Exploring gender through material objects is a difficult exercise in the best of circumstances, but for the world of archaic Greece the problems are compounded by the particularly skewed and fragmentary nature of the archaeological record. Many successful settlements of archaic times have been obliterated by the classical, Roman and later cities which succeeded them; so it is difficult to see the “urban” and rural landscapes of the period. Moreover, classical archaeologists have traditionally focused on monumental buildings, sanctuaries, cemeteries and the art associated with them, which offer only a partial view of the operation of gender and social organization.
Gender and housing in archaic Greece
In an important article and a book Ian Morris (1999a; 2000: 280-6) presents what he sees as a new mode of gender relations emerging in eighth century Greece. In contrast with the “more flexible” (Morris 1999a: 265) structures of gender he perceives in Iron Age Greece, Morris argues that the new sense of community focused on the male citizen made life more restrictive for women. This, he claims, can be discerned in the social construction of space, in particular with what he identifies as the emergence of the “courtyard house.” Following Nevett (1999), he associates this development with structures of gender characteristic of the classical world (especially Athens) in which women become associated with private domestic space (to which access was controlled by men) while simultaneously they were excluded from public spaces. Morris tracks the evolution of domestic architecture from the one-room apsidal houses characteristic of iron age Greece, to rectilinear houses, followed by the “appearance” of courtyard houses at Zagora on Andros in the later eighth century.
One obvious problem with this hypothesis, which Morris himself acknowledges (1999a: 265), is that few Iron Age and eighth-century houses are known or published, and there are even fewer from the seventh and sixth centuries. This makes it hard to locate those we have securely within larger social and political contexts or to test Morris’ assumption that these houses were designed for nuclear families. Concomitantly, it is difficult to understand the development of houses and households over the period. Moreover, there is considerable regional variation, so that rectilinear houses emerge at different times in different parts of the Greek world. At Old Smyrna the eighth-century town contained a mix of apsidal, oval, and rectilinear houses (Coldstream 1977: 304). At Zagora virtually all units were rectilinear from the earliest occupation of the site before 800 (Cambitoglou et al. 1971: 27), perhaps in part because the local schist and marble fractures easily into squared blocks. Examples from Magna Graecia, where the use of space was complex and sometimes rather different from “old Greece,” may also muddy the waters. For example, the best known sixth-century houses in the chora of Metapontion consist of three rows of three rooms, a type which persisted into classical times alongside the “courtyard house” (figure 25.1).
A closer look at the intriguing site of Zagora (figure 25.2) does, however, raise some interesting questions about gender and social organization in early archaic times, and allows a re-examination of Morris’ ideas. The cluster of rooms and courtyards at Zagora was not built all at once but grew organically over the course of just over a century (from shortly before 800 to the abandonment of the site early in the seventh century), and was constantly under modification. This is clear from the many walls which butt up against other walls but are not keyed into them, as well as the many units which are subsequently subdivided. The excavators of the site were consequently able to work out an elaborate relative chronology of the various walls and units.13 Indeed the excavators of the site talk about “units” rather than houses, rooms, or courtyards since it is not always clear where one “house” stops and another starts (Cambitoglou et al. 1971: 13; 1988: 154). None of this should be very surprising
World History
