Towards an Archaeology of Sustainability: Resource Packages and Landscape Management in Sphakia, South-West Crete

Abstract

Using evidence from the Sphakia Survey, a multiperiod archaeological project in south-west Crete, this article has two goals. The first is to contribute to a newly emerging field, the archaeology of sustainability. The investigation of sustainability in Sphakia uses five main kinds of evidence: environmental, archaeological/material, textual, oral, and patterns of activity that seem ‘difficult’ or ‘inconvenient’. Sphakia is a large area of highly dissected terrain with a wide altitudinal range – in many ways, a ‘tough’ landscape, where agropastoralism has been its main economy. The second goal is to introduce the concept of a Resource Package (RP), a combination of perceived resources in an area, as an analytical tool for landscape study. Evidence for identifying agropastoral RPs of various scales, used at a particular time, includes imports, such as pottery and obsidian, which can suggest exchange for a local resource or product; sacred sites; coins; texts and inscriptions; place-names and other toponyms; and maps. The concept of RPs can usefully be applied synchronically and diachronically to multiperiod projects like this, as well as more generally to other landscapes, ‘tough’ or not. Sustainable strategies (that is, maximising resources and RPs without exhausting them) were used in the Prehistoric, Graeco-Roman and Byzantine–Venetian–Turkish epochs in Sphakia; some may be relevant for the future.