic and classical times may not
have been particularly rugged themselves, access could be via steep and
difficult paths). Mules and donkeys can be used (though the latter are rather
small and are better used as beasts of burden). Mules are more efficient than
cattle but more expensive to acquire and not self-replicating. Cattle are
very slow and cumbersome, and a team of two cannot feasibly cultivate a very
small plot because of the room needed to turn: very small plots would have
had to be dug by hand.
There are limits on how hard cattle and other draught animals can be
worked without suffering overexertion or even collapse (well documented in
ethnographic and historical accounts). The problem is exacerbated by the
season at which ploughing and sowing takes place. By the end of the hot, dry
summer, cattle in most parts of Greece and the Mediterranean world are
often in relatively poor condition because fodder and forage are in short
supply. This deficiency is not remedied until well into the autumn, after
ploughing is under way. Therefore, the upper limit of about 20– 30 days
extends to the capacity of the traction animals as well: even if the weather and
the pressure of other jobs allowed extra days of ploughing, a team of cattle
probably could not cope with more.
Finally, there is the variable of human labour. Ploughing and sowing with a
team of cattle is slow and arduous; the alternative, digging by hand with
a mattock, is even more so. Not surprisingly, a number of measurement
systems in the pre-modern Mediterranean world calculated land not by area
but by the number of days it took to plough a plot. Frequently systems of areal
measurement have as their base unit the nominal, rule-of-thumb figure for the
amount which could be ploughed in a day. This may have implications for
the land division systems documented from archaic Greek settlements
(see below). Obviously notional figures for ‘a day’s ploughing’ varied from
place to place with local terrain, soil, and weather conditions. Nonetheless,
there is a significant clustering of figures from a wide range of sources around
0.2 –0.3 hectare. This is most probably related to the factor which all shared:
the limitations of the draught animals.
On Methana, the rule of thumb in the 1970s for ploughing with a single
mule was around 2– 2.5 stremmata (0.2 –0.25 hectare) per day.28 Though the
terrain was steep and broken, the largely volcanic soils were fertile and
moisture-retentive, so it was worthwhile growing cereals for subsistence.
Nonetheless, no individual household sowed more than 5– 6 days’ ploughing
of wheat for subsistence,29 and even the one poor but energetic household
which grew wheat for cash sale sowed a maximum of 15 –17 days’ ploughing
(ca. 3.75 – 4.25 hectares).30
More comparable, perhaps, to the kinds of conditions which regularly
prevailed in archaic Greece is Stan Aschenbrenner’s figure of 0.3 hectare
per plough team (usually two cattle, less often one horse) per day
for a first ploughing or when only one ploughing was done.31 The community
in Messenia that he studied was inhabited by small-scale cultivators and was
about 50 per cent self-sufficient in food. Not every household owned its own
plough team. There were 23 plough teams in all, and the village had about 210
hectares under cultivation in the year of his study, which required a total of
30 days of ploughing. Aschenbrenner notes: ‘The observed difficulty that
some farmers had in finding enough days for plowing when it was not raining
and the soil moisture was suitable, suggests that the twenty-three units
[i.e., plough teams] are probably a minimum for the area under cultivation.’32
His observation also suggests that 30 days of ploughing was a near-maximum
which could be squeezed into the window available between October and
December, and this was in a context in which tractors were in use for
some cultivation.
A remarkable Ottoman cadaster translated and analyzed by Fariba

Zarinebaf-Shahr, John Bennet, and Jack Davis for Anavarin (Navarino),
the same part of Messenia as Aschenbrenner’s study,33 notes the number
of plough teams needed to manage the arable fields under cultivation of
a number of estates (çiftliks). The range of variation was generally 23– 70
dönüm (2.12 –6.44 hectares) per plough team of two cattle (1 do€ n€um ¼ 919:3
square metres ¼ 0:092 hectare).34 However, the figure of 40 dönüm
(3.68 hectares) per plough team recurs frequently (as a ‘persistent value’).35
The researchers suggest that most farmers ‘imagined that on average 40– 50
dönüm (3.68 – 4.6 hectares) of land could be sown by a team of oxen’.36 When
the çift was used as a land measure, however, the values were in the region of
80 –100 dönüm, about double the arable area cultivated in any one year, to
take account of fallow in a two-year crop rotation system. These figures
suggest that eighteenth-century farmers under Ottoman rule did not usually
work their draught animals quite as hard as their modern Messenian
counterparts. This may be related to any number of factors, including the
type and condition of the land, the condition of the oxen, the availability
of human labour, and the demands of other jobs. If the maximum figure of
70 dönüm (6.44 hectares) is divided by 20 days, the result is a figure of 0.32
hectare per day – close to the upper end of the figures for modern peasant
communities which work draught animals very hard. The ‘average’ of 40– 50
dönüm (3.68 – 4.6 hectares) divided by 20 days gives a figure of 0.184 – 0.23
hectare per day’s ploughing, close to the lower end of the modern figures.
In northern Calabria (Italy), near Crotone, the normal land measurement
in the nineteenth century was the tomolata, equivalent to 0.34 hectare.
Again, it looks as though this measurement were nominally based on the
amount of land which could be ploughed in a day. During this time, much
of the territory was exploited as a huge latifondo running a diversity of
enterprises owned by the Barracco family.37 Some of the arable land was
exploited in small units, rented out to tenants and sharecroppers, but much of
the best flat land was exploited in large, intensively cultivated mixed farming
units, massarie.38 These were overseen by a farm manager and incorporated a
number of sub-units, though resources such as equipment and draught animals
were shared among all the sub-units. They employed a very large number of
workers (hundreds), some on a daily basis, some seasonally (e.g., for the olive
harvest), and some on a more permanent basis. The Isola massaria, one of the
larger ones, included 19 smaller masserie. The whole operation covered 2,500
acres (1,012 hectares). A wide range of crops was grown, and therefore no
more than 50 per cent of this area, and probably less, would have been under
arable cultivation in any one year. In the year 1861 –62, the massaria had
169 oxen (84 plough teams). If 50 per cent of the holding had been under arable
crops (506 hectares), the ratio would have been 6.02 hectares per yoke of oxen
(probably a maximum), a figure comparable to those for Greece given above.

These examples – and many more could be cited – demonstrate the
physical and practical limits of the amount of land which could be cultivated
by a household and/or a plough team. Although they are drawn from different
areas of the Mediterranean and from different time periods, agrarian regimes,
and cultural/political settings, their points of convergence suggest that these
are real practical limits which cannot easily be transcended, especially by
small-scale cultivators. Therefore, when we speculate upon the working of
ancient Greek landholdings it is probably reasonable to suggest that if we are
imagining farm units under the management of individual nuclear or stem
family households, a household with one yoke of cattle could have cultivated a
maximum of 5 –6 hectares per year as arable crops over 20 –30 days’
ploughing per year at a rate of 0.2 – 0.3 hectare per day (Table 1).
INTERPRETING AGRARIAN LANDSCAPES
Estimates of a minimum viable ‘peasant’ holding by Burford, Jameson,

Morris, and others have clustered roughly around 4– 5 hectares.39 Such an
estimate may well be correct, but the above analysis suggests that it is unlikely
to have represented a minimum holding for subsistence. Rather, it is more
likely to be close to the maximum area which a single household consisting of
a nuclear or stem family without access to extra labour could cultivate as
arable. However, a holding of this size is not one on which such a family could
generate a large amount of surplus or wealth without access to other economic
resources. At the same time, if even some plots were as large as 22 hectares or
larger (e.g., if households or other kinds of ‘ownership’ units held multiple
plots), then they must have been too large to be cultivated by a single
household with a single plough team. In other words, a single household
(at least as we usually think of households) could not have generated
substantial agrarian wealth on its own without exploiting the labour of extra
humans and animals.
There are a number of possible scenarios which might reconcile the
archaeological and documentary evidence we have for farming systems in
the archaic and classical Greek world with the pragmatic considerations raised
by ethnographic and historical comparanda. Some of these have already been
extensively discussed in the scholarly literature. One possibility is that larger
holdings were more extensively worked, with only a relatively small
proportion planted in arable crops. Long fallow periods, grazing, and tree
crops might have been useful alternatives when land was not in short supply
in relation to human and animal labour, and in my view this was the case for
84
TABLE 1
ETHNOGRAPHIC AND HISTORICAL EXAMPLES OF ARABLE LAND PLOUGHED ANNUALLY
Place Date and Traction Unit Area per Amount Ploughed Comments
Cultivator Day’s Ploughing Annually
Methana 1970s, ‘peasant’ 1 mule 0.2–0.25 15–17 days ploughing max. Broken terrain, but good
owner –occupiers hectare (ca. 3.75–4.24 hectares), fertile volcanic soils,
cereals for cash; 5–6 days modern fertilizers,
ploughing av. (ca. 1.25–1.5 weedkillers, etc.
hectares), cereals for
subsistence.
Messenia 1960s–70s, ‘peasant’ 2 cattle or 0.3 hectare 30 days max.; 9.1 hectares max. Good plainsland; some
owner –occupiers 1 horse use of tractors; modern
fertilizers, weedkillers, etc.
Messenia 1715, çiftliks, worked 2 cattle 0.106 –0.32 2.12–6.44 hectares; 3.68 hectares Good plainsland.
by sharecroppers hectare; ‘average’ an ‘average’ recurring figure.
0.184–0.23
hectare.
Crotone 1862, latifondo 2 cattle 0.34 hectare(?) 6.02 hectares max. Mostly good plainsland,
some hillslopes.
M E D I T E R R A N E AN H I S T O R I C A L R E VI E W
all of archaic and much of classical Greece. This idea might be upheld by
archaeological and archaeobotanical data from the archaic countryside of
Metaponto, but there are relatively few comparable data from other sites in the
Greek world at this time. In any case, for small households, there remains
the problem of mobilizing sufficient labour for enterprises and activities
beyond subsistence. Another possibility is that households and family units,
especially among the élite, might have been more complicated and larger than
the kinds of households better-known from classical times. The excavation of
housing complexes (as at Zagora, Koukounaries, Lathouresa, and other sites)40
might suggest such groupings, which could have corporately exploited land.
For archaic and especially for classical antiquity, the exploitation of slaves
and other kinds of dependent labourers (including tenants and sharecroppers)
provides the most economical solution to the problem of the shortage of
agricultural labour, as was long ago suggested by Michael Jameson.41
However, even for well-documented ancient Greek societies it is difficult to
ascertain how widespread slave ownership was and how far along the
socioeconomic spectrum it extended. Nor can we freely apply the evidence for
classical Attica to the rest of the Greek world: Greek poleis varied too much
for this to be a legitimate exercise. Clearly, those who could utilize slave or
dependent labour most effectively to exploit larger areas of land and to
generate agricultural wealth were élites whose rank, status, and wealth
allowed them to dominate others. Thus, for example, in many Mediterranean
societies partible inheritance systems militate against the accumulation and
consolidation of land, especially for smallholders. Élites, however, are in a
position to manipulate social convention or even to circumvent legal rules to
get around the problems caused by partible inheritance.
One example of this might be the well-attested practice in classical
Athens of rich families leaving land only to sons while daughters took
their share of the patrimony as a cash dowry. (Women did inherit land
in other contemporary Greek societies.) Another strategy sometimes
employed in classical Athens was to leave estates undivided, so that even
after the death of a father, brothers continued to work land and other economic
resources as a single unit, pooling labour resources (both their own labour and
that of their slaves).
In nineteenth-century Calabria, the Baracco family used similar strategies
but on a much larger scale. Despite the fact that legally all brothers
were entitled to equal shares of the inheritance, over several generations the
family managed to ‘persuade’ only one brother to marry and produce heirs
(usually the eldest, with one notable exception). Often he married a cousin or
affine. Other brothers were persuaded to serve as managers of various sections
of the vast latifondo, living a life of luxury but remaining unmarried
(or marrying only late in life and producing no children) and devolving all of
the ‘inheritance’ to which they were entitled onto the heir of the one married
brother. Similarly, sisters were persuaded to trade in their rights of inheritance
‘voluntarily’ for a generous cash settlement on marriage. This allowed the

latifondo to grow and consolidate for over 150 years.42
In Languedoc, in the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth centuries, land was
not in short supply, and large, middle-sized, and small landholdings
coexisted.43 For a brief period in the second half of the fifteenth century, when
land was plentiful, many farms were worked by large households consisting of
groups of brothers and their (nuclear) families, the frérèches. By pooling their
labour resources they could work more land than any individual family could
have managed on its own. Over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, access to land became more difficult, partly because of population
recovery after a period of plague. Estates were divided equally, and peasant
holdings became more fragmented and smaller. At the same time, a few
estates grew larger – not those of nobles or emerging bourgeois but mostly
those of a few wealthy locals ‘of peasant origin’.44 These processes squeezed
out the middle-sized estates.
Even where deliberate policies of land reform and redistribution are
instituted (such as were regularly demanded and sometimes happened in
Greek poleis), it is difficult to prevent the accumulation of land and the
domination and exploitation of labour by élites. For example, in 1811, under
anti-feudal legislation of the Kingdom of Naples, good farmland belonging to
large church and feudal estates was divided into parcels and apportioned to
landless peasants in lots of about 3 –4 tomolate (1.02 – 1.36 hectares). Almost
all of these were sold to the Barracco family in 1821, ten years after the
distribution and the earliest date at which the owners were allowed to sell
them. The plots were too small to be viable for subsistence or for supporting
livestock, especially for single women who lived some distance away.45
LAND DIVISIONS AND THE EXPLOITATION OF THE COUNTRYSIDE IN

THE ARCHAIC GREEK WORLD
This line of argument raises important issues for understanding the significance
of archaeologically attested systems of land division in the archaic Greek
world. To what extent can these be considered a manifestation of a specifically
Greek culture imprinted on Mediterranean landscapes?
In combination with the documentary evidence for the establishment of
colonies (much of it disturbingly secondary), land divisions have generally
been interpreted as implying equality of land distribution46 or at least an
egalitarian ethos47 within the structure of an urbanized polis. In fact, what we
see on the ground is a measure of land, not a unit of ownership, whose very
existence implies a numerate élite. The stated principle of distributions of land
in later times is generally that the allocation of land be fair, but there is no
implication that the ‘portions’ of all landowners were the same size.48 In the
archaic period, the division of land into equal-sized parcels need not have had
any implications for the size or scale of the distribution of landholdings to
individual citizens or colonists, and there is no justification for pushing the
radical democratic principle of equal holdings back to archaic times. Élite
colonists may have had access to more than one ‘portion’, just as the ‘fair’
distribution of booty in war allocated a greater share to the (élite) leaders
(e.g., Homer Iliad 1.163 –8). If plots were equal in size or in some other sense
but shares of land were not so, this in itself could have led to the creation of a
potential source of debt-bondsmen or dependent labourers over the long term
as poorer farmers obligated themselves to wealthier ones in times of trouble
(as in the nineteenth-century Italian example cited above).
More significant, however, is the agrarian underpinning of these early
land-division systems. Jameson and Boyd suggested that the large unit
measurement for what ultimately became urban land divisions at sixth-century
Halieis was based on a notional ‘farm size’ of 50 plethra.49 The big squares
at Halieis were approximately 210 metres on a side. This gives an area of
4.41 hectares. However, the internal divisions are also interesting: the strips
appear to be bisected, producing 14 strips in the better preserved southeastern
block. Each strip then works out to a nominal 0.315 hectare – a notional day’s
ploughing. A glance at the land divisions in the area of the ‘agora’ apparently
surviving from the earliest levels at Megara Hyblaea, which may date to the
eighth-century founding of the city, also suggests that the sizes of blocks
cluster at around the nominal equivalent of a day’s ploughing, between 0.275
and 0.298 hectare, with even the short blocks just under the lower end of the
range (Insula 15 ¼ 0:138 hectare) (Table 2).50
This observation might support Jameson and Boyd’s suggestion that
‘urban’ land division was conceptualized in rural terms.51 The above analysis
suggests that this idea could be pushed farther, implying that ‘urban’ land
division was not conceptualized as ‘urban’ at all in the first instance, however
the land was utilized later. What, in reality, could ‘urban’, as we understand
TABLE 2
SIZES OF LAND DIVISIONS AT HALIEIS AND MEGARA HYBLAEA
Halieis Megara Hyblaea
Square: 210 metres per side ¼ 4:41 hectares Insula 3 ¼ 0:289 hectare
(= 50 plethra?), divided into 14 strips, Insula 6 ¼ 0:298 hectare
each strip ¼ 0:315 hectare Insula 15 ¼ 0:138 hectare (short one)
Insula 18 ¼ 0:275 hectare
the term for classical or later times, have meant in eighth- or seventh-century
Greece?52 More important, it might imply that land (especially good, flat land)
was appropriated or distributed in small parcels whose size was based on a

notional ‘day’s ploughing’. The holdings of an individual or a family group
might then have been made up of a number of such parcels. They tell us
nothing, however, about equality or egalitarianism as conceived by early
Greek communities. Nor do they support the idea that the sociopolitical entity
we call the polis was enmeshed in the development of urbanism.53 Rather, the
use of a nominal ‘day’s ploughing’ as the basis of early land divisions suggests
that cities developed out of a landscape originally constructed as a specific
kind of rural, agrarian landscape – a patchwork landscape of family and
community relationships.
CONCLUSION
The problem of the shortage of household labour to work land is not simply an
issue of the comparability of technologies and environments but also one of
social structures and discourses. In all of the examples cited above the
fundamental unit of social organization and, in consequence, the unit of labour
deployment and farm operation is the household consisting of a nuclear or
stem family. These households are generally founded on bilateral kinship.
Property is generally, ideally, devolved through some form of partible
inheritance. This does not mean, though, that family groups (especially among
élites) do not act in concert within larger political communities to
exploit land and labour more effectively. It would be interesting to map
the degree to which tensions and conflicts might arise between these
two different levels of solidarity in particular Mediterranean societies.
In special circumstances larger configurations do occur and social conventions
are bent and manipulated, but they appear to be volatile and relatively short-
lived – variations on a set of themes, not a different tune. I am not, by
this, arguing for a uniformitarian view of Mediterranean rural life. These
underlying shared patterns are the result of a combination of shared
environmental, technological, political, and historical factors. The diversity
and complexity of the variations are equally interesting and significant for
interpreting broad Mediterranean themes.
The Mediterranean landscapes of the archaic Greek world, in comparison
with the rural landscapes of later periods, are a good example of such diversity
and complexity. They share with many other Mediterranean rural
societies the use of a nominal day’s ploughing as a fundamental land
measure – the technological link between culture and nature. However, unlike
the çiftliks of Ottoman times or the latifundia of Roman or early modern times,
which encompass many days’ ploughing, the small unit of a single day’s
ploughing becomes the signature of archaic (and classical) Greek landscapes,

made permanent by land divisions on the ground. The emphasis on these small
divisions might suggest that Greeks themselves from the outset perceived one
critical facet of their communities to be privately owned property worked by
the shifting succession of households of these communities: worked by one
generation, constantly changing in shape and use, and then inherited by its
children. The monumental public buildings of urban centres later came to be
another such manifestation of Greek landscapes, representative of these
communities as a collective whole.54
Plainly, Mediterranean landscapes have deep structures founded on shared
and historically connected common themes and constraints. It is also clear,
however, that different cultures with different conceptualizations of politics
and place, society and space, have created landscapes with unique identities
even directly on top of landscapes shaped by quite different ideals and
ideologies. Understanding the underlying themes helps us to recognize more
clearly and with greater understanding the diversity of the variations.
N OT E S
1. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol.1,
trans. Siân Reynolds (London, 1972).
2. ‘Landscape’ is a concept that has frequently been used by archaeologists in recent years as
a useful vehicle for the holistic interpretation of archaeological, topographical, and
environmental data. It has been used in many different ways and in many different kinds of
studies, from the application of geographical information systems, to the contextual
aesthetics of a monument to the spatial analysis of religious activity. Phenomenological
approaches reconstructing landscapes of the mind and the imagination have proven
particularly fruitful. See, for example, B. Bender (ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives
(Providence, RI, 1993); W. Ashmore and A.B. Knapp (eds.), Archaeologies of Landscape:
Contemporary Perspectives (Oxford, 1999); P.J. Ucko and R. Layton (eds.), The
Archaeology and Anthropology of Landscape: Shaping Your Landscape (London, 1999).
Here I am using ‘landscape’ in a more limited way to express the long-term interaction
between human societies and the larger biological, geological, and geographical environment
in which they function.
3. For the main references, see V.D. Hanson, The Other Greeks (New York, 1995), pp.91–219;
A.M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (London 1980), pp.35–9;
I. Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History: Words and Things in Iron Age Greece
(Oxford, 2000), pp.96 and 259–60; R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World
(London, 1991), pp.94–5, 208– 9 and 310; R. Osborne, Greece in the Making, 1200–479 BC
(London, 1996), pp.60–63.
4. See also L. Foxhall, ‘Bronze to Iron: Agricultural Systems in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron
Age Greece and the Implications for Social and Political Structures’, Annual of the British
School at Athens, 90 (1995), pp.239–50.
5. Braudel, The Mediterranean, pp.421, 425.
6. L. Foxhall and H.A. Forbes, ‘Sitometreia: The Role of Grain as a Staple Food in Classical
Antiquity’, Chiron, 12 (1982), pp.41–90.
7. Sallares, Ecology of the Ancient Greek World, p.310.
8. Hanson, The Other Greeks, p.82; cf. pp.36–41.
9. Or earlier, for that matter, though I am not here interested in considering the so-called
‘structural revolution’ of the eighth century BCE; see I. Morris, ‘Archaeology and Archaic
Greek History’, in N.R.E. Fisher and H. van Wees (eds.), Archaic Greece: New Approaches
and New Evidence (London, 1998), pp.71–2. See also the arguments of F. De Angelis,
‘The Foundation of Selinous: Overpopulation or Opportunities?’ in G.R. Tsetskhladze and
F. De Angelis (eds.), The Archaeology of Greek Colonisation (Oxford, 1994), pp.87–110,
who presents a persuasive case that Selinous was not founded in response to population
pressure in its mother city, Megara Hyblaea.
10. Zagora: A. Cambitoglou, J.J. Coulton, J. Birmingham and J.R. Green, Zagora 1 (Sydney,
1971); A. Cambitoglou, A. Birchall, J.J. Coulton and J.R. Green, Zagora 2 (Athens, 1988);
Koukounaries: D. Skilardi, ‘Anaskaphê stên Paro’, Praktika (1982), p.252; D. Skilardi,
‘Anaskaphê stên Paro’, Praktika (1984), pp.280–82; D. Skilardi, ‘Anaskaphê Parou’,
Praktika (1986), p.173; D. Skilardi, ‘Anaskaphê Parou’, Praktika (1987), p.221; D. Skilardi,
‘Anaskaphê Parou’, Praktika (1988), pp.198–200; Incoronata: Università degli Studi di
Milano, Istituto di Archeologia and Commune di Milano, Ricerche archeologiche all’
Incoronata di Metaponto, 3 vols. (Milan).
11. C. Morgan and J.J. Coulton, ‘The Polis as a Physical Entity’, in M.H. Hansen (ed.), The Polis
as an Urban Centre and as a Political Community (Copenhagen, 1997), p.91.
12. Osborne, Making of Greece, p.239; I. Morris, ‘The Athenian Economy Twenty Years after
the Ancient Economy’, Classical Philology, 89 (1994), p.364.
13. J.C. Carter, ‘Metapontum – Land, Wealth, and Population’, in J P. Descoeudres (ed.), Greek
Colonists and Native Populations (Oxford, 1990), p.413.
14. Ibid., p.413.
15. Ibid., p.410, Fig. 3.
16. Ibid., p.421.
17. J. Bintliff, ‘Recognizing the Archaic in Greek Survey’, unpublished seminar paper presented
at Oxford, 2001; J.F. Cherry, J.L. Davis, and E. Mantzourani, Landscape Archaeology as
Long-Term History: Northern Keos in the Cycladic Islands from Earliest Settlement until
Modern Times (Los Angeles, 1991), pp.328–31, esp. Figs. 17.1 and 17.2: very few sherds
found could be definitely assigned to the archaic period; Morgan and Coulton, ‘The Polis as a
Physical Entity’, p.121.
18. Cherry et al., Landscape Archaeology, pp.246– 8 and 330; W. Cavanagh, J. Crouwel, R.W.V.
Catling, and G. Shipley, Continuity and Change in a Greek Rural Landscape: The Laconia
Survey, Vol.2 (London, 1996), pp.86–9 (archaic and classical pottery treated as a single
category); M.H. Jameson, C.N. Runnels, and T.H. van Andel, A Greek Countryside:
The Southern Argolid from Prehistory to the Present Day (Stanford, 1994), pp.372–81, esp.
pp.376 and 380; C.B. Mee and H.A. Forbes, A Rough and Rocky Place: The Landscape and
Settlement History of the Methana Peninsula, Greece (Liverpool, 1997), pp.57– 61.
19. Jameson et al., A Greek Countryside, pp.376 and 379.
20. Morris, ‘The Athenian Economy’, pp.363–6; Archaeology as Cultural History, pp.138–44
and 155–91; cf. Hanson, The Other Greeks, pp.50– 89.
21. Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History, pp.155–91; cf. Hanson, The Other Greeks,
pp.108–26.
22. Morris ‘The Athenian Economy’, p.304; cf. Hanson, The Other Greeks, p.186.
23. Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History, p.142. On ‘farm plots’ in the Crimea, see
now J.C. Carter, M. Crawford, P. Lkehman, G. Nikolasnko, and J. Trelogan, ‘The Chora
of Chersonnesos in Crimea, Ukraine’, American Journal of Archaeology, 104 (2000),
pp.707–43.
24. Carter, ‘Metapontum – Land, Wealth and Population’, p.423.
25. E. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, trans. John Day (Urbana, Chicago, and
London, 1974), p.39.
26. Hamish Forbes, ‘The Agrarian Economy of the Ermionidha around 1700: An Ethnohistorical
Reconstruction’, in S.B. Sutton (ed.), Contingent Countryside: Settlement, Economy, and
Land Use in the Southern Argolid since 1700 (Stanford, 2000), pp.63–4, has recently carried
out a similar exercise in relation to the southern Argolid in the early modern period.
27. It is hard to identify any major technological developments from archaic to classical times in
the Greek world. The available documentary and archaeological evidence suggests that more
or less the same wide range of agricultural techniques was known across both periods and that
different elements of the technological repertoire were selected as appropriate in different
times, places, and circumstances. This is not at all the same as technological development,
pace the rather mechanistic and evolutionist arguments of I. Morris, ‘Hard surfaces’, in
P. Cartledge, E.E. Cohen, and L. Foxhall, Money, Labour, and Land: Approaches to the
Economies of Ancient Greece (London, 2002), pp.33 and 37.
28. H.A. Forbes, ‘Strategies and Soils: Technology, Production and Environment in the
Peninsula of Methana, Greece’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Pennsylvania, 1982, p.357.
29. Ibid., pp.358–9.
30. Ibid., pp.361–2; Fig. 47, p.363; Fig. 48, pp.365–7.
31. S. Aschenbrenner, ‘A Contemporary Community’, in W.A. McDonald and G.R. Rapp Jr.
(eds.), The Minnesota Messenia Expedition: Reconstructing a Bronze Age Regional
Environment (Minneapolis, 1972), p.57.
32. Ibid., p.58.
33. F. Zarinebaf-Shahr, J. Bennett, and J. Davis, The Ottoman Reconquest of the Morea in 1715:
A Case Study from Western Messenia (Hesperia suppl., forthcoming).
34. Ibid., p.50.
35. Ibid., p.55.
36. Ibid., p.58.
37. M. Petrusewicz, Latifundium: Moral Economy and Material Life in a European Periphery,
trans. Judith Green (Ann Arbor, MI, 1996).
38. Ibid., pp.116–17.
39. A. Burford, Land and Labor in the Greek World (Baltimore, MD, and London, 1993),
pp.67–8; M.H. Jameson, ‘Agriculture and Slavery in Classical Athens’, Classical Journal,
73 (1977–78), pp.125 and 131; Morris, Archaeology as Cultural History, p.142.
40. Lathouresa, Attica: H. Lauter, Lathuresa: Beiträge zur Architektur und Siedlungsgeschichte
in spätgeometrischer Zeit (Mainz, 1985); M.H. Jameson, ‘Domestic Space in the
Greek City-State’, in S. Kent (ed.), Domestic Architecture and the Use of Space:
An Interdisciplinary Cross-cultural Study (Cambridge, 1990), pp.108–9. For Zagora and
Koukounaries see n.10.
41. Jameson, ‘Agriculture and Slavery in Classical Athens’, pp.122–45.
42. Petrusewicz, Latifundium, pp.25–47.
43. Le Roy Ladurie, The Peasants of Languedoc, p.22.
44. Ibid., pp.93–4.
45. Petrusewicz, Latifundium, pp.64–8. On the other hand, the Italian agrarian reforms of 1954
in the same area apportioned plots of around 4.5 hectares. Carter, ‘Metapontum – Land,
Wealth, and Population’, p.423.
46. D. Asheri, Distribuzioni di terre nell’antica Grecia (Turin, 1966); Hanson, The Other
Greeks, pp.195–6; O. Murray, Early Greece (London, 1993), pp.113–15 and 117; cf. 164;
S. Isager and J.-E. Skydsgaard, Ancient Greek Agriculture: An Introduction (London, 1992),
p.123; M.H. Jameson, ‘Class in the Ancient Greek Countryside’, in P.N. Doukellis and
L.G. Mendoni (eds.), Structures rurales et sociétés antiques (Paris, 1994), p.59.
47. Isager and Skydsgaard, Ancient Greek Agriculture, p.69.
48. Burford, Land and Labor in the Greek World, p.27.
49. T.D. Boyd and M.H. Jameson, ‘Urban and Rural Land Division in Ancient Greece’,
Hesperia, 50 (1981), pp.327–42.
50. G. Vallet, F. Villard, and P. Auberson, Mégara Hyblaea: Le quartier de l’Agora archaı̈que
(Paris and Rome, 1976). I am grateful to Anne Forbes for assistance with the calculations.
The excavators believed that from the seventh century, partly as a result of later arrivals
to the colony, plot sizes were unequal, pp.302 and 405. A. Di Vita, ‘Town Planning
in the Greek Colonies of Sicily from the Time of Their Foundation to the Punic Wars’,
in J.-P. Descoeudres (ed.), Greek Colonists and Native Populations (Canberra and Oxford,
1990), p.349, has observed that ‘at Megara Hyblaea the houses in the area of the agora are
too close together to have formed part of regular klêroi, and too far apart to speak of an urban
setting’. Cf. R. Osborne, ‘Early Greek Colonization? The Nature of Early Greek Settlement
in the West’, in N. Fisher and H. van Wees (eds.), Archaic Greece: New Approaches and
New Evidence (London and Swansea, 1998), pp.260–61, on the issue of the five separate
grids. In the urban centre of Metaponto, the ‘house blocks’ measure 190 £ 35 metres,
giving an area of 0.665 hectare, or two days’ ploughing (at a nominal 0.333 hectare per
day’s ploughing); it is significant that the division still seems to be based on units of a ‘day’s
ploughing’. The date of these divisions is unclear: in their present state they are associated
with the fourth-century city. See Carter, ‘Metapontum – Land, Wealth, and Population’,
p.406 n.2.
51. Boyd and Jameson, ‘Urban and Rural Land Division’, pp.340–42. On land division in Sicily
and southern Italy see also F. D’Andria and K. Mannino, Ricerche sulla casa in Magna
Grecia e in Sicilia (Rome, 1996).
52. I. Morris, ‘The Early Polis as City and State’, in J. Rich and A. Wallace-Hadrill (eds.),
City and Country in the Ancient World (London, 1991), p.40: ‘Town planning is more a sign
of centralisation than of urbanism per se (in so far as it is legitimate to separate them).’
53. The issue of whether ‘urbanism’ is an essential quality of poleis, especially early poleis, has
been fruitfully debated in Hansen (ed.), The Polis as an Urban Centre, by Hansen himself and
by Morgan and Coulton.
54. Morgan and Coulton, ‘The Polis as a Physical Entity’, pp.103–16 and 129.

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This article was downloaded by: [York University Libraries]

On: 21 November 2014, At: 22:03

Mediterranean Historical Review

Cultures, Landscapes, and Identities in the

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0951896032000230499

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in the Mediterranean World

Mediterranean landscapes are human artefacts in which complex cultural

Mediterranean Historical Review, Vol.18, No.2, December 2003, pp.75–92

an interconnected whole, diachronically and culturally, through the features

These issues have been at the heart of the study of Mediterranean

THE EXPLOITATION OF LAND

The question of agricultural production in archaic and classical Greece3

activities, however, when they flourished, were enmeshed in stable and

AVAILABILITY OF LAND IN THE ARCHAIC GREEK WORLD

Archaeological evidence suggests, however, that shortage of land, in any

30 per cent of the Classical sites have produced Archaic pottery,

THE SOCIAL AND POLITICAL CONTEXT OF AGRARIAN LANDSCAPES

Recently Morris has suggested what he calls a ‘new model’ of exploitation

TECHNOLOGY, LABOUR, AND LAND

A remarkable Ottoman cadaster translated and analyzed by Fariba

(probably a maximum), a figure comparable to those for Greece given above.

INTERPRETING AGRARIAN LANDSCAPES

Estimates of a minimum viable ‘peasant’ holding by Burford, Jameson,

‘voluntarily’ for a generous cash settlement on marriage. This allowed the

LAND DIVISIONS AND THE EXPLOITATION OF THE COUNTRYSIDE IN

Halieis Megara Hyblaea

was appropriated or distributed in small parcels whose size was based on a

ploughing becomes the signature of archaic (and classical) Greek landscapes,

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