Propylaeum

While the impact of major societal transformations on town and country has always been a central topic in field survey archaeology, recent methodological and theoretical advances are offering novel perspectives on this subject. Increasingly intensive field walking techniques, artefact collection strategies and both typological and technological artefact studies have transformed our understanding of rural settlements and ceramic consumption, especially of local (coarse) wares. These developments enable us to study changes in local systems of production and exchange with much more spatial and chronological detail, and in turn contribute to a revision of the impact that large-scale transformations had on local settlement systems and economies.
The papers in this volume explore how survey archaeology can refine our understanding of the links between socio-political change and local economic landscapes. Focusing on different micro-regions in Italy and Greece, the papers present new work that combines archaeological field surveys and ceramic research. Using both tested and novel methodologies, they explore socio-economic change (in consumer practices, systems of agricultural and artisanal production, exchange networks) in the context of the development of the Greek polis, of Roman expansion in different parts of Italy, and of the transformation of Late Antique (local) landscapes in Italy and Greece.

Scholars have adopted an array of approaches, both traditional and experimental, to approximate the scale of craft production, which has always been central to the study of ancient economies. This panel examines these new methods, for estimating the workshop crew size, the workshop physical space, the time requirements for the chaîne opératoire for each product, the needs of the population for different goods, or the percentage of ancient products surviving to this day. These new approaches, some borrowed from related disciplines, should help us overcome the paucity of archaeological evidence. By employing social network analysis, individual worker’s output, architectural energetics, and production-consumption ratios, we aim to improve our understanding of the scale of craft production in the ancient Greek world, both in the Greek mainland and in the Greek colonies in Sicily. Archaeologists and ancient economists are using new approaches to study the ancient economy at a micro-level, taking into consideration several variables, such as raw material procurement, labor investment, cross-craft dependencies, apprenticeship periods, and product demand, to name a few. From Prehistoric to Classical Greece and Italy, the industries covered are mostly ceramics-centered, such as pottery and tiles, but also pavement construction and funerary monumental architecture.