Souvatzi, S. 2013. Land tenure, social relations and social landscapes.

An Archaeology of Land Ownership

Edited by Maria Relaki and Despina Catapoti

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First published 2013 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2013 Taylor & Francis

The right of Maria Relaki and Despina Catapoti to be identifi ed as the author of the editorial material has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data An archaeology of land ownership / edited by Maria Relaki and Despina Catapoti. pages cm. — (Routledge studies in archaeology ; 9) “Simultaneously published in the UK” — Title page verso. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Landscape archaeology. 2. Social archaeology. 3. Ethnoarchaeology. 4. Land tenure—History. 5. Land use—History. I. Relaki, Maria. II. Catapoti, Despina. CC77.L35A72 2013 333.3—dc23 2012048566

ISBN: 978-0-415-88618-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-203-49759-3 (ebk)

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To the loving memory of my father

M. R.

To Maro and Chryssanthi

D. C.

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Contents

List of Figures ix List of Plates xiii Acknowledgements xv

1 An Archaeology of Land Ownership: Introducing the Debate 1 DESPINA CATAPOTI AND MARIA RELAKI

2 Land Tenure, Social Relations and Social Landscapes 21 STELLA SOUVATZI

3 Minoan Lands? Some Remarks on Land Ownership on Bronze Age Crete 46 SIMON JUSSERET, JAN DRIESSEN AND QUENTIN LETESSON

4 Where Mythical Space Lies: Land Ownership versus Land Use in the Northern Bronze Age 70 JANE DOWNES AND ANTONIA THOMAS

5 Pervasive Assumptions of Ownership: Land, Gender andReproductive Narratives 93 MARIA RELAKI

6 Land and People in Tribal Societies: Aspects of Land Possession in Oman 126 NIKOS EFSTRATIOU AND EFTHYMIA ALPHAS

7 Ownership or Tenure? A Case Study of Tribal Land Use from the Cusp of Prehistory 154 MOIRA JACKSON AND IAN W.G. SMITH

8 Harnessing the Land: The Place of Pioneering in Early Modern British Columbia 170 JEFF OLIVER

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viii Contents

9 Losing and Repossessing Land and Ancestral Landscapes: Archaeology and Land Reforms in the Eastern Highlands of Zimbabwe 192 PAUL MUPIRA

10 Land, Power and Status in Material Culture Studies: A Case Study on Alienability and Inalienability of Land in Brazil 218 CLARISSA SANFELICE RAHMEIER

11 Land Ownership and Rights of Use on Land in the South Italian Countryside: Ethnoarchaeological and Historical Perspectives 229 ANTOON C. MIENTJES AND MARK PLUCIENNIK

12 To Own or to Share? The Crisis of the Past at the Onset of the 21st Century 260 DESPINA CATAPOTI

13 Concluding Comment: Land, Life and the Dwelling Perspective 291 JOHN C. BARRETT

List of Contributors 299 Index 305

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2 Land Tenure, Social Relations and Social Landscapes

Stella Souvatzi

THEORETICAL LIMITATIONS AND POTENTIAL

Many archaeological explanations of land ownership have tended to focus al-most exclusively upon resources, restrictions and divisions and to view these, in addition, from a strictly economic, or rather economistic, perspective. Others project capitalist concerns and philosophies onto past societies—for example the need for intensifi cation of land exploitation and productivity, or the assumption of a direct connection between surplus production and surplus appropriation. These observations are especially true in the case of agricultural communities and ‘delayed-return’ economies, and generally so-cieties in which land is a principal means of production, my concern in this chapter.

Notions of the so-called formal, neoclassical or liberal paradigm in wider economic theory (see Folbre and Hartmann 1988: 186–190; Hann 1998; and Hart 1992: 112–117 for overviews and critiques), which focuses on pragmatic rationality and on economic maximisation and advocates the preeminence of private, exclusive property, have been particularly popular within archaeological processualist-functionalist agendas and/or the perspec-tives of centralised power (e.g. Byrd 1994; Earle 2000; 2004; Halstead and O’Shea 1989; Johnson and Earle 2000). The language and terms employed are distinctive: self-interest, appropriation, exploitation, status and power attainment, domination and differential access to productive resources and to opportunities for control. These terms can of course be deployed in dif-ferent theoretical economic frameworks, from that by formalists, where the problem is primarily one of allocation of resources and of management and risk, to that by Marxists and others, where the main question is one of political economy and inequality. Generally, though, most of the archaeo-logical approaches in which social relations revolve around economy and production construe a rather ‘dark’ view of both prehistoric economics and life as refl ecting domination, oppression and exploitation. In addition, they usually embody various aspects of different schools of economic thought, including a bundle of theories in economics—most notably, interest, role, re-source, strain or constraint and bargaining theories (for use of these notions

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22 Stella Souvatzi

in economic anthropology see, for example, Aragwal 1997; Curtis 1986; and Hart 1992: 115–117). Similarly, within neo-evolutionary perspectives, land ownership and its transmission are viewed as a major driving force behind the emergence of social complexity, specifi cally intensive agricul-ture and increased labour and energy investment in cultivation, which are taken to have raised the value and the productivity of land (see also Relaki this volume). This derives of course from the wider evolutionary tenet that productive systems determine social systems and the subsequent ranking of societies from ‘simple’ to ‘complex’ involving the emergence of centralised control and hierarchy (see Souvatzi 2007; 2008a: 40–43, 205–207 for more detailed discussion and critique; also Chapman 2003; 2007; Wynne-Jones and Kohring 2007). Agency-based approaches have not always managed to extricate themselves from economistic and positivist-processualist thinking (David 2001: 271), privileging social asymmetry and domination and the links between such relationships and the wider economy. Yet, the vision of a world marked by division, tension and competition may suggest that the ‘capitalist penetration’, which was the main subject of Marxist anthropol-ogy in the 1970s and 1980s, still makes its way into archaeological thinking.

A distinct epitome of a series of the above notions is seen in the dominant models of long-term socio-economic processes and changes in early prehis-toric farming communities. The Neolithic is considered to be a period of gradual intensifi cation of land exploitation and investment in subsistence production, seen, for example in the increase of settlement permanence, space restrictions and storage constructions, leading to growing indepen-dence of individual social groups such as houses or households, kinship units and so on and a progression against social cohesion and towards political centralisation (e.g. Byrd 1994; 2000; Earle 2004; Flannery 2002; Halstead 1995; Tringham and Krstiá 1990). Often coupled with an almost axiomatic presumption of strain and scarcity, the distinct belief is that so-cial groups intensively undertook to maximise the exploitation and value of their resources and competed with each other over land and all types of property. This, in turn, led to differential access to resources and the abil-ity for surplus appropriation or redistribution and gave way to the rise of aspiring leaders. There are two major assumptions here. The fi rst is that increased autonomy and antagonism facilitates increased productivity. The other is that individual social groups are able to act independently of the community or the wider society, driven, moreover, by self-interest. Both these assumptions bring us to another theoretical and sociological problem that I wish to address in this chapter—the emphasis on individualism within archaeology, implicit in the focus on private property, the perceived pursuit of individual autonomy and generally the tendency to take individuals, or individual social categories, such as women and men, as analytic units.

This chapter argues that such approaches embrace a narrow conception of complex social processes and cultural meanings, reducing an entire sys-tem of social relationships to an economic relationship between people and

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Land Tenure, Social Relations and Social Landscapes 23

land or people and things. They impede consideration of the entire varia-tion and multitude of ways in which people are linked with land as well as of the total range of social levels, scales and dimensions within which such links are established. They may, therefore, be of limited analytical applica-bility and cross-cultural utility. I suggest, instead, that associations of people with land are not a series of formalistic, economic or technical matters, but confi gurations of relationships linking the social, economic and ideo-logical spheres and being dependent upon particular social and historical circumstances.

Although it makes sense to consider land in terms of economy, land rela-tionships do not simply function merely on behalf of economy. Life is a lot more complex, and it might actually be the other way around: ideologies, cultural meanings, morality systems and the negotiation and reproduction of wider social relationships and dependencies might in fact shape the con-nection between people and land. And while divisions, antagonisms and inequalities are important themes of land relationships, they are not the only ones. Land and land relationships are also about unities, collectivi-ties and the dialectical interweaving between the political economy and the moral economy. There is substantial variation among societies with regards to whether land dependencies are dealt with as ‘private’ or as public/com-munal matters. In addition, land resources and values are not only narrowly economic in their character; they are also nonmaterial, ideal, symbolical and emotional. Thus, land ownership and economic benefi ts are part of a much larger package that also includes culturally defi ned concepts of value, emotion, restrictions on ego-centred behaviour and a possible distinction between producing and redistributive units (Curtis 1986; Hann 2001; Wilk 1993: 203).

Equally, focus on the self-interested pragmatic individual or individual social group downgrades the role of larger levels of social organisation, corporate groups and collective strategies and leaves little space for under-standing unities as well as divisions. For example the pursuit of household autonomy and resource maximisation advocated equally by the func-tionalist and neo-evolutionary reconstructions of the Neolithic discussed above assumes a weakening of institutional controls and collective ideals and downgrades relationships and dimensions that do not conform to some straightforward economic logic. Recent debates in archaeology and anthro-pology have severely criticised the idea of the self-contained, self-defi ned and integral individual actor as ethnocentric and rooted in metaphors of West-ern culture and have demonstrated that personal expressions and identities cannot be understood independently from wider social features and levels (e.g. Battaglia 1995; Busby 1997; Carsten 2004: 84–96; Chapman 2000; Edwards and Strathern 2000; Fowler 2004; Hann 2001; Jones 2005; LiPuma 1998; Schweitzer 2000: 9–10; Wilk 1993). Even within Western societies ‘individualism’ constitutes a very recent experience, and there are ‘property relations that transcend their individual members, i.e. they imply some sort

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24 Stella Souvatzi

of integrated collectivity’ and/or involve numerous variations from indi-vidual to the state (e.g. corporations and taxes) (Goody 1998: 201–202; Hann 1998: 6, 12).

Land and notions of ownership therefore are better seen in terms of so-cial relations between people. They can be composed of individual inter-ests and collective interests, inasmuch as social life is composed of both self-interest and morality in a rich dialectic, and interpretation should not treat these ideas as opposites. In accounting for land connections we should also include questions to do with the nature and deployment of social net-works and obligations in all their complexity; with culturally defi ned belief systems and concepts of value and reward; with the mapping out of the social, spatial and temporal dimensions of different groups; and with a dis-tinction between production and distribution. This approach is examined from the perspective of houses and village communities in Neolithic Greece, particularly through settlement patterns, architecture, subsistence and stor-age practices. A major aim is to demonstrate the diversity and richness of relationships to land at multiple scales of space and time. In doing so, I call into question several long-held models and theoretical constructs, includ-ing settlement permanence and continuity, ‘House societies’, the associa-tion between production and appropriation, and private or individual and public or communal ownership. The synthesis of anthropological examples provides further insights into the vast social and cultural variability in these matters and the multiplicity of the factors which produce it.

SETTLEMENT PATTERNS AND FLEXIBLE LAND SYSTEMS

The Greek Neolithic settlements ( Figure 2.1 ) utilise a variety of locations, create different spatial and architectural patterns, exhibit multiple principles of organization and refl ect different connections with the physical and social landscape.

In Macedonia and Thrace fl at, extended settlements of a large size such as Makriyalos (over 50 ha) and Stavroupolis (over 11 ha), resulting from the horizontal replacement of the widespread pit-buildings, exist along with habitation on mounds such as Dikili Tash, Sitagroi and Makri, characterised by several phases of occupation and substantial post-framed houses. Long-term settlements in the form of high earth mounds (also known as ‘tells’) resulting from the vertical superimposition of the closely spaced houses are characteristic of Thessaly and central Greece—for example Sesklo A, Otzaki and Pefkakia. Within the same region, some settlements show character-istics of both fl at sites, considered typical of central Macedonia, and tell sites, considered typical of Thessaly. Galene is an inconspicuous site of an extended and shifting habitation pattern, situated among the numerous con-temporary tell sites (Toufexis 2005). Sesklo combines a tell 8.5 high (Sesklo A) and a more extended settlement spread below (Sesklo B) ( Figure 2.2 ). In

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southern mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, villages include both tells and open sites and show a remarkable variety of size and possibly of func-tion (Alram-Stern 2005; Broodbank 2000; Cavannagh and Crouwel 2002: 121–158; Davis 2001).

Interestingly, although this diversity indicates general local preferences and understandings, it does not correlate strongly with particular regions or temporal phases, not even with environmental conditions or the avail-ability of resources. Different settlement types are developed within the same region, and new surveys have shown that soil formations and geo-graphical areas do not seem to have played a decisive role in settlement location (Gallis 1992; Johnson and Perlès 2004). The temporal trends are

Figure 2.1 Map of Neolithic sites from Greece mentioned in the text. Copyri

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26 Stella Souvatzi

equally interesting. For example there is an ‘Early Neolithic gap’ in central and eastern Macedonia, and probably also in Thrace, where settlements were established only at the end of the Middle Neolithic (around 5500 BC ) (An-dreou et al. 2001: 298–299, 308–309; Efstratiou et al. 1998), which cannot be satisfactorily accounted for by economic factors or environmental conditions (Andreou et al. 2001: 318–319). The Aegean islands were not systematically inhabited until the later phases of the Neolithic, even though the circulation of obsidian from Melos began as early as the Early Neolithic. In southern mainland Greece, the Final Neolithic is also a period of territorial expansion, which has been linked to a general shift to Aegean trade and metalworking (Davis 2001: 24). By contrast, in Thessaly, the long and stable settlement pat-tern, with its striking intra- and intersite density, broke in the Final Neolithic, when a dramatic reduction in the number of sites took place (see below).

In conjunction with the settlement pattern, agricultural practices and human interaction with plants and animals provide further data on socio-economic fl exibility in land tenure and intentionality in choice of regions. As Perlès (2001: 113; see also Kotsakis 2005) argues, the model of progressive and regular expansion of agriculture and domestication does not hold in Neo-lithic Greece. Instead, these appear to be complex and nonlinear phenomena, regulated by social and ideological factors as much as environmental ones. Not all regions were inhabited, the founding of new villages did not take place regularly during the course of the centuries, and the location, form

Figure 2.2 The settlement of Sesklo and surrounding landscape. (Reproduced cour-tesy of Vassiliki Adrimi-Sismani).

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and density of settlement varied. One homogeneous element is the prefer-ence for the creation of sedentary villages (though not always long-term) and the reliance of subsistence economy on agriculture and animal hus-bandry. Throughout the Neolithic natural habitats such as caves and rock-shelters, particularly abundant in Greece, were deliberately neglected and exploitation of the wild resources was limited, consisting mostly of acorns and occasional hunting, fowling and fi shing. Already in the Early Neolithic, as is evident for example in the settlement of Nea Nikomedeia, people grew cereals and pulses, including naked six-row and four-row barley, emmer wheat, lentils, peas and bitter vetch (Bintliff 1976; van Zeist and Bottema 1971), and kept fl ocks predominantly of sheep and goats, but also cattle and pigs (Payne 1969; Rodden 1962). In Late Neolithic settlements such as Dimini pips of vine and olive stones (Kroll 1979) suggest perhaps the intro-duction of vine and olive cultivation.

Other than that, different regions seem to have followed different socio-economic rates and trajectories regarding territorial exploitation and land connections. For example the majority of Neolithic sites discovered thus far are concentrated in the eastern half of Greece, whereas western Greece and the Ionian islands are comparatively underinhabited, at least in terms of density. Similarly in northern and central Greece villages are situated in large fertile plains on alluvial deposits, thus having an unlimited amount of arable land at their disposal, and form a dense and homogeneous network, spread-ing in all directions. In southern mainland Greece and the Aegean islands villages are situated at the edge of small fertile plains, on hillsides, and on coastal plains, tend to be smaller in size and are often separated from one another by 5–20 km. In the Peloponnese, the relatively low intra- and inter-site density (10–30 km) suggests generally, but not always, small- to medium-sized settlements (up to 1 ha), less long-lived and more mobile, with different territorial exploitation and a greater emphasis on animal husbandry, seasonal pastoralism, exchange networks and maritime economy than on agriculture (Cavannagh and Crouwel 2002: 121–158; Johnson 1996; Zachos 1996).

In conclusion, the settlement pattern evidence as a whole indicates an array of socio-economic systems and land connections, whose very diversity cannot be accounted for by single explanatory arguments. Rather, it refl ects consid-erable variations in territorial exploitation and subsistence strategies; in no-tions of permanence, continuity and the construction of social memory; and overall, in how social groups defi ned themselves and how they might have been connected with land and place. All this is further exemplifi ed in the following two sections.

The Tell and Nontell Dichotomy in Defi ning Modes of Land Tenure

The distinction of settlement types from central Europe to Anatolia into mounds or tells and nontells or open, extending sites and their respective

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socio-economic formation has been the subject of a long discussion in pre-historic archaeology (e.g., Bailey 1999; Chapman 1989; 1990; 1997; 2008; Kotsakis 1999; Whittle 2003: 59–62). Much of this discussion has aimed to explain their differences in terms of their links to land, the role of continuity in the construction of social memory and their general correlation with ver-tical superimposition and horizontal displacement of houses, respectively. A central issue regards the identifi cation of modes of land tenure and owner-ship. For example a common interpretation of the tell pattern in Thessaly is that the location of villages on good agricultural land inhibited horizontal expansion in favour of rebuilding on the same plots, so their longevity and economic stability resulted from the high productivity of the fi elds. This created a sense of ownership of domestic space and arable land, which in turn led to the need for intensifi cation of production and ‘banking’ of vital economic resources (Demoule and Perlès 1993: 363; Halstead 1989; 1999). Conversely, the nontell, shifting pattern in Macedonia may be the result of the use of cultivation plots within the site, interspersed with nonfi xed habitation structures and involving greater fl exibility with space and land holding and more limited scope for intensifi cation of production (Andreou and Kotsakis 1987: 82–84; 1994: 20; Kotsakis 1999: 73).

However, environmental and economic factors alone fail to explain both why in the equally rich soils of Macedonia the fl at settlement pattern was preferred and why extending sites do occur in Thessaly, let alone why hori-zontal shifting and vertical superimposition of houses can co-exist at the same site—for example at Nea Nikomedeia, Servia, Achilleion and Sesklo. More important, although the two types may suggest varying degrees of attachment to specifi c places and landscapes, an overemphasis on the con-trasts between tells and nontells may impede the recognition of variation within either type of site as well as of similarities between the two types of site. For example at Middle Neolithic Sesklo the differences relating to stra-tigraphy and settlement pattern between the tell (Sesklo A) and the nontell part of the site (Sesklo B) (see Kotsakis 1994; 1999) do not correspond to important economic or social differences, and certainly not to degrees of sedentism.

It is more likely that the differences between tells and nontells derive from different preferences, ideological structures and levels of dominant manifes-tations of identity rather than from fi xed systems of territorial rights and ownership. Besides, tells themselves are not unitary constructions. There can be considerable differences in their form, size, location, visibility, degrees of continuity and therefore in their associations with land (i.e. more or less per-manent) (e.g. Andreescu and Mirea 2008; Evans 2005: 117–118, 120–123; Whittle 2003: 59). Of equal relevance is Tringham’s (2000) argument that open or fl at settlements are not necessarily less continuous or less complex; they just have different notions of continuity. For example the open settle-ment of Nea Makri, with its twelve successive habitation layers, spanning two thousand years, verifi es the fact that fl at villages of pit-buildings can

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be as long-lived as tells with more durable houses. At Makriyalos I the re-peated digging and renewing of the ditch that surrounded the fl at settlement and its recurrent association with burials created a landmark which may have been just as vital to expressing and maintaining site (re)occupation or residential continuity (Triantaphyllou 1999: 131–132). Generally, in earth mounds the maintenance of a specifi c and fi xed settlement plan, house re-striction and the use of more durable construction materials formed over the years the prominent and permanent landmarks that are now known as ‘tells’ and comprised vital means for the creation of a social identity grounded, among other things, on land and place. Flat settlements, on the other hand, might be viewed as having a more fl uid use of land or space. However, in these settlements the successive interventions and short-distance relocations of buildings, in conjunction with the constant digging of pits and ditches and their infi lling with various types of material, may well refl ect a method of creating, ‘appropriating’ and holding connections with land and the past (Skourtopoulou 2006: 55–56).

The Constructed Environment and Land as Both a Connecting and Dividing Factor

Yet more forms of land associations, rights and uses can be detected in the many ways in which people constructed the wider landscape, projected meanings onto it and ultimately transformed it into a social landscape. All over Greece and throughout the Neolithic people invested considerably in the creation of a structured environment and marked out parts of the land-scape by dividing settlement from nonsettlement space. They did so in a va-riety of ways, ranging from stone enclosures to perimetric ditches, and from habitation terraces to retaining walls, all of which incorporated, among other things, social perspectives about space divisions and the intention to engage in large-scale labour-intensive works.

One pattern that seems consistent and widespread is that of concentric boundaries, although its particular material representation and social and symbolic signifi cance might have varied considerably among different com-munities. For example at Dimini six stone concentric walls that follow the natural contour of the mound and create symmetrical habitation segments provide the best example so far of both site demarcation and consistent internal segmentation ( Figure 2.3 ). At Mandra and Makriyalos the ditches and enclosures seem solely to surround rather than organise intrasite space. Other examples include the large perimetric ditches and stone enclosures of Palioskala and Makrychori I in Thessaly, of Paliambela and Mandalo in Macedonia, and of Strofi las and Limenaria on the Aegean islands of Andros and Thassos, respectively.

Whatever the specifi c role of the boundaries—and they probably had many—they cannot be seen independently of the wider social, cultural, eco-nomic landscape or of the areas they enclosed. They create varying degrees

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of intimacy, visibility and movement, and refl ect considerable variations in people’s connections with the social landscape, with other communities, with their own community and with each other. While they did act as wider space dividers and landmarks, settlement boundaries do not seem to relate well to an appropriation of the surrounding lands and the control of access to these lands or with the marking of site territories. For example there are no convincing indications of site nucleation and aggregation associated with settlement hierarchy and the development of central places, and no ‘core’ and ‘satellite’ sites can be identifi ed (Andreou et al. 2001: 281; Demoule and Perlès 1993: 406–407; Johnson and Perlès 2004: 75). Rather, they represent a complex web of social relationships, group identities, cosmological percep-tions and conceptual and physical directions at a settlement, local, regional and interregional level.

Through their peripheral distribution the enclosures and ditches symboli-cally ‘protected’ the settlements, demarcated them from the landscape and the outsiders, and primarily controlled access to the settlement themselves rather than within the surrounding lands. In the cases of the prominent earth mounds or tells the territorial demarcation, complemented by the houses, often two-storied, would have undoubtedly imposed them on the landscape and made them visible from considerable distances. At the intrasettlement level one basic purpose of these large-scale architectural works could have been to

Figure 2.3 The settlement of Dimini. The central part is 4–5m higher than the bot-tom of the outermost enclosure. (Reproduced courtesy of Vassiliki Adrimi-Sismani).

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provide a framework within which social units could come together and orga-nise their transactions, as well as a material mnemonic of those transactions. In this sense, a settlement as a whole served as a material manifestation of the community’s history and identity, while all settlements together, with their varied forms, locations and distributions, would have created a heavily so-cialised environment as well as a kind of physical, social and conceptual map.

‘HOUSE SOCIETIES’ AND FIXITY VERSUS MOBILITY

Nor is there any reason to assume that houses (or whole settlements for that matter) remained stable or that they retained the same social and ma-terial organisation over time, in any type of site. In fact, a serious obstacle to the study of the relationship between people and land as an analytical issue rather than as a given is the stereotyped image of a stable prehistoric house, fi rmly rooted in land and material possessions. It is often argued that long-term locality and solid architecture established fi rm links between people and land, and that social relationships became increasingly infl exible as the result of space continuity and the manipulation of land ownership and transmission (e.g. Bailey 2000: 269–170; Byrd 1994: 641, 643; Earle 2004: 112, 113). Lévi-Strauss’s (1983; 1987) concept of ‘House societies’ has been particularly infl uential on the focus on intergenerational invest-ment in a specifi c locus. That is, societies in which houses or households are fundamental units of social structure, encompassing both a social group and the architectural unit and the objects that go with it, and integrating a number of antagonistic principles revolving around kinship, alliance, inheri-tance and exchange systems (Lévi-Strauss 1983: 174–184; 1987: 155). In these societies ownership of land leads to links between dwellings, temporal succession and ancestral lines (Lévi-Strauss 1987: 152).

The concept of ‘House societies’ has contributed signifi cantly to our un-derstanding of the fact that objects, buildings, settlements, monuments and landscapes can all be enmeshed in strategies by which groups and communi-ties claim or negotiate land ownership, property, inheritance and transmis-sion. Houses themselves can act as sites for the construction of a sense of property and ownership through the daily repetition of practices, the use and continuity of buildings over time, the burial of ancestors, the transmis-sion of social knowledge and information, as well as the transmission of the houses themselves and of the objects kept in them (Carsten 1997; Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995; Hodder 2005; 2006; Hodder and Cessford 2004; Joyce 2000; Joyce and Gillespie 2000). Finally, the concept may be appli-cable to the Greek Neolithic, with its most overwhelming feature being the central importance of the house and the village community, evidenced in the hundreds of settlements that have been identifi ed to date.

However, the importance of co-residence, durable architecture and space continuity should not be a priori assumed and should be treated with

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caution. An overemphasis on these notions risks both privileging some types of societies over others, as well as disregarding the fl exibility of spatial boundaries within all types of societies. It may therefore be of limited cross-cultural validity (see also discussion in Gillespie 2000: 32–49). Although co-residence is a pertinent component of social grouping and can become the focus of claims for rights to land, it is not the exclusive referent of a social unit. A large number of anthropological case studies have shown that co-residential groups can exist on different levels within the same society, can contain more than one social unit or can be parts of larger social units—with examples ranging from the Serbian zadruga , in which the constituent sub-groupings of the extended household occupy rooms surrounding a central house (Byrnes 1976; Hammel 1972), to the large family-communities of me-dieval France, which formed one co-resident group of thirty or forty people occupying one large partitioned house (Segalen 1986: 14–17). In addition, house space may be designated more by the social activities carried out in it and less by physical structures and units. Equally, although long-term locality and solid architecture may impose different constraints on the so-cial structures of ‘House societies’ than the mobility in residence patterns of other societies, they should not serve to mask the constant fl uctuations, shifts or changes in spatial and social organisation at the small scale, arising, for example over rights to collective wealth, property and inheritance, and the repeated redistribution of goods, labour and resources. In reality, the house is subject to continual change rather than to perpetuation over time of a single social unit.

One method to detect such contingencies archaeologically is to direct sim-ilar attention to the social dynamics of mobility between and within settle-ments and of house or settlement discontinuity, abandonment, destruction or fragmentation as is devoted to the processes of repeated reconstruction of buildings and the notions of continuity and stability. They are all present in Neolithic Greece, in parallel to the wider social balance and stability at the larger scale, and say much about the nature and duration of land ownership. At the house level, different architectural and spatial divisions are intro-duced in different contexts at different times; entrances are being blocked up and relocated; houses shrink or become larger, others are abandoned and new ones are founded, on top of, in adjunction to, or away from the earlier ones; and house interiors are modifi ed, altered or totally rearranged over the different building phases. At Sesklo, the incessant process of structuring and restructuring house interior (see Souvatzi 2008a: 98–101) rarely resulted in a deviation from the original plan and size of house. This may refl ect well-defi ned links between domestic groups and specifi c plots. Conversely, the history of the settlement at Servia over the seven successive Neolithic phases reveals changing attitudes to house replacement, and possibly also to residence and land ownership patterns: either buildings were relocated and the old plots were left temporarily vacant, or the old structural debris was levelled and new building programmes on the same plots were undertaken

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(Mould and Wardle 2000). A change of or in residence may mean a break or a loosening of tightly knit relationships with the village community, with neighbours or relatives and may therefore affect considerably patterns of and rights to land and property.

Variation in the degree of settlement continuity and abandonment can also betray changes in residence patterns and territorial rights. For example Middle Neolithic Sesklo and Platia Magoula Zarkou were both destroyed by fi re. Sesklo was abandoned for about fi ve hundred years before reoccupa-tion in the Late Neolithic, whereas Platia Magoula Zarkou continued into the early Late Neolithic, but seems to have been abandoned during the later Late Neolithic. In the deep stratigraphic trench ZA at Sitagroi, alternation of house fl oors with layers described as middens suggests that occasional short-term abandonment may have taken place within a generally continu-ous habitation of the tell (Renfrew 1986: 175–182).

Settlement abandonment, destruction or ‘deliberate’ fi ssioning may have also been a means of dealing with confl ict situations over land and resources. For example recent analysis of settlement patterns in Thessaly, the region of hundreds of long-term villages, reveals a long history of widely accepted so-cial constraints on site size, number and territory (Johnson and Perlès 2004). From the Early to Late Neolithic (ca. 6500–4500 BC ), settlements remained up to 5 ha in size, with populations maintained in the low hundreds, a mean distance between fi rst-order nearest neighbours of 2.2 km, and an individual territory estimated at 430–450 ha. The number of settlements for each phase also remained relatively stable over time (between 118 and 146) because of the abandonment of settlements and establishment of new ones. The corre-spondence between settlement abandonment and establishment and the reg-ular spacing of sites implies regular migration and conscious relocation of whole villages (Johnson and Perlès 2004: 70). Constraints on the maximum size of settlements would have also allowed for a controlled demographic expansion in order both to prevent intrasite confl icts and to facilitate in-tersite connections (Perlès 2001: 151, 297). Incidentally, this could explain both the exceptional site density in Thessaly and why, despite this density, no intra- or intersettlement hierarchy, was developed.

THE INTERPLAY BETWEEN PRIVATE AND COMMUNAL LAND OWNERSHIP ON THE INTRASETTLEMENT LEVEL

In accordance with the models discussed at the beginning of this chapter, the Greek Neolithic is considered a period of gradual intensifi cation of land ex-ploitation and storage activity, seen, for example in the introduction of large storage vessels and an increase of storage pits during its later phases, even though there are no major changes in agricultural production (Halstead 1989: 75–76; Perlès 2001: 166, 193–194; van Andel et al. 1995). Halstead (1995: 14–18; 1999) argues that during the Late Neolithic previously open

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34 Stella Souvatzi

villages become organised into courtyard groups, and storage and cooking facilities are placed indoors or in closed yards. This is taken to suggest a new sense of land ownership, independent bulk storage and an increase in individual household economic control. It then follows that land ownership was regulated through inheritance or property systems at the level of each house and that houses acted more and more as autonomous units, driven by self-interest. A major problem with these arguments is that they are not substantiated convincingly, either theoretically or empirically. Here I focus on two examples on the intrasettlement level—storage and house property.

Storage

In all of the Greek Neolithic settlements that have been suffi ciently exposed the extensive facilities for storage and the amounts and range of foodstuffs indicate that there was enough surplus collectively, seen at the level of a community, and individually, at the level of different households. The range and abundance inside the houses of storable surplus and storage facilities ( Figure 2.4 ), in conjunction with the generally homogeneous distribution of food remains, suggests uniform strategies of subsistence exploitation and equal access to subsistence resources and produce by all individual households. Signifi cantly, it is paralleled by an even distribution of all other classes of material, from pottery and tools to burial and ritual data. Even in later Neolithic sites such as Dimini, where the variety of subsistence data suggests diversifi cation and, possibly, a degree of intensifi cation of produc-tion (Halstead 1992), consistent indications of unequal distribution of a kind that would point to social differentiation are lacking. For example the lack of signifi cant variation in the horizontal distribution of the faunal assemblage suggests uniform strategies of animal exploitation and relative self-suffi ciency of the separate domestic units (Halstead 1992: 53).

Furthermore, there is no clear association between location of storage (indoors or outdoors) and temporal period that would support the argument about increasing restriction of storage activity or stored surplus. Through-out the Greek Neolithic, the frequent presence of storage facilities and large storage vessels in areas not clearly related with a single house—e.g. external spaces and nondomestic buildings—refl ects a tendency towards communal control of the surpluses. A good example is the structural complex with a concentration of clay bins of various sizes at Makri II (Efstratiou et al. 1998). It is found in the central and uppermost part of the settlement, be-yond the spatial realm of individual households, and it is clearly distinct from them in terms of architecture, size and contents. It has been interpreted as representing communal storage of grain and/or goods (Efstratiou et al. 1998: 25–27). Signifi cantly, the same organisation of the site, with the corpo-rate bin-complex located at the top of the mound and the residential areas on the slopes and below, seems to have persisted for hundreds of years without noticeable changes. The extensive yards and external constructions at many

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other sites (e.g. Dimini, Sesklo, Thermi, Makriyalos, Stavroupolis, Saliagos and Nea Makri), with their storage and cooking installations and charred cereals, also indicate attempts for more collective storage ( Figure 2.5 ). Other relevant indications of communality include the occurrence of storage pits and pots and food remains in shared work areas used for various craft ac-tivities such as pottery fi ring and fl int- and obsidian-knapping. It is likely that shared storage and food consumption might have been accompanied by the sharing of tools, facilities and labour.

All this evidence suggests that while storage was well within the capaci-ties of individual households, individual households might have not been as economically independent or as socially unrestrained in hoarding as is supposed. It also implies that producers did not necessarily have a ‘natural’ right to their own produce and that control and exploitation of surpluses, local resources and fi nished products may instead have been organised at a higher level of social organisation.

House Land Ownership, Property and Transmission

Similar skepticism can be aimed at the idea of strictly exclusive territorial and property rights at the household level. Indeed, a host of anthropologi-cal and historical studies suggest that individual social groups rarely have

Figure 2.4 The settlement of Mandra showing stone enclosure and ditch. (Repro-duced courtesy of Giorgos Toufexis) .

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36 Stella Souvatzi

authority over the totality of common land, which is instead shared with other such groups (e.g. Segalen 1986: 14–20). For example among the Kekchi Maya of Belize most land and resources were owned communally by the vil-lage, village leadership positions rotated and material wealth fl owed through the manipulation of kinship relationships rather than through land owner-ship and manipulation of property (Wilk 1983; 1984). In addition, equal pooling of house labour and resources could increase production, while au-thoritarian relationships could lead to a long-term decline (Wilk 1989). In the Melanesian island of Ponam the land is held and used according to a complex pattern determined by relations to the fi rst owners of the different parts of the island, who were said to be settlers from the mainland (Carrier 1998). According to the Ponams, those settlers were the people who fi rst cleared the land and built houses on it and who therefore had fundamental rights in it. Consequently, many of the islanders who occupy land do so because of the web of social relations and identities embedded in the land, periodically brought to the fore in intravillage ceremonial exchanges.

Similarly, the evidence from the Greek Neolithic considered thus far prompts us to reconsider the extent to which we can envisage clear notions of private or exclusive land-ownership rights, and much less household em-powerment over the rest of the community. Certainly, the day-to-day inter-action, the repetitive patterning of activities over time and, generally, the experience of lived space through hundreds of years of largely unchanged

Figure 2.5 Interior of House 23 (or House N) at Dimini showing the facilities on the three successive fl oors. Stone built-in storage constructions on top left and top right.

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occupation would have contributed to the development of notions of pri-vate ownership of physical and social space, land, resources and objects at the house level. Equally, through the practice of house replacement, either vertical or horizontal, a household history and genealogy were created and transferred from one generation to another, linking households at any one time to those preceding and those succeeding and perhaps also enabling them to enjoy particular rights and relationships. In addition, in several settlements internal spatial segmentation suggests that specifi c social groups persisted within the same locations and benefi ted from a particular form of settlement space ownership. All these features suggest some kind of in-trasettlement ownership practices, inherited exclusivity or private forms of ownership.

However, it does not follow from any of this that individual households can exclude others, for example from the consumption of agricultural sur-plus, the distribution of material products and the use of natural resources or of community land. True, societies with ‘delayed-return’ economies are more likely to develop private claims to territory than ‘immediate-return’ societies: they require investment in agricultural production and this invest-ment can become the focus of ownership claims (Hann 1998: 11; Woodburn 1982; 1998). But the growth of long-term dependencies and the production and pooling of subsistence surplus is equally necessary for these societies: it provides an essential precondition for the engagement of certain individu-als or groups in craft specialisation, long-distance exchange and large-scale architectural works, all of which are major characteristics of the Greek Neo-lithic. Individual household ‘protection’ from economic risk and uncertainty as well as from fi ssion and dissolution through some wider control or co-ordination of land, resources and the distribution of surplus should also be considered. If a house member claimed exclusive rights, the house might collapse. If a house claimed more rights than others, the community might collapse.

Another criterion for identifying house property rights on land and spe-cifi c resources in the vicinity of the settlement could be an association of particular raw materials with specifi c buildings (see also Jusseret et al. this volume). This could be particularly indicative, in view of the considerable intrasite variability in Greek Neolithic domestic architecture, with differ-ent building techniques and materials often co-existing within the same site and sometimes a combination of more than one technique or material being employed for the construction of the different structural elements of the same building (see Souvatzi 2008b). In addition, at the settlement of Dikili Tash the different clays used for different domestic constructions (walls, roofs, fl oors, ovens and benches) were obtained from sources as far as 15 km away (Koukouli-Chrysanthaki et al. 1996: 686–688). However, there is no exclusive association between specifi c buildings and specifi c raw materi-als within a settlement. The generally homogeneous intrasite distributions of material products point to similar inferences, given also that in several cases

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(e.g. obsidian tools, Spondylus shell items and marble vases) the raw materi-als used were obtained from long distances.

In summary, although a house unit can be viewed in terms of land own-ership and property and inheritance systems, the ways different societies recognise, maintain and affi rm such links in material terms are far from fi xed and uniform. Even within long-term farming communities there is a range of social, cultural and economic features that may defi ne intergenera-tional transfer. I believe that what we see in the storage and house data is an interplay between inclusive and exclusive or between private and communal forms of land ownership, with all the gradations, fl uctuations and overlaps in between. We can perhaps envisage a system whereby community or com-munal land might have been cultivated or otherwise used in individual ways and yet subject to several nesting levels of control and ownership. Land plots, especially for agriculture, might have been allocated through some wider con-sensus to specifi c households on the basis of a variety of factors—e.g. needs or size, social obligations, notions of responsibility, as a token of social rec-ognition or as an economic reward—and could have reverted back to com-munity for reallocation when no longer needed by the household or when a household broke up or dissolved. In short, land might have been collectively owned, but ‘privately’ or exclusively used for subsistence production. House plots and their transmission, on the other hand, might have been subject to more private or individualised concerns (although again some general con-sensus as to where one could or could not build would be necessary, given the ordered layouts of most Greek Neolithic settlements).

CONCLUSIONS

The theoretical arguments and empirical evidence discussed in this chapter indicate that it is impossible to compress the bewildering complexity of the relations between people and land into a few arguments about economic manipulation, rational planning and production inputs and outputs. Nor is it easy to enclose the rich diversity of these relations into a few predictive and single-dimensional models of associations between social systems, pro-ductive systems and land property systems.

All lines of Greek Neolithic evidence considered here, from settlement patterns to residential mobility, and from house architecture to storage, sug-gest that different forms of land ownership may have existed, taking place at different contexts and in different times. For example how was space al-located within a settlement, given also the highly structured layout of most settlements and the clear manifestation of community-wide standards in architecture and the spatial structuring of activities within each of them? When a household broke up or dissolved, where were the new household(s) established and who was responsible for the allocation of new house- and land-plots? How was the decision reached and the consensus achieved to

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abandon a settlement and to establish a new one, or, more signifi cantly, to fragment a settlement into others, and according to what processes and criteria new lands were selected and links with them affi rmed? Who was allowed to exert a degree of communal control over solely household rights to storage, and why? On a larger scale, to what level of social organisation can the access to long-distance resources be related? To that of specialised groups, to whole communities or to even wider, intercommunity or inter-regional social formations? And is all this to be understood solely in terms of an economic relationship between people, land and things or is it better perceived primarily in terms of social choices and social interaction between people?

The most plausible answer to all these questions is that there indeed co-existed many forms and modes of land tenure, a mix of inclusive and rela-tively exclusive land associations and property relations. Their boundaries were fl exible rather than clear-cut, overlapping and even contradictory at times and involved numerous variations of ‘private’ and collective. There is, in addition, no consistent evidence that these forms and variations con-solidated over time into stable confi gurations of social entitlements to land, focused on the individual or the community or some centralised hierarchy or socio-political formation, and the boundaries between individual and collective ownership become more and more blurred as we move towards the larger spatial scale. It therefore seems more likely that the motives be-hind these phenomena may be better accounted for by a concern with the creation and maintenance of social networks, underpinned by complex no-tions of responsibility and obligations, rather than by solely economic or practical reasons.

It seems that some of the long-held models and straightforward associa-tions concerning land ownership are simplistic, and often ethnocentric, and require serious rethinking. A good place to start is the very notion of land ownership. As the editors of the volume underline, it has to be treated as an analytical issue rather than as a supracontextual given, and such a treatment also entails a concern with its defi nition and conceptual refi nement. Confl a-tion of the concept of land ownership with concepts such as property (and what is more, private property), inheritance, management and permanence limits our potential to understand the character and diversity of land own-ership systems in different socio-historical circumstances. For instance, the need for resource maximisation and the assumption of a direct connection between surplus production and surplus appropriation or ownership may be evident in Western philosophy and economy, but in noncapitalist societ-ies, it is conceivably more variable and complex. Certainly modes of sur-plus appropriation are associated with particular forms of power relations. But those who exercise power or who own the ‘means of production’ are not always those who extract and distribute the surplus (Saitta 2005: 29). There is also a variety of socially rather than economically prescribed rea-sons for overproduction (intensifi cation) and resource mobilisation, most

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saliently documented ethnographically and archaeologically—for example the intended destinations of social or symbolic exchange (Spielmann 2002; Strathern 1988).

Land ownership and other forms of property may also have to do with shared value and belief systems and restrictions on self-interested or ego-centred behaviour. A shift from a focus on individualism towards the con-sideration of common property arrangements and collective strategies can also be critical for a fuller understanding of the ways in which people es-tablish links with land. It allows us to see individual relationships refl ecting larger social relationships and therefore to examine the material, spatial and temporal dimensions of different interest groups.

Overall, the web of rules, meanings and ideologies within which land ownership, property rights and modes of inheritance are shaped must them-selves be explained rather than produced as explanations. I propose that land ownership and other ‘land matters’ are better seen as social relations between people, operating at a variety of time and space scales and linking the economic with the ideological and the material with the symbolic. Such a viewpoint has fl uidity and an open-ended character, allows for the dy-namic interplay between different factors in land connections and can create greater conceptual and analytical potential for archaeology.

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