Grace K. Erny, "Landscapes of Inequality: Social Differentiation in Geometric thru Classical Crete"

The Department of Classics at Stanford University invites you to attend a public dissertation defense by

Grace K. Erny

"Landscapes of Inequality: Social Differentiation in Geometric through Classical Crete”

Traditional histories of the Greek world in the first millennium BCE characterize Crete as an unusual region, where a seventh-century floruit was followed by the emergence of economically stagnant, oligarchic city-states. This dissertation takes an archaeological approach to understanding inequality and social difference in Cretan communities in the 8th through the 4thcenturies BCE, one that moves beyond literary accounts to focus on the material culture of rural settlements recovered by archaeological surveys. I first critique some of the ways that archaeologists have approached inequality in the past and demonstrate why we need a new approach. I discuss how interpretations of survey evidence have traditionally been deployed in arguments about inequality and complexity and argue that we can extract more information from this evidence than has been previously attempted. My own methods combine spatial and functional analysis of settlement patterns across the island with in-depth study of small regions. I demonstrate that there are meaningful differences between small survey sites on Crete, with some sites more engaged in agricultural intensification, large-scale storage, elaborate dining practices, or trade than others. This is important, for it suggests that we cannot interpret all small settlements as single-family farmsteads of equal means occupied year-round. The Cretan evidence thus encourages us to consider alternatives to models of Greek land use and community organization predicated a middle class of small freeholding citizen farmers – a narrative that has dominated the interpretation of evidence from archaeological surveys on the Greek mainland and has had broad implications for discussions of Greek egalitarianism in general. The dissertation concludes with a reflection on how Cretan communities used material culture to send messages about individual and collective identity, with particular focus on the phenomena of “austerity” and “conservatism” in Cretan material culture.

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