INTRODUCTION

A different approach would be to study contemporary Greek agriculture, and to try and make deductions back to antiquity. We find ourselves in the fortunate situation that geographers as well as social anthropologists have taken an interest in the comparatively backward Greek countryside. This is due particularly to political conditions in modern Greece. After the Second World War and the Greek Civil War substantial amounts of capital, primarily American, were invested in order to put Greece back on her feet; it had

been realized that without a thorough change in the stagnant life in the villages, the demographic distribution of the Greek population would become yet more uneven. A number of commissions under OEEC came up with recommendations supposed to guide governments in their agricultural politics. Thus, in 1951 appeared Pasture and Fodder Development in Mediterranean Countries; in general, it deals with the ever-present question concerning the relationship between agriculture and cattle-breeding, emphasizing the need to supply manure to the soil as a prerequisite for an increased agricultural productivity. Subsequent years saw a series of specific studies on Greek villages: Vasilika, A Village in Modern Greece by Ernestine Friedl (1962), Portrait of a Greek Mountain Village by Juliet du Boulay (1974) and The Greek Peasant by Scott G. McNall (1974), with analyses of villages in Boeotia, Euboea and northern Attica. Although the interest of the scholars is focused mainly on social life in a wider sense, much information concerning agriculture is to be found. In 1975 Ernestine Friedl convened a conference in New York with a view to assembling the results of field work in Greece; in 1976 the report was published, entitled Regional Variation in Modern Greece and Cyprus: Towards a Perspective on the Ethnography of Greece, edited by M. Dimeo and Friedl. Here we find a series of interesting separate analyses which throw light on agricultural practice and farmers' mentality in parts of Greece that are only to a small degree under the influence of the three phenomena that rapidly change the nature of agriculture: the use of fertilizers, artificial irrigation and mechanization. It is also noteworthy that here we find an attempt at a long-range analysis of agriculture. The same trends will be found in the so-called 'New Archaeology'. Here, Michael H. Jameson's project in southern Argolis, which is now nearing its final publication, and the Cambridge/Bradford Boeotian Expedition are of the greatest interest and go to show that a combined effort from scholars representing various fields of learning is of vital importance. The pioneers in Greece were the participants in the Minnesota Messenia Expedition, the results of which were published in 1972 by W.A. McDonald and G .R. Rapp with the subtitle Reconstructing a Bronze Age Regional Environment. But the concentration on prehistoric periods may well make the student of antiquity shed a bitter tear. The expedition analysed remains from the Bronze Age, but some may feel that relatively little attention was paid to later remains from the Archaic and Classical periods. A search for the Messenian Helot settlements could perhaps have furnished us with a corresponding result and would have given us an entirely different basis for our understanding of circumstances concerning the production that constituted the basis of Spartan society. Now we have to be content with the impetus that these studies have given to Bronze Age research. But other surveys are on their way. Classical archaeologists have, in fact, overcome the hesitation towards the study of material culture that Sally C. Humphreys, rather caustically, has described in her article 'Archaeology and the social and economic history of Classical

Greece' (1967). The ecological aspect in the interpretation of the past has been emphasized also by Renfrew and Wagstaff in An Island Polity: The Archaeology of Exploitation in Melos (1982) and by J.L. Davis, J.F. Cherry and E. Mantzourani in 'An archaeological survey of the Greek island of Keos' (1985). Often, however, it seems that the presentation of archaeological material has receded into the background in favour of interpretation. This lessens the reader's ability to check as he reads on; perhaps, indeed, it throws a veil over the fact that the empirical material is limited, and therefore also of limited value as evidence. 2 It remains to consider another interesting contribution from historical geography: The Development of Rural Settlement, A Study of the Helos Plain in Southern Greece by J.M. Wagstaff (1982). By a combination of archaeological and geographical methods we find a history of settlements in a well-defined area on the Peloponnese from prehistoric times until today, with a number of precise observations that require reflection also for a student of ancient history.