Landscape archaeology in Greece and the Balkans was linked to ‘the past in the past’ perspective early on, especially as far as the Neolithic is concerned. The very differentiation between tells and extended settlements has been at the forefront of discussions pertaining to the inhabitation of the landscape and indeed it has been interpreted in the light of the different relationship their inhabitants had with the past. There is a cohort of studies that ask how people dealt with their past, depending on the kind of community they were part of and indeed depending on the landscape these communities would have helped form. But in asking that, these studies almost invariably take the past as a given and explicitly or implicitly equate it with the very accumulation of what remains. The past is construed as being there all along, waiting to be found and used. In this paper I revisit the ontological status of the past and ask under what conditions and through which practices the past is produced. That is, I explore the production of the past as a distinct period of time and trace its history in prehistory, asking about the effects of such a history on people’s lives.
Communities, Landscapes, and Interaction in Neolithic Greece
International conference 29-30 May 2015
