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“Producing the Peasant in the Corinthian Countryside”
David Pettegrew, Messiah CollegeWilliam Caraher, University of North DakotaAnnual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of Americaand the American Philological AssociationPhiladelphiaJanuary 2012(Special thanks to the directors of the Eastern Korinthia Archaeological Survey,Timothy Gregory and Daniel Pullen, for their continuing generosity in allowing usto use the project data for this paper).
Introduction
Peasants have often occupied the
periphery
of ancient and moderndiscussions about the economy of Greek and Roman Corinth. In antiquity, writershad little to say about agriculture, land use, and settlement in the Corinthia, preferring instead to comment on the region’s commercial facilities
(Slide)
. In themodern era, scholars have ignored and downplayed rural Corinthians or, in theabsence of evidence, abstracted them apart from physical places of habitation.Over the last few decades, however, regional studies have changed our knowledge of Corinth’s territory in two fundamental ways. First, survey in theCorinthia has revealed numerous and varied places that people occupied fromancient to modern times. And second, regional studies in Greece more broadlyhave highlighted the contingencies of rural life that complicate assumptions aboutsynchronous categories like “peasant” and their “static” country abodes. Territorywas dynamic space constantly shaped by regional and global forces.In our paper today, we seek to make a particular contribution to thecurrently under-developed state of knowledge about the Corinthian countryside,and a more general contribution to this session about using regional survey to
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place small farmers. We use three case studies—one modern, two ancient—tohighlight how a wide range of processes and activities made rural Corinthiansdifferently visible and therefore differently detectable to the blunt instruments of regional surface survey. The methods of archaeological survey most easilyintersect the lives of rural inhabitants when they invest in places over time, butthese investments reflect the accumulation of resources and connections to a wider world that problematize traditional definintions of peasants as timeless, isolated people
(Slide)
.(Our first case study is part of a collaborative venture between Bill Caraher,Timothy Gregory, David Pettegrew, and Lita Tzortzopoulou-Gregory. We arecurrently preparing this for publication)
Lakka Skoutara
When our field team first discovered the modern settlement of LakkaSkoutara in 2001, it seemed, at first glance, an ideal environment for thinkingabout the diachronic processes of habitation and agriculture in the territory.Located near Corinth’s historical border with Epidauria, Lakka Skoutara is a basinhemmed in by steep wooded slopes containing a dozen long houses apparentlyoriented toward subsistence agriculture. Bypassed by the modern roads in the areaand filled with swarms of stinging bees and biting flies, this cluster of countryhouses around a church and crossroads was neither historically significant nor unique in the region.Over a 10 year period, an EKAS team documented the settlement with acombination of intensive pedestrian survey, architectural study, and interviewswith the few people still alive who had some connection to the valley. This multi-faceted study demonstrated a dramatic contrast between the rather limited natureof the archaeological evidence and the fluid processes of land use and agriculturereported in our interviews.
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•
While thousands of olive trees today seem to point to olive cultivation as themain agricultural activity, our informants told us that many of these trees were planted just 50-80 years ago.
(Slide)
The only material indicators of recentolive processing, in any case, were crates, pruned branches, and a few woodenladders. The discovery of a premodern olive pressbed (
trapetum mortarium
)
near the church, however, suggests that olives were processed in the valleycenturies before our informants’ memories.
•
In contrast, there was much evidence for sustained productive investments incereals
(Slide x 2)
: massive piles of stones cleared from fields, numerous fieldwalls to keep out grazing animals, overgrown terraces, and threshing floors 10-20 m in diameter! But inhabitants informed us that cereal production ceased by the decade after WW II.
•
Likewise, resin production
(Slide)
was historically important in the regionfrom the 19
th
century until the 1970s, but the ubiquitous artifacts of resin production—corroding resin collectors that litter the wooded hillsides—are poor reflectors of the scale of production historically. The large basins builtinto and outside of a couple of the houses
(Slide)
suggest that resin collectingwas a significant economic industry that may have been energized by proximity to the Saronic. The discovery of 19
th
and 20
th
century pottery andtiles imported from Aegina and the Piraeus at least point to goods exchanged inSaronic markets via the nearby harbor of Korphos.The houses also defied facile classification
(Slide)
. Interviews andformation process studies documented aggregate structures that representedepisodes of construction, remodeling, abandonment, and reconstruction. In somecases, these archaeological processes were obvious from assorted roof tiles of various dates and fabrics, as well as the attractive mixture of
bricks and cinder blocks in restored walls. But in most cases, our informants revealed morecomplex life cycles
(Slide)
. We learned that one house (#3: Sklias) now
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Caraher and Pettegrew, Producing the Peasant in the Corinthian Countryside
This paper explores the peasant in the Corinthian countryside. It was delivered at the 113th Annual Joint Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of America and the American Philological Association.
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