Rural Variations: Settlement and Society in Archaic and Classical Crete (Grace Erny)
About: This paper uses legacy data to explore emerging forms of inequality and social difference on the Mediterranean island of Crete from the 7th through the 4th centuries BCE, a time of pronounced cultural change in the ancient Greek world. Through spatial and functional analysis of nearly 450 Cretan sites documented by intensive archaeological surveys, I clarify the political, economic, and social relationships that linked these rural settlements to each other and to urban centers. Although small survey sites in Greece are often interpreted as homogeneous farmsteads inhabited by free smallholders, they in fact exhibit important differences in their surface assemblages, hosted diverse activities, and comprised distinct social places in the landscape. The talk concludes with a case study of ceramic assemblages and architecture at rural settlements in the Mirabello region of East Crete. This work reveals varied forms of community organization, ranging from densely populated centers to linked systems of rural estates, as well as creative manipulation of material culture to send messages about individual and collective identity.