Guest post by Kristen Mann, Early Career Material Culture Fellow in Hellenic Studies 2022-23

Research topic during fellowship: The Material Home in Geometric Greece

During the ninth to seventh centuries BC Aegean people radically transformed their social fabric and landscape, emphasizing communal identity and paving the way for the later laws, institutions, and philosophies so emblematic of ancient Greece and its legacy today. As a consequence of growing settlement densities, social codes of interaction became more articulated, while the stresses of an expanding world horizon generated a need for new institutions, laws, and centralized government. With its rare preservation and evocative site plan, the Cycladic settlement at Zagora on Andros (900-700 BCE) has been central to debate as to how these transformations unfolded, becoming emblematic of Early Iron Age communities on the cusp of change.

Our understanding of this period largely derives from evidence generated for specific occasions, such as burial contexts or epic cycles. In contrast, settlement evidence can illuminate how people participated in such processes on a daily basis. Yet querying tangible remains in search of the intangible human values, meanings, and perceptions they once held can seem impossible. When faced with the enormity of such a task, it is tempting to gloss over the enmeshed factors that shaped the creation, experience, and perception of domestic space, to fixate on one or two elements that offer a less complicated story.

The result is an impressionist picture of social change that is compelling at a distance. Upon closer examination of the material remains, and reflection on the forces that shaped that data, we find the picture hollow, populated by what Ruth Tringham (1991) dubbed the “faceless blobs” of prehistory. It is all too easy to populate these houses with our own distorted characters, often retrojected from the opinions of select 4th-century BCE authors like Aristotle. The original people are but echoes: ghosts we chase by modeling possibilities from the debris they left behind. This is the reality of archaeology: we seek the intangible in the tangible. To appreciate the complex materiality of household remains we must engage directly with the surfeit of spatial properties that enabled household tasks while simultaneously providing material cues for social behavior.

It is only once we develop multi-layered, material, understandings of people, their houses, and lived experience (physical conditions, sensory perceptions, and social engagement) that we can tease out what evidence more plausibly points to larger socio-political changes. For prehistoric settlements, all we have is the material: the physical remains of buildings and scattered remnants of belongings they once held. Too often, we overburden such evidence by working from broader theories of social change to select elements that seem to fit our interpretive models without first comprehending houses as lived spaces with functional, practical, and social needs. This has been particularly problematic in gendered approaches to early Greek houses (cf. Mann 2015).

Specifically, the rectilinear Zagora houses bear a superficial resemblance to those of later periods, leading scholars on a red-herring chase concerning the ‘evolution’ of urban planning and (very select) Athenian ideals concerning gendered behavior. My research places the tangible and experiential at the heart of discussion concerning Zagora households and 8th-century social change. It also grapples directly with questions of archaeological context and underpinning data reliability.

On receiving the CHS research fellowship

The CHS fellowship has been pivotal in preparing my PhD for publication. I live on Andros, and so access to the online libraries and resources has been vital. Specifically, in addition to polishing existing drafts, I have been crafting two new chapters: one setting the settlement of Zagora in its contemporary Cycladic context; the other challenging outdated gendered perceptions and contemporary biases that continue to distort our understanding of early Greek domestic space and women’s participation in Geometric community life. Thanks to the CHS, I have refined my arguments and extended my evidence significantly. My time at Washington was also critical, with full access to hardcopy journals such as Πρακτικά της εν Αθήναις Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας, Το Έργον της εν Αθήναις Αρχαιολογικής Εταιρείας, and Αρχαιολογικόν Δελτίον.

I am incredibly grateful for the financial and professional support of the CHS. The opportunity to travel to Washington with my other fellows and connect with fellow Early Career scholars both here and internationally was a particular highlight of this year. It was a wonderful experience, and I am greatly looking forward to the Nafplio workshop this summer.

About Kristen Mann

Dr. Kristen Mann is a settlement archaeology expert and veteran field archaeologist. Kristen completed her Ph.D. at the University of Sydney in 2019 and is also Treasurer of the Australasian Women in Ancient World Studies society and Director of the Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens’ Digital Horizons Project – a vocational training project for archaeology students. Her research specializes in Greek Early Iron Age (EIA) archaeology, social history, field methodologies, and the site of Zagora on Andros. However, her interests span Mediterranean archaeology, Greek history, digital archaeology, and intersectional feminist theory more broadly. Kristen’s work is informed by fifteen years of diverse field experience on over thirty five projects in Greece, Cyprus, Jordan, and Australia. Kristen will be conducting research, material study, and student training on Andros in support of her forthcoming publication The Material Home in Geometric Greece: A Social Archaeology of Zagora on Andros which explores EIA Cycladic social dynamics through household archaeology.

Early Career Fellowships in Hellenic Studies in Greece and Cyprus

The Early Career Fellowships in Hellenic Studies in Greece and Cyprus program aims to support postdoctoral researchers whose work requires continued access to material on-site. For 2022-2023, in the context of this fellowship award, CHS appointed two additional fellows whose work specializes in Material Culture. Learn more about this research opportunity on the Early Career Fellowships in Hellenic Studies webpage.