Archaeological survey in the eastern Mediterranean has become increasingly intensive over the last 20 years, producing greater and more diverse data for smaller units of space. While complex, siteless data sets have allowed more sophisticated reconstructions of natural and cultural regional histories, the employment of more intensive methods has refocused the scope of Mediterranean surveys from region to 'micro-region'. Such increasingly myopic approaches have been criticized for their failure to address research questions framed by a large-scale, regional perspective and the analytical categories of 'settlement' and 'site'. This paper uses results from a survey in southern Greece to show how artifact-based approaches make valuable contributions to 'big-picture' historical and archaeological issues in a Mediterranean context.
In this article, we address the historical question of why Aegean Bronze Age economies are characterized as redistributive systems and whether it is appropriate to continue to describe them as such. We argue that characterizing the political economies of the Aegean as redistributive is inaccurate and misleading. Instead, we suggest it is more fruitful to describe how specific prehistoric social institutions were used to organize and allocate goods and services and thereby to study how political and economic systems interacted with one another. By examining how Aegean social institutions were constituted and changed over time, we will be in a position to use the prehistoric Aegean to develop and refine general models of political economy.* * We thank Seth Richardson and an anonymous AJA reviewer for their valuable suggestions.
Individuals and society in Mycenaean Pylos / by Dimitri Nakassis. pages cm.-(Mnemosyne supplements. History and archaeology of classical antiquity, ISSN 0169-8958 ; volume 358) Includes bibliographical references and index.
: This paper examines descriptions of remote places in archaic Greek epic. I argue that Homeric cosmic geography consists of two complementary models, one in which the sun rises and sets at a single locus-the axis mundi-as in the Theogony, and another in which sunrise and sunset take place on the eastern and western horizons respectively. Conflation of these models in the Odyssey results in the gemination of peoples and places associated in myth with the sun. This not only explains some recurrent patterns in Homeric geography and their thematic importance to Odysseus' travels, but also resolves some traditional interpretive difficulties with descriptions of the edges of the earth in archaic epic. * I would like to thank Jonathan Burgess, Sarah James, Chris Lovell, Jim Marks, and Tim Stover for their helpful comments, as well as Cynthia Damon and an anonymous TAPA reader for greatly improving the text. Most of all I want to thank Erwin Cook for his constant guidance and encouragement. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2002 meeting of the APA in Philadelphia.1 This point is forcefully made by Heubeck 1989: 4-5. Recently Hartog 2001, 28 has discussed real and imaginary Homeric geographies. Ballabriga 1998 argues that we need to supersede the distinction between real and imaginary geography, yet he essentially reproduces ancient interpretations of Homeric geography using later Greek texts and modern maps. Ballabriga assigns a real location to every entity in the Odyssey, implying that Homeric descriptions are always reflections (albeit fabulous ones) of real peoples and places. Thus according to Ballabriga 1998: 180-84 the description of Ogygie, Kalypso's island, reflects 6th century .. knowledge of the Atlantic Ocean, so Kalypso is a recent poetic invention of the Homeridai designed to lengthen Odysseus' absence from Ithake.
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