Lin Foxhall

Household, Gender and Property in Classical Athens

The idea that the household was the fundamental building block of ancient Greek society, explicit in the ancient sources, has now become widely accepted. It is no exaggeration to say that ancient Athenians would have found it almost inconceivable that individuals of any status existed who did not belong to some household; and the few who were in this position were almost certainly regarded as anomalous. In ancient Athens, as elsewhere, households ‘are a primary arena for the expression of age and sex roles, kinship, socialization and economic cooperation’. It has been suggested for modern Greece that our own cultural biases, along with the Greek ideology of male dominance, have led to the assumption that the foundations of power in Greek society lie solely in the public sphere, and that domestic power is ‘less important’. In a less simple reality the preeminent role of the household cannot be underestimated. Here I hope to question similar assumptions about ancient Greece, focusing in particular on the relationships that existed between Athenian households and the property of the individuals, particularly women, within these households.

‘The king in the car park’: new light on the death and burial of Richard III in the Grey Friars church, Leicester, in 1485

Archaeologists today do not as a rule seek to excavate the remains of famous people and historical events, but the results of the project reported in this article provide an important exception. Excavations on the site of the Grey Friars friary in Leicester, demolished at the Reformation and subsequently built over, revealed the remains of the friary church with a grave in a high status position beneath the choir. The authors set out the argument that this grave can be associated with historical records indicating that Richard III was buried in this friary after his death at the Battle of Bosworth. Details of the treatment of the corpse and the injuries that it had sustained support their case that this should be identified as the burial of the last Plantagenet king. This paper presents the archaeological and the basic skeletal evidence: the results of the genetic analysis and full osteoarchaeological analysis will be published elsewhere.

The Dependent Tenant: Land Leasing and Labour in Italy and Greece

‘Farm’ sites of various kinds have been a striking feature of survey archaeology in most areas of Greece and Italy in recent years, and a number of such sites dating to the Roman period have been located. In many parts of Greece there seem to be particularly large numbers of later Roman sites, with fewer which can be firmly dated to the earlier imperial period, while in a few areas the Imperial Roman period is one of dense occupation. In Italy, too, there seems to be considerable regional variation in peak periods of rural settlement, so that in some areas numbers of small sites are greatest for the Republican period (second to first centuries B.C.), while in other areas there are many small sites of the first century a.d. or even later. The tendency of archaeologists working in both Greece and Italy, especially in the early years of the survey boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s, was to categorize these smaller sites as peasant farms (generally assuming peasant free-holders), while larger, more opulent sites were classed as ‘villas’. This encouraged both archaeologists and historians to jump to the conclusion that the development of large estates attested in the literary record from the later second century B.C. onward had not effected the complete demise of small-scale, free subsistence farmers.

Bronze to iron: agricultural systems and political structures in late bronze age and early iron age Greece

This paper surveys farming practices and their associated administrative structures in Mycenaean Greece, and outlines the kinds of changes which might have occurred in regional farming systems during the dark ages. It is postulated that the underlying subsistence basis of Greek agriculture remained substantially the same, although the structural position of elites in regional agrarian economies (as well as the constitution of elite groups) may have changed considerably. The type and degree of changes that occurred during the dark ages in any particular region seem to correlate with their earlier relationships to Mycenaean palace centres.

The social and political aspects of food surplus

ABSTRACT This article looks at how surplus is not only an economic reality but a state of mind, created by and reflecting the social and political relations of a group, by considering examples of historic and prehistoric food surplus. The state of one’s surplus is not just what one stores, but also how others see it and think about it. Individuals are not alone, but always think of their surplus within a larger network of social and political interactions with others who are also storing food as well as within the rules for access. These networks have been considered safety nets by archaeologists, but often, as with many situations today, the populace does not have access to the safety net. Two case studies illustrate the dynamics and differences of this constructed side of food surplus.

The fabric of society: recognising the importance of textiles and their manufacture in the ancient past

Until recently the study of textiles was a neglected specialist niche in archaeology, pursued by only a few scholars, the majority of whom were women. It was a field deemed to be of little significance and was largely marginalised by ‘mainstream’ archaeologists concerned with more ‘important’ themes. Fortunately, this situation has changed radically in the past 15 years. The critical roles that textiles and their manufacture played in past societies from before the Neolithic is increasingly recognised and taken into account in our understandings and interpretations of the past.

Carving out a territory: Rhegion, Locri and the households and communities of the classical countryside

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how people enacted multiple, alternative constructions of ‘territory’, using as a case study two neighbouring and often antagonistic ancient Greek city-states of southern Italy, Rhegion and Locri Epizephyrii, focusing primarily on the fifth–fourth centuries bce. We ask how the everyday practices of the inhabitants dwelling in these rural hinterlands shaped their landscapes. Did their lived experience of the landscape map on to the boundaries and models of ‘territory’ presented in the urban-focused written sources? We suggest that though the written sources provide a useful overall context, it is more difficult to connect particular incidents directly with specific archaeological or landscape features. Applying Roman, or modern, concepts of boundaries and borders in this period may be anachronistic. Sovereignty of the urban centres, and even of the most powerful regional rulers, over the lands in the border zone between classical Rhegion and Locri largely appears constrained and patchy.

Introduction: households and landscapes

ABSTRACT This issue explores how households, both individually and collectively as communities, choose to embed themselves in landscapes. In different ways and at different scales, the articles explore how their actions shaped, defined and delineated their landscapes through everyday practices.