This paper explores some of the many ways in which people in Neolithic Greece constructed and used the wider landscape, moved across it, projected meanings onto it and ultimately transformed it into a social landscape.
Traditional approaches have tended to focus almost exclusively upon resources and environmental conditions in order to reconstruct past landscapes, and to view these, in addition, from a strictly economic, or rather economistic, perspective – for instance, through a need for intensification of land exploitation and productivity – thus often projecting capitalist notions onto past societies. Recent studies, however, increasingly move towards a view of the landscape as a social and historical construct, advocating greater account of human perception, agency and meaning, which so far has been little embraced in Neolithic eastern Mediterranean studies.
This paper argues that associations of people with land are not a series of formalistic or technical matters, but configurations of relationships linking the social, economic and ideological spheres. Although it makes sense to consider land in terms of economy or the natural environment, life is conceivably a lot more complex and variable. The negotiation and reproduction of wider social relationships and dependencies, ideologies and cultural meanings might also shape the connection between people and land. This approach is explored from the perspective of village communities in Neolithic Greece, particularly through a synthetic examination of settlement patterns, architecture, residential mobility, and production practices. A main aim is to demonstrate the diversity of links to land at multiple scales of space and time. In doing so, the paper includes questions to do with social networks and with the mapping out of different social groups.