Eighth-century Expansion

In any account of the Early Iron Age, the eighth century stands out as a period of transformation. At this point, we can recognize many traits familiar in the archaic world of city-states - an extensive network of sanctuaries and temples, growing towns, alphabetic writing, and overseas settlements. It is often seen as a “Greek Renaissance,” although as we have come to understand the rapidly expanding archaeological record of previous centuries, the analogy with the European Renaissance becomes less precise. Instead, we find a more complex and regionally variable mixture of tradition, transformation, and innovation. Certain continuities and transformations have already been mentioned. Perhaps the most obvious changes in the archaeological record follow from the expansion of settlement both in the countryside and at population centers. Although the level of pre-eighth-century settlement in most parts of Greece has been greatly underestimated, there was undoubtedly a significant increase in evidence for rural settlement (chiefly burials), as well as expansion at principal sites, from the eighth century onwards. This was initially attributed simply to population increase (Snodgrass 1980a: 20-4), although this is unlikely to be the sole explanation and no straightforward correlation can be made between the volume of material evidence and population size. In the case of graves, it is essential to consider when and where particular categories of people were granted the rite of formal burial, as well as the nature and visibility of mortuary practices (Morris 1987). Nonetheless, in the great majority of cases, expansion at principal settlements, like Athens or Thebes, was accompanied by increased activity across ever-larger areas of countryside (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988; Mersch 1997). Physical synoikism cannot be the main reason, despite later tradition (C. Morgan 2003: 171-6), and a number of other factors may have been in operation - residential groups may split to create temporary or permanent bases close to distant land, or to allow established principles of residential organization to be maintained. Expansion at major settlements probably demanded the ranking of available resources by distance and accessibility, and even when new settlements were created, more land would be needed (eventually drawing in marginal land) if the same strategies of exploitation were to be maintained without intensification.32

Population pressure and pressure on land are relative concepts. In both cases, the desire to maintain the status quo in terms of settlement density, the residential rights of individuals or families in particular areas, access to certain agricultural or pasture land, or cultivation of the same crops using the same practices, could lead to extensifica-tion before, or alongside, intensification. The movement to colonize, which in the west began with Euboean settlement at Naxos immediately followed by Corinthian at Syracuse (according to Thucydides 6.3), must therefore be understood within the wider context of movement across and beyond Greek speaking lands, be it over relatively short distances, within what was to become the territory of the state concerned (Dyme in the case of Achaia, for example: Morgan and Hall 1996: 186-9) or further, into areas such as the northern Aegean and the islands (Snodgrass 1994b). To some extent, the distinction between internal and external colonization rests on the anachronism of modern national borders. Yet there were real differences in the nature of the host populations, not only in terms of social and political organization and attitudes to material wealth, but in their identification (however poorly understood) with broader notions of Hellenism, noting especially the geographical extent of the spread of the Greek alphabet in the late eighth and seventh centuries (Johnston 1999). Neither internal expansion nor migration commonly led to the settlement of virgin territory. The responses of established settlers varied greatly. For example, the custom of making offerings at conspicuously old (usually Bronze Age) tombs is found in many parts of Greece during the eighth and seventh centuries, chiefly in Messenia, the Argolid, and Attica, but also widely elsewhere.33 Anonymous tomb cult has been variously interpreted as asserting rights to the land of one’s ancestors in the face of incomers, or establishing “ancestral” or “founder” claims in new territory.34 Whatever the case, the desire to anchor a personal or collective past in the landscape is clear, and there is a long-recognized conceptual link between offerings to the nameless dead of the deep past, and other forms of ritual connected with community ancestors - feasting in cemeteries, for example, as at Mycenae, Asine or Naxos, or more rarely cults of named heroes like Helen and/or Menelaos in Sparta (Antonaccio 1995a: ch. 3, 199-207).