Panel 2.5 – Halos, a city state on the edge?


Organisation/Vorsitz:

  • Vladimir Stissi (University of Amsterdam)

Panel abstract

Ancient Halos, in the south of Thessaly, Greece, was a small polis at a strategic position in a coastal landscape that looks fertile now, but may have been difficult to manage in antiquity. More than a century of archaeological research in the Halos territory and its direct surroundings by Greek, Dutch, British and Canadian teams has produced a dataset of exceptional variety and quality. Much of the area has been surveyed, many sites (including two urban centers) have been excavated, and there are detailed studies of faunal remains, geomorphology and human remains (including DNA and isotope analyses). Together these offer a unique possibility to study the subsistence of a 'city state' in exceptional depth. This is all the more interesting because Halos was not a regular polis. It only had a substantial (50 ha) urban settlement for less than forty years, and may have had no proper urban center for much of its existence – the likely site of the main central place was less than 10 ha at its largest, but that may not have lasted long; it was also uninhabited during some periods. Yet, the area hosts one of the largest known cemetery areas of Early Iron Age Greece, which contains thousands of graves over an area of several square kilometers, but dwindles in the 6th century BCE. 250 years later, the just mentioned large Hellenistic city seems to come out of the blue. The archaeological finds, moreover, suggest strong variations in wealth and food patterns over time. Clearly the demographic, social and economic foundations of this polis were unstable – which was surely not unusual, but is rarely as visible as here. At least part of this precarious situation may be related to the landscape, which was partly very marshy or subject to flash floods and episodes of heavy erosion and soil deposition, and may not have been very fit for agriculture in many areas. Archaeology and isotopes suggest periods of immigration, whereas historical sources indicate Halos was the victim of major moments of warfare, which lead to the destruction and depopulation of the city at least once. Finally the area is regularly hit by earthquakes, the devastating results of which are clearly visible in the archaeological record. In this panel we want to explore the subsistence of Halos from various angles as an exemplary case, to get a better grip on the ways a community in a difficult environment managed to survive and sometimes thrive over almost a millennium.

Paper abstracts

1. Vasso Rondiri, Dimitrios Agnousiotis und Despina Efstathiou (Ephorate of Antiquities of Magnesia) / Konstantinos Vouzaxakis (Ephorate of Antiquities of Karditsa)

Reconsidering archaeological landscapes in the broader area of ancient Halos
Landscape always played an important role in archaeological thought and research. Through the anthropology and geography of the 19th and 20th centuries, the concept of landscape was often redefined, along with the perceptions and the philosophical currents of the time. In archaeological research, space as a variable has always participated in the formation of culture, at the same time as it was itself formed.
In recent archaeological practice landscape and material culture acquire meanings according to historical conditions, and associated with memories and senses of individuals. At the same time, acts and their actors are involved in the landscape, gaining experiences that can contribute to its interpretation.
Today, the archaeological landscape is redefined historically, socially and ideologically, from something static to something fluid and dynamic, open to various interpretative perspectives.
The area of Almyros, as an archaeological landscape, has been at the forefront of archaeological research since the early 20th century. Greek and foreign scientists have always been interested in the antiquities of the area. The present paper looks forward to examining the archaeological research of the region over time, from Prehistory to the Roman Conquest, focusing on the different levels of landscape influence in the formation of the archaeological scene and vice versa. As examples, data from three major research areas are analyzed: Halos, Voulokaliva and Magoula Plataniotiki.

 

2. Vladimir Stissi (University of Amsterdam)

Halos pottery in its landscape: a diachronic ceramic perspective
The many years of fieldwork done at Halos have produced an enormous amount of ceramics, from a wide range of contexts, covering all periods from Neolithic to the present. It would be a waste not to use this in a session focusing on the impact of landscape on the economy.

However, traditionally, mainly pottery imports are used to explore trade connections and to assess wealth, literally leaving out the local landscape. While there is nothing wrong with this in itself, overly simplistic and positivistic conclusions are all too easily drawn. Moreover, such approaches often focus on a single period, and a small selection of pottery, and they rarely take into account environmental factors. In the case of Halos, finally, the pottery assemblage hardly includes imports, even during periods when it cannot be characterized at poor. Traditional approaches would barely work.

This seems the ideal context for a different approach of pottery in connection to the economy: diachronic, focusing on local production and consumption, and set within its landscape and social context. Can we see a ‘longue durée’ in Halos pottery? And are there perhaps significant interruptions which we can relate to changes in the economic and political setup of the area? And can local pottery perhaps be set in a much wider setting after all? Previous case studies seem to indicate we can do all this. By bringing these and new explorations together, we hope to be able to offer a more comprehensive picture.

 

3. Sofia Voutsaki, Reinder Reinders, Arnoud Maurer, Rene Cappers, Wieke de Neef und Canan Cakirlar (University of Groningen)

A landscape approach to Halos: New questions, methods and challenges
The pioneering geological, geomorphological and palynological explorations undertaken by the University of Groningen in Halos in the 1970’s offered invaluable insights into the interplay between environmental, geopolitical and social processes in the Halos area.
In the new Halos 5-year project we intend to provide more accurate data about land capacity which will enable us to raise new questions about labour mobilization and the sustainability of the Halos community.
We propose to combine novel geophysical and geomorphological methodologies (magnetometry, GPR, electromagnetic induction, electrical imaging along transects, corings) in order to reconstruct roads, natural anchorages and harbours, to map changing hydrographical circumstances, and to understand the formation of the coastal plain. We plan to take new pollen samples in order to reconstruct diachronic developments and anthropogenic influences on the natural vegetation. We will perform macrobotanical analyses of the old corings in order to carry out radiocarbon and isotopic analyses, but also study any shells, or molluscs indicative of marine or lagoonal environments. These analyses will be complemented with the study of faunal and plant remains from the excavations in Magoula Plataniotiki.
We expect that this integrated approach will have methodological relevance beyond Halos and make an important contribution to the debates surrounding the political economy of the ancient world.

 

4. Margriet Haagsma (University of Alberta)

The Unsustainable City: domestic economies, environment, and the maintenance of the urban landscape in Hellenistic Halos
Taking the concept of the urban-rural continuum as a point of departure, this paper will focus on the relationship between the maintenance and development of New Halos, a newly planned Hellenistic city on the Pagasitic Gulf in Greece, and the viability of the domestic economies of its inhabitants.
New Halos was founded ca. 302 BCE and abandoned around 265 BCE, likely after an earthquake. Strategically located further inland than its Classical predecessor, the habitation area of Hellenistic city covers 46 hectares and is protected by state-of-the-art defensive structures which contrast starkly with the modest houses. Analysis of domestic artefact and ecofact assemblages and environmental studies done in the area point to a surrounding countryside that was not intensively cultivated during the period of the existence of the Hellenistic city. The inhabitants of this urban centre could not support themselves by the agricultural yields of the countryside alone and the city must have been dependent on the import of grain from elsewhere. The city’s marginal location, the limited capacity of the land, and the role of Hellenistic rulers who kept the city under tight economic control had a negative impact on the ability of individual households to renovate and sustain their urban environment.
The complex interaction between historical, social, environmental and economic factors thus played into the inhabitants’ decision to abandon this urban centre after only 35 years of habitation.

 

5. Eleni Panagiotopoulou (University of Groningen) / Hillary Sparkes (University of Alberta)

Diet reconstruction in Early Iron Age and Hellenistic Halos
This paper investigates dietary variation observed in populations inhabiting the area associated with the Hellenistic city of Halos in Thessaly, Greece. This is a unique opportunity to compare the diet and study dietary change from the Early Iron Age (EIA, 1100-900 BC) to the Hellenistic period (323-31 BC). Diet is reconstructed by means of stable carbon, nitrogen, and sulfur isotope analysis of human and animal bone collagen as well as enamel carbonate. The main pattern that is observed is that the diet was largely based on C3 plant and animal resources with evident absence of large marine fish despite the fact that this is a coastal location. However, there is observed variation between the two periods. In the EIA the diet was complemented by C4 resources while animal protein was higher and marine resources were totally absent. On the other hand, in the Hellenistic period, reliance on animal protein varied, some individuals depended heavily on C3 grains and olive oil, while marine resources in small amounts were present. Further interpretation of the isotopic results based on social differentiation patterns revealed dietary variation observed between age, sex, and status groups.