The Frankish countryside in central Greece : The evidence from archaeological field survey.
Year: 1996
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: The data-base I shall use to shed light on the Prankish landscape in Central Greece will be essentially the results of the Boeotia Project, a collaborative archaeological field survey co-directed by myself on behalf of Durham (and formerly Bradford) University and Professor Anthony Snodgrass of Cambridge University (cf.Bintliff 1985, Bintliff & Snodgrass 1985, 1988a, Snodgrass & Bintliff 1991).Boeotia is a modern province in central Mainland Greece, immediately north of Athens, although our study area is that of the ancient tribal region or 'ethnos' of Boeotia, which has slightly different boundaries.The ancient province is equivalent to a large English county, at some 2580 sq km or around 1000 sq miles.Clearly such a vast area would take several lifetimes to cover with total, intensive fieldwalking, which is the technique we have operated from the inception of the project in 1978.Our strategy has been to select a central district, with a variety of topography and soils, and territory belonging to more than one ancient political unit.The area chosen is in South-West Boeotia (Fig. 1), focussing on the two ancient cities of Haliartos and Thespiae, and including part of the Plain of Thebes, Lake Copais, and the central hill-country so characteristic of Boeotian geography.Since our first field season in 1979, our field teams have walked a contiguous block of over 40 sq km in this district, omitting very few parts of the landscape however difficult the terrain.The area chosen is intended to provide us with a very detailed picture of the changing patterns of land use and population from prehistoric to modern times.A careful comparison with the much less detailed data available for settlement developments over the rest of Boeotia will hopefully reveal obvious parallels or contrasts to what is going on in the South-West.In addition, it will be possible to compare our results with smaller-scale archaeological surveys elsewhere in Boeotia, such as that carried out by John Fossey in the territory of the ancient city of Chorsiai, by Tim Gregory around Thisbe, and by Duane Roller at Tanagra.Furthermore, as a smallscale control on the results of the major survey block, we were able to open up a second survey area from the summer season of 1989, in the upland basin once belonging to the city of Hyettos, a district in northern Boeotia remote from our initial survey zone and from any other survey work hitherto.Thus at the
Authors: John Bintliff, Sanders G.D.R. Lock P
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W1606844892