Modern agriculture in the Stymphalos Valley,
Arcadia, Greece, with 'typical' collections of survey
pottery from the Sikyon Survey Project, Greece (Photo: Author).
School of Archaeology and Ancient History, University of Leicester, UK. Email: ds120@le.ac.uk
Cite this as: D. Stewart 2013 'Storing up Problems: Labour, Storage, and the Rural Peloponnese', Internet Archaeology 34. http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.34.4
Modern agriculture in the Stymphalos Valley,
Arcadia, Greece, with 'typical' collections of survey
pottery from the Sikyon Survey Project, Greece (Photo: Author).
There are profound differences between the foci of past activity and their material remains: elements of agricultural processing, storage, transport, and domestic habitation leave the most visible archaeological evidence of life in the rural landscape, but how we interpret that evidence is a subject of some debate. These are the 'end points' of past sequences of behaviours, but the individual points along those sequences are difficult to pinpoint within archaeological material. Archaeological surface survey is good at recovering aggregate remains of past behaviour, but how we interrogate and interpret them is another matter altogether. Agriculture is a seasonal activity, but this seasonality is often elided by the archaeological material and how we, as archaeologists, present it. This article examines elements of these archaeological traces in order to suggest a new way to approach our understanding of archaeological survey, using the case study of the rural Roman Peloponnese.
Go to article Table of Contents
Internet Archaeology is an open access journal based in the Department of Archaeology, University of York. Except where otherwise noted, content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY) Unported licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that attribution to the author(s), the title of the work, the Internet Archaeology journal and the relevant URL/DOI are given.
Terms and Conditions | Legal Statements | Privacy Policy | Cookies Policy | Citing Internet Archaeology
Internet Archaeology content is preserved for the long term with the Archaeology Data Service. Help sustain and support open access publication by donating to our Open Access Archaeology Fund.
File last updated: Tues Jul 9 2013