970 settlement patterns: Greece Age settlement of Százhalombatta Földvár in Hungary was protected by both a ditch and an earthen rampart, construction of which was a huge earth-moving project that probably required direction by a respected person of higher social status than most people Another manifestation of the existence of a social elite was the use of distinctive burial practices In many areas the elite were buried in specially constructed mounds (sometimes called tumuli) The Iron Age is the first time in European prehistory that something is known about the group names people called themselves The most famous are the Celts, who were spread from southeastern Europe to the British Isles Their elite lived in hill forts (often called oppida) The settlement of Bibracte, now called Mont Beuvray, in France was surrounded by a wall of timber, stone, and earth, miles long GREECE BY MARK ANTHONY PHELPS Two geographic factors are paramount in understanding Greece from either a social or an economic context First, this is an extraordinarily hilly and mountainous land, as over 40 percent of the land is more than 1,600 feet in elevation The Pindus Mountains extend the length of the region until they submerge into the Aegean Sea, creating most of the islands found there as well as a jagged coast that provides a vast number of protected harbors Settled life focuses on valleys and a handful of plains scattered throughout the country Second, no point of the peninsula is more than 38 miles from the sea The soil of the region is rocky and often of marginal fertility Adding to the fragility of the soil is the climate, known as dry summer subtropical Summer dryness, wind, and heat contribute to crop failure, while winter rains demand modifications of the farmland to enhance drainage and to stop soil erosion Natural springs and man-made cisterns, necessities for rural life, influence where cities can grow In ancient times the marginal land that could not lend itself to intensive agriculture was used for pastoralism After the collapse of the Mycenaean civilization (ca 1100 b.c.e.), the depopulation of cities may reflect a period of nomadic pastoralism For the rest of the ancient history of Greece, transhumant pastoralism was the norm The hills and mountains of Greece contributed to the political fragmentation that characterizes Greek history Isolation fosters ethnocentrism, which contributes to the history of independent city-states and continual rivalries The majority of ancient Greeks were farmers Wheat was the dominant crop in the plains and valley bottoms, while olives and grapes were typically grown on terraced hillsides The model traditionally espoused for ancient farmers is taken from the pattern of farming found in medieval and modern Greece Historians theorized that farmers lived in villages, leaving in the morning to tend to scattered plots The distribution of plots was the product of equal devolution of property among sons and the usage of land in dowries This dispersion was ultimately advantageous, as land in plots that have some ecological differentiation serves as insurance in the face of droughts, because one piece of land may fare better than others Further, the village provided protection from raiders Given the scarcity of water, it was assumed that farmhouses in the countryside would have been impossible to maintain However, this model has been successfully challenged by the recent attention to rural archaeology and a closer reading of certain classical texts The rise of villages and the increase in trade at the beginning of the Iron Age points to a rise in agricultural production The need for land for intensive farming was a contributing factor to the phenomenon of colonization as Greeks established colonies throughout the Aegean coasts, the Black Sea, Libya, and other scattered centers in Asia Minor and the rest of the eastern Mediterranean The image of Odysseus’s father Laertes in Homer’s Odyssey serves as antithetical evidence to the traditional model of ancient Greek farming In contrast to the notion of living in a village, Laertes resides in a house on his farm with outbuildings constructed on it for storage and drying He works his farm daily, which must be done if one is growing vines and maintaining orchards He has a fence and dogs for protection He labors alongside his slaves, sharing equally in toil He rarely enters the town, where he owns a lavish house, and he has a profound disdain for urban dwellers He has a reputation as a warrior Archaeological evidence indicates that small-scale irrigation emerged at the time of Homer and Hesiod in the late eighth century b.c.e., providing another argument for the need to have farmers on farms for continual maintenance In his writings Aristotle (384–322 b.c.e.) asserts that in early days the population of the polis was small, as most were working farms Surveys in Attica, Boeotia, the Argolis, the Peloponnese, Aegean Islands, Magna Graecia, and the Crimea all support these images where a number of rural structures from these areas have been located Ancient Greek farmers would have needed to both protect their land from raiders and hide from invaders Given that most farms were small, neighbors were not terribly distant Protection from farming neighbors seems to have been a greater concern than raiders given the attention that Plato assigns to legal codes regulating the relationship between farming neighbors in his work Laws Clearly, settlement in rural areas was dense enough to cause troubles The largest estates were by no means enormous The politician and general Alcibiades (fift h century b.c.e.), nephew of Pericles, was fabulously wealthy with an estate of some 80 acres The choice for urban settlement was based primarily on access to water, generally springs or (less often) rivers Sites needed to have an agricultural hinterland to support the urban population that did not farm This hinterland would have needed a population base to trade its surplus for certain manufactured and imported goods The two most powerful states during the bulk of the ancient Greek period were