The response of individual communities to the toppling of Mycenaean-Minoan civilization suggests that local political and military processes were decisive: initially many people fled to sizeable refuge sites in the final, post-palatial Bronze Age and earliest Iron Age, either new settlements or survivors of the thirteenth-century destructions (for example Tiryns, Perati, Asine, and Lefkandi). Some Mycenaean or Minoan centers were abandoned or shrank to hamlets, others revived as villages or even towns. Significantly, a number of remote, inaccessible “refuge sites” were already left for more practical agricultural locations by Geometric times, while others lasted through the EIA, only to be replaced in Archaic times by open-landscape sites at the time when the historical-era city-states were becoming fixed centers. At that era, communities were relocating into more accessible new town-sites: urban locations include the “new towns” ofTanagra, Koroneia, and Thespiae in Boeotia.
Nichoria in the Southwestern Peloponnese is an excavated site that provides a glimpse of a small EIA settlement (McDonald et al. 1983). An earlier Mycenaean village at the site was a rural imitation of Bronze Age town life, with rectilinear houses in rows along the streets. After limited abandonment a new plan emerges: a less structured EIA settlement consists of individual houses dispersed over the site, at irregular angles to each other. Significantly, although material culture remains unimpressive, Nichoria sees its simple houses grow in size over the Geometric era, whilst a larger-scale chieftain’s house is identified. Nonetheless, through the EIA until Late Geometric times, the typical Mainland family-home was a one-room curvilinear house. This plan was occasionally enlarged into a megaron form with a porch, main room, and storeroom in a simple access sequence, particularly in houses supposed to be of the elite (Dickinson 2006).
We have portrayed typical EIA landscapes as thinly settled by chieftain-focused hamlets or villages. A less numerous class of EIA settlements of a very different character usually retains its uniqueness into the subsequent early historic era. Many Mycenaean centers shrink to very small towns or villages (for example Mycenae), or remain unoccupied (Pylos), but a few (Athens, Argos, Thebes, Knossos) show continuity into Classical times, and moreover as extensive clusters of closely-spaced hamlets forming a “town in patches.” Remarkably, the Classical historian Thucydides (History of the Peloponnesian War 1.10.2) and the philosopher Aristotle (Politics 1252b. 28) describe this as the “traditional archaic” type of town, preserved to their time in the plan of Classical Sparta, a curious amalgamation of close villages. This multifo-cality might be giving us a map ofseveral chiefs (basileis) with their retinues and serfs settled in each other’s vicinity, keeping some social distance and with separate cemetery zones (Snodgrass urban origins Model 2, see earlier). At Eretria such a series of chief-centered house-clusters has been argued for from excavations of the Geometric predecessor of the later town (Crielaard 2007).
In contrast Old Smyrna on the west coast of Turkey has a fortification wall with signs of concentrated settlement within it (Snodgrass Model 1) already by the ninth century BC (Dickinson 2006). This might precociously anticipate its better-known plan by the end of the seventh century BC (Figure 9.3), when a dense Archaic township sits firmly enclosed within a circuit wall, a model for a typical Classical polis.
In landscapes mostly composed of small communities, the existence of an EIA town must at all times have exerted a gravitational attraction in its immediate region. It offered increased trade opportunities and social possibilities unobtainable elsewhere, and surely political influence over its neighbors (Lehmann 2004). Moreover a warlike elite society sees virtue in aggression and feuding to enhance its members’ status and control over land and people, so that an imbalance of military capability in favor of such agglomerations could stimulate these larger communities into territorial expansion over lesser settlements in their vicinity. Multifocal Athens is remarkable in achieving dominance over the large region of Attica before recorded history begins (ca. 700 BC), and perhaps as early as 900 BC. By the end of the Geometric era Athens might already have possessed 10,000 inhabitants (Morris 2005), more than twice the size of a typical Classical city-state. Dark Age towns at Thebes, Argos, and Knossos also all rose to become the most powerful city-states in their regions, although at later dates.
Settlement and house-plan development over Geometric times
The Geometric settlement at Eretria on the island of Euboea may perhaps be typical. Under the Classical town lie many individual houses scattered without clear order, the only link between them being an orientation to the street plan. Lang (1996) terms this the Einzelhaussiedlung or Individual House Settlement model. Even the communal temple was initially comparable to surrounding houses (Figure 8.7). Eretria marks a new elite foundation at the end of the EIA, perhaps replacing nearby Lefkandi. Although the residence(s) of its chiefly rulers have yet to be clearly identified, their prestigious burials are placed inside the town, with associated cult (Crielaard 2007). At Geometric Emborio on the island of Chios (Figure 8.5, reconstruction), another Einzelhaussiedlung sprawls along a hillside
Figure 8.5 Settlement plan of Emborio on the island of Chios in the Early Iron Age.
A. Snodgrass, An Archaeology of Greece. The Present State and Future Scope of a Discipline. Stanford 1987, Figure 57. Reproduced by permission of University of California Press Books.
Below a waHed acropolis, within which lies a putative chieftain’s house beside the eastern wall, indicating that the enceinte was plausibly a communal refuge in times of threat.
The development of the later major city of Corinth between Geometric and Archaic times is enlightening in documenting the transformation from such plans to a nucleated Archaic town-plan, the physical trace for the emergence of a city-state (Lang 1996). Like other “town-like” settlements such as Athens, initially village-hamlets lie dispersed around a large undefended area, whilst the lofty citadel of the Acrocorinth above the town provided refuge. In later Archaic times a city wall will enclose almost all the lower-town clusters. As at contemporary Eretria, an early stone temple from this transitional era seems to be symbolic of a communal identity, which the propinquity of the settlement clusters implies but cannot clearly demonstrate.
More exceptional and precocious is Old Smyrna, where as noted earlier the built-up and fortified small town of Archaic times may have been prefigured in a clustered house-plan of Late Geometric date (Dickinson 2006). Similarities appear at Zagora on the island of Andros, built on a coastal peninsula with a fortification wall protecting land access. It was created in the ninth century and abandoned ca. 700 BC (Snodgrass 1980, Lang 1996). Like other EIA sites, the Zagora community was focused around an architectural complex on the highest central point, which could have housed a leading family (although the distinctiveness and hence “status” assignation of this sector is disputed). However and significantly, instead of filling the enclosure with free-standing dispersed houses, the inhabitants were largely clustered in one-fifteenth of the defended area (around 1 ha), with many houses sharing a similar alignment on rectilinear plots (in terraced houses, also termed a Reihensiedlung). In its later stages Zagora’s population is estimated as several hundred people. Are we seeing the early stages of an emergent city-state? At Old Smyrna certainly we are, where the nucleated settlement continues into the following period as a typical polis urban plan.
Vroulia on Rhodes provides a useful comparison (Lang 1996), a short-lived settlement occupied for a brief period soon after Zagora was abandoned. Around 700 BC, at the very end of the Geometric era, a strictly-planned settlement was set out on a coastal promontory, with a land defense wall, behind which lay two regimented rows of terraced houses and a communal sanctuary. The population was also a few hundred, with the settlement being abandoned after a century. Between Zagora and Vroulia, we seem to observe a tightening of the architectural expression of a single community, anticipating the “Hippodamian” grid-plans of new towns in Classical times, with the “little boxes” marking seemingly equal citizen families. Nonetheless all these proto-urban (emergent town) settlements are within an aristocratic political system, where communal planning is elite-directed. And yet the concept of “community,” expressed in integrated architectural blocks and defensive walling, equally reflects the emergence of a more homogenizing concept of a corporate society, “the citizens,” and hence marks the rise of the “polis.” Reinforcing this transformation is the displacement now of Vroulia town’s burials outside of the defense walls — the separation of the society of the living from the “settlement of the dead” beyond a formal boundary.
Comparison with contemporary Late Geometric-early Archaic developments outside the Aegean are instructive. At this time there was a wave of Greek colony foundations abroad (see below). Typically the aristocratic founders of these new towns practiced a regular allotment of urban house-plots and an associated division of the surrounding agricultural land, providing attractive living and working conditions in order to encourage lesser-status families to depart from their homeland along with their aristocratic leaders. The Sicilian colony of Megara Hyblaea, founded in 728 by Megara for example, was a (rather irregular) grid-plan from its inception (Snodgrass 1980). However, the houses appear less regimented, and less like modern residential estates or the Classical “Hippodamian” plans. There is plentiful space for gardens and courtyards, and it is probable that class differences were marked by differences in the allotment of larger or smaller houses and rural estates.
If we turn to developments in the form of the domestic house, some at least of the Late Geometric sites so far discussed demonstrate that the private sphere of non-elite dwelling-houses is becoming more elaborately subdivided, which has been taken to be symptomatic of the evolution of a more complex
Figure 8.6 Elaboration of houses at Zagora during Late Geometric times.
F. Lang, Archaische Siedlungen in Griechenland: Struktur und Entwicklung. Berlin 1996, Figures 55—56. © Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim.
Society. Especially after ca. 750 BC the typical single-roomed curvilinear house, in mudbrick and wood, is replaced by rectangular houses, increasingly using stone foundations. At Zagora, the standard room plus porch, or megaron form, is replaced over the life of the settlement by multi-roomed houses often placed around a courtyard, inaugurating that more elaborate definition of social and economic space which is usually associated with the formation of the citizen family-based city-state (Figure 8.6, illustrating this transformation between LG1 and 2).
World History
