The ancient Greek farmstead first appeared in modern scholarship in the middle decades of the twentieth century, as archaeologists began documenting the countrysides of mainland Greece and the Aegean islands. Initially scholars focused on isolated rural sites with visible architecture or features, such as blockhouses, towers, enclosures and threshing floors, but the advent of regional archaeological surveys in Greece from the 1970s shifted attention to the more frequent scatters of table wares, cooking pots, storage vessels, transport amphoras and rooftiles that seemingly pointed to ubiquitous rural occupations. As scholars wrestled with the definition, character and identification of farmsteads from different kinds of evidence—surface scatters of pottery, excavated rural buildings and Greek literary and epigraphic texts—the ‘classical farmstead’ emerged as a problematic and difficult category of regional archaeological survey.
Maeve McHugh's new book on the subject aims to find a way through problems of identification and reinstate the farmstead as a foundational category for studying the social and economic life of the polis. This valuable survey of the ancient evidence and modern debates about farms and farming establishes criteria for identifying farms archaeologically and considers their broader role in the connective topography and social and economic networks of individual regions. The ‘Ancient Greek’ in the title references a focus on mainland Greece between 450 and 250 bc, while ‘farmstead’ refers to a small rural centre of occupation and agricultural activity (p. 1). The book, in fact, serves as a wide-ranging introduction to small rural sites of Archaic to Hellenistic date and includes examples from the Aegean islands and the regions of Cyprus, Italy, Macedonia and the Black Sea.
The Ancient Greek Farmstead is organized into a brief introduction, four main chapters and a summative conclusion. The opening chapter walks the reader through a history of farmsteads in modern scholarship, historiographic debates over their definition and identification, and the specific contribution of regional pedestrian surveys. The second chapter constitutes a full but efficient overview of farms and farming in Greek poleis that outlines the character of ancient textual evidence and long-standing debates about agricultural strategies (extensive versus intensive), settlement patterns (nucleated versus dispersed), populations (bailiffs, slaves, hoplites and hired or dependent labourers) and land ownership; the theme that emerges is the varied experience of agriculture and settlement. The third chapter continues this theme in reviewing the archaeological evidence for farms and farming from published second-wave regional surveys of the Akte and Methana peninsulas in the Argolid, the Eurotas valley in Laconia, and Atene, a deme and district of Attica. Considering the shared attributes of the small rural sites identified by these projects, McHugh lays out four criteria for identifying and classifying farmsteads: 1) location on or near arable land; 2) relatively small size of occupation debris (less than 7000 sq. m); 3) presence of certain types of occupational and domestic ceramic objects (storage, kitchen and fine table ware); and 4) occurrence of food-processing tools such as querns and handmills. These criteria, which are not overly rigid—agricultural tools, for example, are not consistently present at most farms—are also the basis for distinguishing types of farming sites (tower complexes, simple rural sites and agricultural installations), and subdividing those types according to function and frequency of occupation (e.g. towers for storage versus tower complexes for habitation; short-term occupation versus year-round settlement: see p. 86, fig. 3.22). The interesting fourth chapter applies several GIS tools (least-cost paths, path-distance and viewshed analysis) to the topography of Methana and Akte in the Argolid to showcase the significant role of networks and rural connectedness, to highlight the many connections between urban centres and their territories and to undermine the view of farms as isolated entities. Chapter 5 steps back again from the archaeological case studies to survey recent discussions about the social and economic dimensions of farms and farming, the economy (subsistence versus market), roads and markets, and rural consumption. A very brief conclusion follows, as well as appendixes and tables.
The book is well illustrated and documented. Some 22 tables and 58 maps, building plans and photographs of towers and farms contribute to McHugh's overall synthesis. The figures are generally of high quality, but some of the maps appear at such coarse scales (e.g. fig. 3.6–3.7, showing farms against slope, and fig. 4.16–4.17, showing viewsheds from small farms and installations) that it is difficult to appreciate the perspectives of individual sites and difficult to evaluate the author's arguments. Chapters are well organized and straightforward, with conclusions summing up previous discussion, but the text would have benefited from another round of rigorous copy editing to correct numerous problems of grammar, punctuation and style.
On the whole, The Ancient Greek Farmstead marks an important and welcome introduction to modern debates about Greek farms and farming that is exemplary for its synthesis and integration of archaeological, epigraphical, textual and ethnographic evidence. McHugh shows throughout a sensitivity to different kinds of evidence, the challenge of their interpretation (e.g. the ambiguity and biases of texts, or the imprecise nature and limits of archaeological evidence) and their potential for making positive assessments about ancient farming. In the process, she underscores the variety of occupation even within the same region that suggests a dynamic continuum of agricultural strategies reflecting the topographic variance of the region, differential quality of land and underlying social and economic realities, such as the status of the farmer. McHugh is likewise convincing in her description of the ancient Greek countryside as an inherently interconnected space in which small farms were rarely isolated, but linked to one another and larger sites through viewsheds, routes and commercial connections. In short, this is an even-handed and nuanced treatment that recognizes the complexity of human interaction with the landscape.
Given the strong emphasis on typologies, ancient agricultural variety and the dynamism of habitation, it is disappointing that fundamental issues of archaeological method and interpretation play such a limited role in the work. A detailed and systematic discussion of the methods of the four archaeological surveys reviewed in the work on matters such as the coverage, conditions and intensity of survey would have added greater depth and critical reflection to the analysis. One wonders, for example, how different strategies of walker spacing and artefact collection, or varied ground cover and visibility, differently affected the assemblages documented by these surveys that are the basis for McHugh's typologies of sites of different size and character. It is likewise surprising that little attention is given to the corpus of scholarship surrounding non-site, siteless and distributional survey approaches including specific criticisms of sites in the context of Greek landscape archaeology, considering how important that critical literature was for problematizing the ontology and methodological definition of sites and their various sub-categories, such as farmsteads. Proponents of siteless survey in Greece have drawn attention in some regions to continuous carpets of artefacts that are not easily divisible into discrete clusters, as well as smaller and lower-density scatters of pottery that represent the vestigial remains of ancient settlements; they have also called into question the site paradigm altogether by questioning the direct link between visible artefact scatters and ancient categories of settlement. The restudy of older, second-wave surveys in The Ancient Greek Farmstead is commendable, but too frequently takes the surveyors’ original identification of small rural sites as given. Reading against the grain of the text of those original reports might contribute to an even broader typology that includes smaller, lower-density places in the landscape as evidence of the most contingent forms of occupation and short-term agricultural investments in the ancient countryside.
In a related vein, The Ancient Greek Farmstead would have benefited from a more through treatment of middle-range theory to connect farms and farming practices to the visible record through ancient human behaviours. The author certainly recognizes the role of cultural-formation processes in shaping archaeological assemblages, as she notes how missing artefact classes, such as tiles and agricultural tools, might be absent because of abandonment behaviours, and that larger or denser scatters are products of more intensive and longer-duration occupations. Yet, in creating typologies, the absence of evidence for certain classes is frequently taken as evidence of absence at time of occupation—a problematic assumption that overlooks the myriad ways that cultural or natural processes have reshaped original ancient buildings and assemblages over thousands of years. Some discussion of the processes that have generated the visible scatters and their effects on this new picture of farms and farming would add chronological depth to McHugh's view of a dynamic and fluid landscape.
Considering the role of methods and processes should refine rather than overturn the picture and typology presented here. The Ancient Greek Farmstead remains an important synthesis and contribution to the study of the ancient countryside and a new starting point for scholarship of the Greek farmstead. The student should read this work alongside the broader body of critical archaeological and historical scholarship considering the challenges of identification that problematized the farmstead in the first place.
