 The archeological research was located in Huichin, the ancestral and unceded territory of Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, successors of the historic and sovereign Verona ban of Alameda County. We acknowledge that this land remains of great importance to the Ohlone people and that the ARF community inherits a history of archeological scholarship that has disturbed Ohlone ancestors and erased living Ohlone people from the present and future of this land. It is therefore our collective responsibility to critically transform archeological inheritance in support of Ohlone sovereignty and to hold the University of California accountable to the needs of all American Indian indigenous peoples. Today's lecture will be given by Grace Ernie, Rural Variation Settlement Society in Archaic and Classical Creed. Grace is, I'm very excited to say, a new colleague both in daggers and in ancient history, from the Mediterranean archeology and at the ARF. Coming to us most recently from a low postdoc fellowship in Athens, which I actually spent quite a number of years, and is a recent PhD from that place that cannot be named from the other side of the bay, and we'll forgive her for that, with the wonderful dissertation on landscapes with an equality social differentiation in geometric classical creed. She's done an amazing amount of fieldwork. A lot of that centered on the island of Crete, but also in what's called, I'm very jealous, the Bears, Bays of East Attica Regional Survey. I feel like that should be one of our projects. This is a co-director of the Intensive Survey, a ceramicist without project, as well. And has worked in other Satotic islands through the Corinth excavations, but also in Israel, as well, in the earlier stage of her education. Most of her publications thus far have to do with her fieldwork and are connected with the numerous projects that she's been continuing to work on and has worked on in the past, but also includes things like co-authored article demographic dynamics of publishing in the American Journal of Archeology for the AJA in published in 2023. And also a book chapter, Gender and Power in the Practice of Mediterranean Archeology, together with Dimitris Nakasas in the Archeological Ethics in Practice. That's forthcoming, but I wanted to point that out. So I think we have a lot to enjoy today. I'm looking forward to it myself. Hope you are as well. Please help me welcome Grace Ernie. That's for the people. Okay, so thanks so much for that introduction, Kim, and thanks to all of you for hosting me today. So I'd like to start my talk today with a little bit of poetry. Near the end of Homer's Odyssey, the Greek hero Odysseus, who's just arrived home in disguise after an absence of 20 years, tells a lie to his wife Penelope. When he's asked to name his homeland, Odysseus describes Crete, the largest island via Jeanne, located right here. He says, there's a certain land Crete in the middle of the wine dark sea, beautiful and rich with water flowing around it, and there are many men in it, innumerable, and 90 cities. And each language has been mixed with others. There are Keyans, great-hearted Eteocretans, Cydonians, threefold Dorians, and shining Pelasgians. Odysseus paints an image of Crete as a distant and diverse place, home to many different languages and ethnic groups. Homer's Crete also seems to preserve several different strata of time, combining the Pelasgians, who are associated in later myths with primeval non-Greek-speaking groups, with post-Bronze age, Greek-speaking Dorians. This concept of Crete, a standing outside the main currents of Greek history, society, and politics, has been a very persistent one. The classical Greek philosopher Aristotle's description of Cretan city-states as strict oligarchies, dependent on slave labor, characterized by redistributive communal dining practices, and subject to frequent political disruption, furnished the core elements of historical accounts of post-Manoan Crete throughout much of the 20th century. My talk today approaches archaic and classical Cretan society from a new perspective, an archeological one. I'm going to abandon the 90 cities of Homer's Crete and instead move outward to their countryside, focusing on the material culture of rural settlements and communities. This work forms part of my larger research program, which investigates the construction of new forms of inequality and social difference on Crete from the 7th through the 4th centuries BC, a time of profound cultural change across the Greek world. In the first part of this talk, I'll introduce our main source of information about the rural ancient Mediterranean, the evidence from intensive surface surveys. And I'll critique some of the ways that survey material has been interpreted in the past. Previous analyses of these data have focused heavily on dividing up sites into categories based on their size and on building settlement hierarchies. The artifact assemblages at these sites and the human activities that took place at them have received much less attention. In this model, small survey sites have most often been interpreted as an undifferentiated set of farmsteads. I then pivot to my own methods, which combine synthetic study of rural settlements across the island with in-depth study of small regions. My findings demonstrate a couple of things. First, in contrast to later Greek literary sources, which describe a shared island-wide cultural and political system, there are meaningful differences between regions in Crete, with some regions far more engaged in agricultural intensification, storage, or trade than others. Second, small sites yield a very wide range of diverse assemblages and probably fulfill the variety of different functions. We can't just interpret all of these sites as single-family farmsteads occupied year-round. This point is important since small sites, sites smaller than a hectare or even half a hectare, make up the vast majority of sites recovered by intensive Mediterranean surveys across all periods. If we take the function of these sites for granted rather than investigating them empirically, we're likely to misunderstand and oversimplify ancient patterns of land use. The Cretan evidence thus encourages us to consider alternatives to models of Greek land use and community organization predicated on a class of citizen smallholders living in farmsteads, a narrative that has dominated the interpretation of evidence from archeological surveys on the Greek mainland. A little bit of background on archaic and classical Crete will be helpful here. Starting in the seventh century, small city-states in central Crete produced the first monumental inscribed laws in the Greek world, most famously the Great Code of Gorton which you see up here on the left. The archeological record indicates that Crete saw marked changes in mortuary practice, cult and elite consumption at this time. Though there's much regional diversity across the island, inscriptions suggest some common institutions across some of these emerging Cretan city-states. Cosmoi or magistrates and Andrea or communal dining halls are mentioned in multiple inscriptions. Tribal associations and kin groups created important social divisions between free inhabitants of Cretan communities and a system of agricultural slavery is also well-attested. The sixth and fifth centuries on Crete while once viewed as a period of silence or a gap in the archeological record are now often described instead as a period of austerity or restraint in certain forms of material culture. Plain pottery like the Cretan high-necked cup you see on the right was favored, but the consumption of figured pottery like the black and red figure known to us from Attica or ceramic imports from other parts of the Mediterranean was largely rejected. While several new excavations at archaic and classical Cretan cities are slowly permitting us to bring this period into clearer focus, our knowledge of the populations who lived and worked outside these larger settlements remains obscure. I'll illustrate what I mean with an example from the site of Azoria in East Crete, our most important excavated example of an archaic Cretan urban or proto-urban center. Four archaic houses were built at Azoria during a major spatial reorganization of the site at the end of the seventh century. These houses are all very large for the archaic Greek world with a median size of about 125 square meters and they're very similar to each other in size. However, to look at these four houses, a very small sample to begin with and deduce an economically prosperous and egalitarian community at archaic Azoria would be a hasty and misleading conclusion. In fact, archeobotanical and faunal evidence from these households suggest that they were consumers of agricultural goods that had already undergone much primary processing elsewhere. As such, these houses do not represent a cross-section of the Azoria community. Rather, their places where agricultural wealth and surplus were concentrated, managing labor that occurred elsewhere in the surrounding countryside. In order to fully understand the social dynamics at play in Azoria and other Cretan communities, we need to place urban centers like these within a wider regional context, approaching them as one element in an extended network of social relationships. Archeological surveys which study large regions to understand shifting patterns of settlement and land use over time can help to provide this essential wider context. Analyzing the assemblages at small rural sites not only allows us to better understand production, but it can also shed light on how social relations, ideology and personal choice or agency might shape consumption. It's not easy to make survey assemblages, famously described by Kent Flannery as the junk you find on the surface, speak to such questions, but I hope to convince you today that it's worth a try. In order to realize this ambitious project though, we need to approach survey evidence in a new way. Previous analysis of survey results in Greece has often consisted largely of mapping settlement patterns and building settlement hierarchies based on site size. Archeologists count how many sites they fend in a landscape at different periods, putting dots on maps. They then assign these sites to different size categories, town, village, hamlet and farmstead is a typical settlement hierarchy. You can see one of these on this map, a depiction of the classical settlement hierarchy from the Messara plane in 7 Crete. Survey finds are usually used largely to date occupation at each site and much less attention is devoted to artifact typologies and site functions. Although site size is important, focusing primarily on size ignores much of the information documented by surveys. In particular, this framework aligns questions about site function and differentiation of tasks by implying that all sites in a given category are more or less the same. Put another way, no one farmstead can be distinguished from any other farmstead. Two major intellectual currents underlie archeologists dividing interest in settlement patterns and size hierarchies. The first is evolutionary approaches to state formation, which orders societies along a scale of increasing complexity culminating in the state. It's been famously proposed for instance that states possess a four level settlement hierarchy while chiefdoms only possess three. The number of levels in the settlement hierarchy thus becomes a litmus test for the state where more tiers in the hierarchy are equated with a more complex society. The second trend is economic geography, especially central place theory. A spatial model that sees large sites as higher order centers that concentrate goods and services. And on the other hand, small sites as lower order centers that are relatively homogeneous. Central place theory would predict that there are more goods and services concentrated at these large sites than at smaller ones. Is this in fact true? Are there more types of activities taking place at large survey sites versus small ones? Do all small sites appear to be roughly the same or are there important differences between them? Investigating questions like these can help us to understand if the interpretive framework provided by these ideas is actually a good fit for our archeological evidence. In order to explore the functions of these small sites in more depth, I synthesize legacy data from seven Cretan surveys conducted over the past 50 years. This represents more than 250 sites in total. As you can see, these surveys cover many different regions of the island. I recorded and collated information on site location, size, the presence or absence of different kinds of artifacts like storage jars or figurines, surface architecture and durations of use. I tried to choose artifacts that were likely to be culturally meaningful and linked to specific kinds of human activity. Pifos, a type of large storage jar, drinking vessel like cup, loom weight, figurine or industrial debris are all different examples of categories. When we examine changes in the number of sites over time across these seven regions, two different patterns are apparent. In some places, site numbers increased dramatically in the archaic period, the time period I'm focused on in this talk. In other places, the number of sites peaks much later in the second or first century BC. Attaching meaning to these changes and settlement patterns is not a straightforward task. Archeologists working on the Greek mainland and in other world regions have often argued that dispersed settlement patterns indicate smallholders engaged in intensive agriculture controlling their own surplus. While nucleated settlement patterns reflect the consolidation of lands in the hand of wealthier landowners and the monopolization of surplus by elites. This model hasn't gone unchallenged though. Others have argued that settlement patterns with many small sites might indicate demographic growth and increased social stratification as elites bring the outfield into cultivation under tenant sharecroppers or other forms of dependent labor. These varying interpretations of the same dispersed settlement patterns suggest that if we don't consider the nature of small sites and who's actually occupying them, we face a problem of equifanality. Why couldn't dispersed patterns indicate unfree laborers living close to arable land rather than free smallholders? To answer this, we need to interrogate small sites more closely. It's particularly important because almost two thirds of Creighton survey sites from these periods are less than one hectare in size. These sites are all classified together as farmsteads or small hamlets in most survey publications. But my analysis shows that this classification scheme obscures some important differences. This is the one scatter plot I promise. So this scatter plot sort of demonstrates what I'm talking about, right? Each dot on the plot represents a single Creighton site from this database of legacy survey data that I discussed. The x-axis gives the site size and hectares while the y-axis is just a very simple diversity measure that sums all of the categories of artifacts present at a site. A site where only courseware jars were found, for example, would have a diversity score of one while a site that had drinking vessels, figurines and lamps would have a score of three. This is a really rough approximation of the diversity in this data set that you can see from the messy point of clouds in this plot that there is in fact a very low, almost no correlation between site size and diversity of assemblage. And another way to say this is that there's actually a great deal of variation among these small sites. This holds true when we get rid of outliers. It holds true if you control for time period or for region. And this suggests that the pattern is not due solely to chronological change or to methodological variations between different surveys. These diversity scores alone, though, don't actually tell us very much in detail about the types of activities that took place in ancient sites, right? Two sites could have the same diversity score, but they could actually be really different kinds of places. In order to gain a more nuanced understanding of past human activity, we have to dig more deeply into the assemblages found at these sites. I use several different methods to approach these differences in site function and my research, and I can't discuss all of those findings today, but I can give you a few examples of these rural variations and what they might mean in human terms. I'll limit my consideration to small sites of less than half a hectare, which is about half of the sites recovered from these surveys. Some low-diversity small sites yield mostly courseware or pithoid. These sites might be best interpreted as field stations for agricultural storage and processing rather than as more permanent habitations. Other low-diversity small sites with assemblages dominated by figurines and cups likely represent open-air rural shrines, a common phenomenon on Crete in this period and we'll visit one of those in just a little bit. High-diversity small sites also display a lot of internal variation with some showing evidence for ceramic manufactured textile work or olive processing, as well as possessing fine tablewares and storage vessels. While these sites may be farmsteads in a broad sense, i.e. rural sites that combine evidence of habitation, production, and storage, they're also really distinctive places engaging in unique combinations of activity. The data presented also captures substantial variation between regions and across time, suggesting that the typical Cretan rural settlement isn't a static category, but is instead geographically and chronologically contingent. How might we characterize these sites in more detail? So far my discussions relied entirely on presence-absence data derived from survey publications. These legacy data have a lot of limitations, however, when it comes to understanding rural histories at a finer-grained level. Most publications don't quantify the amount of material from each site or the relative proportions of different finds. Instead, isolated objects are depicted as catalog entries plucked out of their associated assemblages, which makes it more difficult to discern differences in site function. To address this issue, I visited various storerooms of the Greek Ministry of Culture and re-analyzed thousands of survey finds from small rural sites in two distinct regions of the island. This allowed me to perform quantitative and stylistic analysis that isn't possible when working from publications alone. I also visited these sites in person in the fall of 2020 and the summer of 2021, an experience which greatly enhanced my understanding of these landscapes. I'm gonna introduce you to one of these regions now because explanations of the examinations of the sites here will help to illustrate what those dots on the scatterplot actually signify. Our case study today is the Verocastera region located on the Mirabello Bay in East Crete. This is an area that was originally surveyed by the Verocastera Survey Project or VSP in the late 1980s. During their field work, the VSP identified a major shift in settlement patterns beginning in the seventh century BC. The timing of this shift accords well with the other important developments on Crete that I discussed at the beginning of this talk. Two new communities were founded at this time. The early Iron Age settlement of Verocastera from which this photo was taken was abandoned and a very large new settlement was established on a coastal promontory called Nisi Pandelamon below Verocastera's peak. At around the same time, multiple small habitations were founded several kilometers inland in the valleys and ridges around the modern village of Mezalerovs. Many of the ridge sites preserve ancient room complexes and enclosure walls. You can see an example of these structures here. Literary and epigraphic sources, as well as modern toponyms, led the VSP to associate these two areas with the historically attested city state of Istran in the north and Alaross in the south. The evidence from the VSP thus suggests two different models of community organization in the archaic and classical periods. A densely populated coastal settlement at Istran and a string of dispersed smaller settlements inland at Alaross. In a series of visits to Crete, I analyzed the assemblages collected from the 15 sites listed on this slide. To assess site function, I sorted all finds from each site into categories, fine medium course cooking, pythos, amphora, figurine, and calculated the relative proportions of these wares at each site. Today we're gonna pay a visit to two of these sites, SK-11 and PI-4, before I present some synthetic observations about the whole group. Many of the ridge sites can be interpreted as residences, probably for extended king groups, the ones that engaged in different activities and may have possessed different levels of wealth. SK-11 and PI-4, however, are very different types of places and likely fulfilled civic and religious functions for the wider community. Let's start with SK-11 viewed here from the north. This is a well fortified site on a double peaked hill. A two meter thick fortification wall is preserved around the southern peak. This wall is constructed of massive stones, some more than 1.5 meters in length. Multiple structures are built inside the circuit, though tumble and vegetation make it difficult to see the outlines of individual buildings. The fortification walls here are by far the most monumental architecture along the ridge, and the residents of the smaller nearby habitations may have contributed resources or labor for the construction efforts here. The distinctive nature of this site is apparent from its surface assemblage as well as the architecture. Pethoy or large storage jars predominate to a much greater extent here than at any other site, making up 30% by count or more than 70% by weight of all collected shirts. Many different clay fabrics and wall thicknesses are represented suggesting that these come from multiple different vessels. This implies that the site's function was related to storing agricultural surplus. Goods may have been concentrated here in order to take advantage of the site's impressive defensive capacity when compared to the smaller habitations along the ridge, or they may have been redistributed to the population in communal feasting events as at the urban center of Azoria, some 10 kilometers to the east. Let's now move west to a very different kind of place. PI-4 is located beside a natural pass that formed the main ancient route into the valley. The site was originally identified by the VSP as a cemetery for the mezzolary communities because of traces of early Iron Age burial architecture that remain visible on the surface, including a small pholostume and simple burial enclosures. The specialized function of this site is clear when we look at the composition of the surface assemblage. PI-4 has more fine ware than any other site, more than half of collected sherds by count. Cups and bowls are the most common shapes suggesting that drinking was a major activity here. Several have a very shiny black gloss that visually distinguishes them from the duller black painted fine ware at many of the ridge residences. Abundant female figurines, a multi-nozzle lamp, a lamp stand, and multiple miniature vessels were also found at the site. These objects here that are found here suggest sustained votive practice from the seventh century into at least the late fourth. Though archaic and classical burial customs on Crete are poorly known, I propose that this assemblage from PI-4 actually represents an open-air sanctuary rather than a cemetery. This combination of drinking vessels with figurines and lamps is typical of archaic, classical, and Hellenistic cult contexts in East Crete, especially at open-air, rural, or suburban shrines without significant architecture. PI-4, then, is best interpreted as an early Iron Age cemetery that was transformed into a rural sanctuary in the seventh century. The early Iron Age funerary structures here were probably known to the new settlers who moved into the Mezzelorei Valley in the seventh century. In the context of building these new settlements and establishing a new political and social order, some members of the community may have wished to emphasize real or fictive kinship links by visiting these older burials. It's worth noting, too, that some of the settlements along the ridge yielded early Iron Age artifacts, including a pithos and a bowl figurine. While these could just represent previous sporadic activity in the region during the early Iron Age, early Iron Age pithoi and bowl figurines have also been found as curated objects in later archaic contexts at Azoria. The inhabitants of the VSP settlements, then, may have similarly curated selective early Iron Age objects as another way to create connections to the past. Now that we've visited these two places, I want to discuss them in their wider context. While SK-11 and PI-4 can be identified by their surface remains as special purpose sites, emphasizing defense and storage on the one hand and drinking and votive dedication at the other, most other sites along the ridge are best interpreted as residences for extended families or corporate kin groups. These estates follow a similar architectural template. I'm showing you one here as a representative example. Two to three freestanding room complexes are paired with curved enclosure walls that might be animal pens or gardens. Megalithic architecture, often employing stones of half a meter to a meter in length, is another common feature. The apparent lack of a large nucleated pound center, like at Istron on the coast, suggests that citizens and dependent or forced laborers may have lived in these settlements side by side, unless we imagine citizens having small urban houses packed closely together within cramped circuit walls at SK-11 and large rural estates nearby along the ridge. This seems unlikely, not least because of how closely these settlements cluster together. The mode of community organization here at Olaros, thus contrasts with the image we get from a tricky passage of the fifth century Gordon Code, which seems to describe voikeas or agricultural slaves and animals living in the country houses while citizens dwell in town. Several of these Olarian estates are similar in plan to urban houses from Azoria. The long string of rooms at site SK-2 on the right, for example, resembles the arrangement of rooms in Azoria's northeast building on the left. In the urban house, a small courtyard separates a kitchen area from a store room and hall. This plan parallels that at SK-2 where a space open to the east, space two separates room one from rooms three through five. However, if we compare the size of the Olaros complexes as best as we can estimate them from the surface to Azoria houses, they're more than twice as large with a median size of 275 meters squared. Urban house size might be limited based on availability of space or by issues of cultural propriety, maybe certain kinds of display like a large house would be more acceptable in a rural setting than in close proximity to the residences of other citizens or in the vicinity of communal or civic buildings. Let's turn now from the architecture to the assemblages of these sites. For sites with enough surface pottery, we can detect variations that may reflect differences in activities or the social identity of the groups using them. Many share a similar pattern, mostly medium course and course pottery with about one quarter fineware by count or three to 8% by weight. In the remaining categories, however, these sites vary widely. Several sites stand out for their high percentage of pythoid and probable high storage capacity. Others have unusually high proportions of imported transport amphoras signaling more variegated consumption practices and perhaps more developed relationships with the wider Aegean. Several kinds of artifacts display pronounced spatial patterning. Transport amphoras and textile tools, for example, are much more common in the valley bottom and at the coastal site of Istron than at sites on the ridge. Drinking practices also vary in significant ways across these settlements. Sites along the ridge prefer the Cretan Cup, a large single-handled thin-walled vessel with dull black paint like the examples on the right. Sites in the valley and on the coast, on the other hand, yield more examples of smaller two-handled drinking cups called skiffoy with very shiny black gloss like the examples you see on the left. Some of these are imported from Athens and its surrounding region while some appear to be local imitations of attic pottery. It's tempting to see here a diversity of responses to Athenian influence with some groups engaging in attic-style drinking practices and others deliberately rejecting them. This case study of the Brocaster region adds some nuance to the broader patterns in Cretan surveys that I talked about earlier and lets us draw a few general conclusions. First, an important shift in settlement patterns occurred in the 7th century across this area but the populations who moved to Istron on the coast and to the Mezzelory Valley inland organized their communities in different ways. Istron became a large and populous harbor town while Al-Arras maintained a more dispersed settlement pattern although it's possible that a larger town center lies underneath the modern village of Mezzeloraus. Some of the inhabitants of new sites in the inland region may have fostered a deliberate connection with the region's past through ritual practice at early Iron Age burials and curation of early Iron Age artifacts. The Mezzelory area is characterized by high levels of architectural investment in megalithic rural estates as well as some likely communal spaces for storage, defense or ritual activity. Though these estates share many features, they also display important differences in architecture and consumption patterns suggesting differentiation in tasks, social status or personal preference. The empirical evidence from these settlements simply doesn't fit well with the model that equates a dispersed settlement pattern with a homogeneous class of smallholders. Although we should be cautious about uncritically assuming continuity in rural practice across centuries a more diversified picture of Cretan rural landscapes in the first millennium BC also affords better with ethnographic and historical studies of Greek rural communities in the 19th and 20th centuries CE. Such communities engage in a variety of activities with a wide spatial distribution including pastoralism, water storage and grain threshing. These activities are carried out at many special purpose early modern and modern sites found in abundance across the Greek landscape today including Calivia, pots for spending the night in the fields, bologna or threshing floors and mandras, sheep or goat folds. These findings also resonate with recent work from other Mediterranean regions that emphasizes the internal diversity of small rural sites. Many of these projects have carried out small scale excavations to supplement their survey work. The Roman peasant project, for instance excavated eight rural sites in Tuscany with the stated goal of uncovering peasant farms. The team instead found press buildings, field drains stables and ceramic production centers some of which were likely used by multiple households. Only one of these sites was identified as a canonical farm and human activity seems to have been distributed over a wide range of these specialized locations. Studies of rural settlements in Iron Age Cyprus and in Iberia, similarly events heterogeneity in architectural styles, craft activity, exploitation of natural resources, consumption patterns and relationships to earlier landscape features and monuments. These examples suggest that Crete's not unique in possessing a differentiated countryside. To return to this case study, it's important to note that a large sample size of surface material is required to draw out these differences and provide adequate chronological resolution for these arguments. My attempts to look at smaller sites that don't have a lot of material and that don't have a lot of fine wear in particular faltered and stalled. For the present, small courseware scatters can really only be made sense of as educated guesses within a context of other sites that yield more and more diagnostic surface material. This might mean that we're simply missing some of the least visible populations such as enslaved or debt-bound agricultural laborers or free individuals with less material wealth. It's also possible that people of different social statuses frequented these sites side by side, engaging in different tasks, but in the same places. Many of these sites consist of multiple complexes, access to which may have been restricted by age, gender or legal category. In the future, test excavations at some of these settlements, like those that have been carried out in Italy and Cyprus, could help us answer more detailed questions about the lived experience of these rural dwellers, providing additional insight into phasing of architecture, the use of space within each small settlement and the identity of their inhabitants. They would also produce stratified ceramic sequences, in particular, of medium course and course fabrics and shapes. These really need to be given more attention because they constitute the majority of the assemblage and most small rural settlements and form the major material apparatus of Greek rural life. When combined with the broad geographical coverage and chronological scope afforded by regional survey, excavations like this could yield a more complete and diversified picture of Iron Age Greek communities across the social spectrum. So to conclude, though archaeological survey poses methodological and pretty intense epistemological challenges, it's capable of providing valuable new insight into the structure of Cretan society. A multi-scalar approach that combines analysis of large bodies of legacy data with fine grained regional study, can revise our understanding of social structure and community organization among rural populations for whom we otherwise have scant evidence. I hope that I've imparted to you today a sense of the many variations present in the rural landscapes of Crete, the countryside of Homer's 90 cities. Thank you.