Abstract:

Any activity requires the expenditure of energy, and the larger the scale of the undertakings, the more careful and strategic planning in advance is required. In focusing on labouring by humans and other animals, the papers in this volume investigate through a wide range of contexts how past people achieved their multiple daily tasks while remaining resilient in anticipation of adverse events and periods.

Each paper investigates the resource requirements of combined activities, from conducting agriculture or trade, over many different crafts, constructing houses and monumental buildings, and how the available resources were employed successfully. Multilayered data sets are employed to illuminate the many interconnected networks of humans and resources that impacted on people’s day-to-day activities, but also to discuss the economic, cultural and socio-political relationships over time in different regions.

Each of us aimed to discuss novel perspectives in which the landscape in its widest sense is connected to interdisciplinary architectural and/or crafting perspectives. Rural landscapes and their populace formed the backbone of pre-industrial societies. Analyses of the rural ‘hinterland’, the foci of cities and other central places (often with monumental architecture) and the communication between these are essential for the papers of this volume. These different agents and phenomena and their connections are crucial to our understanding how political units functioned at several socially interconnected levels.

Bottom-up approaches can dissolve “monolithic” understandings of societies, the elite-labour/farmer and the centre/rural dichotomies, because the many social groups co-depended on each other, albeit perhaps in unequal measure depending on the given context.

Contents

Shaping Cultural Landscapes through Crafts, Construction, Infrastructure, Agriculture and Resilience Strategies Introduction to the papers
Ann Brysbaert, Jari Pakkanen and Irene Vikatou

The Life of the Marble Mountain: Agency and Ecology in the Marble Quarries of Ancient Tegea, Greece
Jørgen Bakke

Building the tholos tomb in Tiryns, Greece: comparative labour costs and field methods
Ann Brysbaert, Daniel Turner and Irene Vikatou

Mobility as a drive to shape cultural landscapes: prehistoric route-use in the Argolid and surroundings, Greece
Ann Brysbaert and Irene Vikatou

Tracing the Mycenaean hinterlands. Refining the models of Mycenaean territoriality with insights from the cadastral maps of the Second Venetian Rule in the Peloponnese, Greece
Kalliopi Efkleidou

Climate, carrying capacity and society: the quest for universal truths
Paul Erdkamp

Encompassing islandscapes in southern Vanuatu
James L. Flexner, Stuart Bedford and Frederique Valentin

After the Preclassic Collapse. A socio-environmental contextualization of the rise of Naachtun, Guatemala
Julien Hiquet, Cyril Castanet, Lydie Dussol, Philippe Nondédéo, Marc Testé, Louise Purdue, Noémie Tomadini, Sandrine Grouard and Antoine Dorison

Placing the houses of the dead: the spatial setting of Mycenaean necropoleis in the Argive Plain, Greece
Stefan Müller

Marble in the mountains – econometrics of quarrying and transporting building stones for the temple of Athena Alea at Tegea, Greece
Jari Pakkanen

Shaping a Mycenaean cultural landscape at Kalamianos, Greece
Daniel Pullen

Time spent at the Heuneburg, Germany, between 600 and 540 BCE to build all their constructions
François Remise

The agricultural hinterland of Aquincum and Brigetio, Hungary. Landscape, rural settlements, towns and their interactions
Bence Simon

Classical and Hellenistic pottery kilns from Greek rural areas in their natural and human landscape
Francesca Tomei

Towns in a sea of nomads: territory and trade in Central Somaliland during the Medieval period
Jorge de Torres Rodríguez, Alfredo González-Ruibal, Manuel Antonio Franco Fernández, Candela Martínez Barrio and Pablo Gutiérrez de León Juberías

A cross-craft approach to ceramic, glass and iron in the Early Middle Ages. The resources of workshops from southern Belgium
Line Van Wersch, Martine van Haperen and Gaspard Pagès

Did ancient building contractors work for free? Stone supply in fourth-century BCE Epidauros, Greece
Jean Vanden Broeck-Parant