James C. Wright

A pollen diagram from the northeast Peloponnese, Greece: implications for vegetation history and archaeology

A pollen diagram is presented for a sediment core from Kleonai in southern Greece. A set of seven radiocarbon dates suggests that the core spans the time period from the beginning of the Holocene to the Roman period. Pollen preservation in the core is patchy and there are only three zones on the pollen diagram with countable quantities of pollen. These zones correspond with the early Neolithic, Bronze Age and Roman periods. The area around the site was largely open by the Neolithic but the wider landscape was still well wooded. In the Bronze Age and Roman periods, there is evidence for arable agriculture, including olive cultivation. By the Roman period, most of the semi-natural woodlands had disappeared and the landscape was probably not unlike that of the present day.

Approaches to the study of personhood in the early Mycenaean era

In the brief space allotted for a comment, with respect to the theoretical discussion I will say only that I find the argument insufficiently developed and would rather that Voutsaki had paid closer attention to Dornans useful critique of Bourdieu and Giddens and the uses to which their sociological theories have been put by archaeologists (Dornan 2002). As a proponent of adding moral philosophy to the archaeological arsenal of theory, Voutsaki might also have dwelt on Walzers powerful argument about the interrelationship between ‘thin’ minimizing and ‘thick’ maximalizing moralities, since they disabuse us of the restraints of our local and universal ideologies and help us understand how individual actors and the groups of which they are a part are constrained by a plurality of moral decisions. My thoughts here, however, will focus on the case study, since that is the area of my own primary interest and expertise.