Introduction

Essential may seem a strong word, yet it is entirely appropriate in this context. First and most obviously, without the agricultural production of the countryside to feed local populations, Mediterranean cultures would never have achieved their eventual levels of power and sophistication. Beyond such pragmatics, however, the life of the countryside wove through all dimensions of ancient society: its everyday politics, its social hierarchies, its cultic practices, and its military stances.

One would never know this from the subject’s treatment throughout much of the history of classical archaeology. Classicists by and large disregarded the countryside, the rural landscape, in their exploration and reconstruction of Mediterranean societies. While this neglect was more pronounced in the Greek world than in the Roman, in both cases, archaeologists were guided by the urban and “high elite” predilections of most ancient textual authorities. The prevailing form of archaeological investigation—stratigraphic excavation of specific sites and monuments—also made it difficult to see how best to explore something as nebulous and unbounded as a “countryside.”

Later twentieth-century trends in the discipline of classical studies as a whole, not least a developing interest in the ancient economy and a growing concern for non-elite social actors, increasingly highlighted this past neglect of the rural landscapes of classical antiquity. The gradual introduction of new archaeological methodologies, in particular regional field survey, aerial photography, and satellite imagery, offered an unprecedented opportunity to redress the situation. As a result, from the 1970s onward, systematic, regional surveillance of landscapes all over the Mediterranean basin and beyond has provided a new dataset testifying to human occupation, utilization, and perception of the ancient countryside.

Much of the initial interpretation of these results revolved around what (at first) appeared straightforward, practical questions. How many people lived in the countryside? Did they live on isolated farms, or in hamlets and villages? How much land did they farm? What crops did they grow? What quickly emerged, however, is that such questions immediately open out into larger debates, not just about the ancient economy, but about such things as structures of local authority, household organization, and regional interaction. Moreover, as survey archaeology became more confident in its methodologies, more nuanced data and interpretations appeared. The discovery of traces of ritual and mortuary activity, for example, provides much-needed insight into the symbolic force and emotional weight invested in the rural landscape by the peoples of the ancient Mediterranean.

As the previous chapter outlined, the nature of “the countryside” varied immensely across the Mediterranean basin (not to mention the expansion by the Hellenistic and Roman empires into other very dissimilar geographic and climatic zones). Yet differences in the patterning of landscape elements—farmsteads, villages, shrines, and tombs (as well as walls, aqueducts, terraces, quarries, field boundaries, wells, and dozens of other rural components)—clearly also relect variable political formations and social choices over time. As this chapter details, key developments, such as the rise of the polis or the growth of empire, are marked in landscapes transformed to accommodate the new order. From being a “blank space” on the map, the essential countryside thus becomes an alternative lens through which to view and consider the workings of the ancient world at large.