The Post-Medieval Settlements and Road Network of the Mani Peninsula, Greece

Summary

In the past 50 years, a great deal of archaeological research in Mani has focused on its Byzantine churches and the enigmatic abandoned settlements that surround them. Far less has been written about the centuries following the collapse of the Byzantine Empire (i.e., the post-Medieval period), when the Ottoman Empire took control. This paper gives a brief overview of the most important sources of historical information about the post-Medieval settlements in Mani. A reassessment of a list dated to 1618 underscores its importance in identifying settlement names, not least because it is the only known register that follows a geographical path around the peninsula. This unique characteristic allows for the proposal of several modifications to the toponym identifications that have been put forth by scholars so far. The paper also discusses recent fieldwork undertaken to record the settlements and the road/path network in Mani. Together with the historical data, the archaeological information was used to build a GIS database and settlement catalog. The rich dataset produced by this research can be used to trace the evolution of settlement hierarchy, community organization, and network properties over the entire post-Medieval period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Long-Term Settlement Dynamics and Land Use on the Mani peninsula of Southern Greece

Keywords

Spatial Coverage