A Tale of Two Landscapes: Agricultural Evidence from a Classical/Hellenistic City and a Nearby Hellenistic Farmstead, Greece

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeobotanical results from a coastal 4th c. BC city and from a 2nd c. BC farmstead located 6 km away demonstrate two different agricultural strategies employed in coastal Thrace. While both sites show a reliance on cereals, the 2nd c. farmstead also contains substantial evidence for the cultivation of bitter vetch, lentils, and chickpeas, as well as viticulture. The varied weed assemblages from these two sites suggest that crops were grown in two very different soil conditions. Weeds including darnel and stinking chamomile signal that residents of the 4th c. city grew their crops on low-lying, clay-rich, poor soils. The weed assemblage from the farmstead, on the other hand, suggests access to fields located on higher-quality soils of the Thracian plain. This paper investigates the relationships between site location and field proximity, and we explore the potential reasons why less-than-ideal soils may have been heavily cultivated by farmers associated with the 4th c. city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37466.0