Introduction

The scarcity of written sources is one of the characteristic features of ancient history. This is also true for the Greek classical period, although it is much richer in written sources than the preceding archaic period. Although the scarcity of written sources makes the use of non-written sources especially important, many scholars of ancient history are not trained in the use of non-written sources and rather prefer to leave this part of the field to other disciplines such as art history, archaeology, numismatics, etc. This is in many ways regrettable, not least because non-written sources may need to be put into their correct historical context in order to become intelligible. Or, in other words, it may be difficult to make the non-written sources speak to us meaningfully unless we have a certain command of written sources.

On the other hand there has definitely been a change in attitude among historians towards the use of non-written sources. During the twentieth century, history in general expanded its original primary focus on the political and military aspects of the past to encompass all aspects of the past. Concurrently with the growing interest in economic and social history, scholars of ancient history have also accepted the material culture as an integral and natural part of their field. One can see this change in attitude very well by comparing the treatment of the fifth and fourth centuries in the first edition of the Cambridge Ancient History with that of the second edition (CAH2 vols 5 and 6). In the first edition, published in 1927, no attention at all was paid to material culture, whereas the second edition, from 1992 to 1994, has reserved generous space to several areas (e. g., art, architecture, civic life in Athens, agriculture, communications, economy and trade, etc.), where our knowledge depends to a large degree on non-written sources.

The written sources give us a somewhat skewed picture of reality, being heavily centred on urban life and sanctuaries with special emphasis on the conditions in Athens and Sparta. Especially those who want to learn more about classical Greece ‘beyond Athens or Sparta’ (Gehrke 1986) or about rural reality within the Greek poleis, i. e., the history ‘beyond the akropolis’, have much to learn from the increasing amount of available non-written data. As a result, it is clear that future research in some genres of ancient history, such as economic and social history, will increasingly depend on non-written sources.

Non-written sources have been used to some degree by scholars of ancient history for a long time. For instance, there is a long tradition of attempting to identify sculptures found in excavations with works of art described by ancient authors. Soon it was noted that sculpture and vase paintings could give information additional to that of the literary sources about the beliefs of the ancient Greeks. Iconographical studies are still very popular and they have added considerably to our knowledge of many aspects of ancient life, such as of the Athenian attitudes towards death and the afterlife (e. g., Sourvinou-Inwood 1995: 321-61), or of the performance of sacrificial rituals (e. g., van Straten 1995). The extent to which public art relates to civic ideology has also been discussed. How should we understand the Parthenon sculptures, for instance, and what do they tell us about how the Athenians viewed themselves, their patron goddess and their place in the world (Hurwit 1999: 222-8 with further references)?

Most of the ancient art objects have been found in excavations - indeed one of the main objectives of early excavations was to bring more ancient art and architecture to the light of day. Since those early days however, archaeological excavations have become far more comprehensive and nowadays aim at recording the entire material culture. An ever-growing palette of scientific methods is giving us more and more information about how people lived, what they ate, how healthy they were, etc. As recording all this information in an accurate way is very time-consuming, large-scale excavations will probably become less common in the future. On the other hand, a growing number of sites that were previously considered less interesting, such as farmsteads or urban residences, are now receiving closer attention (Hoepfner 1999). New types of sites are also being explored by underwater archaeology, opening up a completely new world. After decades of painstaking work, the results of several important large-scale excavations begin to be thoroughly published (Athens (Agora and Kerameikos), Korinth, Delphi, Olympia, Olynthos, etc.), providing us with valuable databases that can be analysed in several comparative ways.

Each excavation gives us information about just one site, and although the results from several excavations can be compared and thus give us a broader and more general picture, it remains difficult to discern regional patterns and to understand the interplay between settlements and topography. This was already realized by the first Western travellers in Greece, who set out to identify settlements and battlefields mentioned by ancient authors in the contemporary landscape. Topographical studies soon led to the development of a discipline in its own right, i. e., landscape archaeology. Since the late 1970s, extensive surveys of complete regions, concentrating on looking for settlements in logical places in the landscape, such as on hills or close to well-known springs, have commonly been replaced by detailed surface surveys of small areas that are intensively searched for all signs of human activity.

Intensive surveys have many advantages over extensive surveys. Above all they give us a more complete picture of the use of the landscape, as they are normally carried out by teams of experts, including geologists, botanists, geophysicists, etc. Small sites, such as farmsteads or other kinds of ‘special purpose sites’, are seldom found in extensive surveys. Intensive surveys also accumulate information about how the landscape was used outside the settlements proper, for instance by collecting sherds that have been dispersed as a result of manuring the fields (Alcock et al. 1994). Finally they help us to understand how the environment and climate have changed, and whether natural causes (Rackham 1996) or human agents have contributed to the occurrence of ecological catastrophes such as large-scale erosion. On the other hand one should not altogether disregard the importance of extensive surveys, because only through them can we obtain information about larger regions, thereby enabling us to understand the ekistic networks better. Extensive surveys are still carried out and published (e. g., Fossey 1988), and this approach has recently proved to be very productive in studying ancient road networks (e. g., Pikoulas 1999).

The enormous amount of archaeological material collected by intensive surveys has unfortunately resulted in very slow progress in publications. Until now only a few of the so-called ‘new wave’ survey projects have been fully published (the only ones being the surveys of Keos, Methana, Lakonia, Atene in southern Attika, Berbati-Limnes in Argolis and the Asea Valley in Arkadia). Others remain unfinished despite having contributed extensively to our knowledge through a large number of preliminary publications or occasionally even through several volumes in the final publication series. The Argolid Exploration Project (Jameson et al. 1994) has, for instance, still not produced the final publication of the pottery and small finds of classical date, and the Cambridge/Bradford Boiotia expedition has brought only one sector of its survey area to final publication (Bintliff et al. forthcoming). Another problem is that some of the completed intensive projects have not presented any data on aspects related to site and off-site densities, find visibility and the like. This makes it difficult for non-specialists, such as historians, to use the data, and above all to compare the final results of the different projects.

It is not possible within the scope of this chapter to give a full picture of all the manifold ways in which non-written sources can be and/or have been used to throw light on the history of classical Greece. Instead I will concentrate on some areas in which the contribution of non-written sources has lately been especially important, viz. sanctuaries, funerary practices, trade, settlement patterns and demography. The common denominator of this research is the comparative and structural approach, through which we may gain new historical knowledge of seemingly mute, nonwritten sources. I shall focus on some of the methodological problems historians may face when using non-written sources.