Cultivating the Emerging Greek World: Land Use, Urbanization and Interaction in the Iron Age Mediterranean (15 min)

Presenters

Tom Maltas, University of Vienna

Abstract

Two prominent features of the Iron Age Mediterranean are a trend toward urbanization and an increase in pan-Mediterranean trade and interaction. The sociopolitical implications of these processes have been widely discussed in topics such as the rise of the polis, Greek and Phoenician colonization, and Mediterraneanization. Both phenomena also imply changing relationships with rural landscapes, however, which have received less attention despite their importance to understanding the routines and movements of past populations. A growing body of bioarchaeological research is beginning to rectify this through direct evidence for the nature of land, crop, and livestock exploitation at the core of agrarian lifeways.

In this paper, I synthesize this research to provide an overview of changing patterns of farming and land use across the Iron Age Mediterranean. Focusing on areas of Greek and Phoenician colonial contact, I consider how rural communities responded to new opportunities and demands created by shifting networks of trade and interaction. I go on to assess the implications of this evidence for patterns of intraregional mobility and interaction that contributed to the formation of a culturally integrated Greek world. I find that urbanization in the Early Iron Age resulted in increased land clearance and the expansion of local farming systems prior to colonial contact. Particularly in the central and western Mediterranean, Phoenician and Greek contact resulted in the transformation of farming systems toward the production of value-added products for interregional exchange networks. Both of these phenomena imply new patterns of mobility within rural landscapes as the hinterlands of increasingly urbanized populations grew alongside the local exchange of specialist products. This points to an increasingly interconnected Mediterranean on both regional and local scales.