A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400–146 BC) - Softcover

Anna Magdalena Blomley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1789699703 ISBN 13: 9781789699708

Publisher: Archaeopress Archaeology, 2022

Synopsis

A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400–146 BC) is the first systematic study of Late Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications in the territories of ancient Argos and the city-states of the Argolic Akte (northeastern Peloponnese). Based on one of the largest regional corpora of Greek fortified sites to date, the volume investigates the function of rural fortifications by placing them in the context of their surrounding landscape. This approach – combining ‘traditional’ methods of ancient history and landscape archaeology with GIS-based data analyses – helps to readdress the long-standing tension between ‘military-strategic’ and ‘non-military’ research agendas in Greek fortification studies, and highlights that Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications are neither a priori fortified farmsteads nor parts of military-strategic networks of territorial defence. Instead, rural fortifications emerge in this monograph as multifunctional and multifaceted sites, which open a new window into different forms of ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ conflict in the ancient countryside and bear witness to a remarkable degree of local motivation and agency. The study thus demonstrates how ancient fortifications can provide an unexpected and so far much underappreciated opportunity for writing local or regional Greek histories – political and military as well as social and economic – from archaeological sources.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Magdalena Blomley studied Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oxford, and received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018. Her research lies at the intersection of Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, exploring political, social and economic structures through the study of ancient landscapes, and combining traditional archaeological approaches with epigraphic studies and GIS-based methods of data collection and analyses. She is currently the Esmée Fairbairn Junior Research Fellow in Classics at New College, Oxford, where her work focuses on ancient Thessaly (Greece).; Anna Magdalena Blomley studied Classical Archaeology at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oxford, and received a DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2018. Her research lies at the intersection of Classical Archaeology and Ancient History, exploring political, social and economic structures through the study of ancient landscapes, and combining traditional archaeological approaches with epigraphic studies and GIS-based methods of data collection and analyses. She is currently the Esmée Fairbairn Junior Research Fellow in Classics at New College, Oxford, where her work focuses on ancient Thessaly (Greece).

Edition details

• Publisher: Archaeopress Archaeology
• Publication date: 2022
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1789699703
• ISBN 13: 9781789699708
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328