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Chapter 7. Houses at Leukas in Acarnania: A Case Study in Ancient Household Organization
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Already in the late nineteenth and again in the Wrst half of twentieth century, Th. Wiegand and H. Schrader, followed by D. M. Robinson, recognized the importance of artifact distributions for analyzing domestic space in ancient Greek houses.1 They published ground-plans of houses from Priene and Olynthus, marking Wnd-spots of small Wnds and pottery (Wiegand and Schrader 1904, 325, with Wg. 365; Robinson 1946, pl. 136). Nevertheless, until now very few Greek houses have been published together with their Wnds material.2 And architectural features alone generally do not allow us to clarify the use of every room in a private house.3 As a rule, whether small Wnds and pottery can actually contribute to the analysis of a household’s organization depends primarily upon depositional and post-depositional processes (Schiffer 1987; LaMotta and Schiffer 1999; Sommer 1991). While an ad hoc abandonment in the case of catastrophic circumstances, as, for example, at Pompeii,4 would ideally leave behind relatively clear and complete assemblages of material reXecting household activities, far more difWcult is the interpretation of “normal” abandonment scenarios, when inhabitants quit their homes in an organized and systematically conducted fashion, leaving behind only things of no further value (i.e., garbage).5 An instance where a city was abandoned under “normal” circumstances can be found at Leukas. Here, several private houses have been excavated in the past few years (Dousougli 1993; Fiedler 1999, 2003). The Hellenistic House AII.6, with its well-preserved Wnds, shows how certain developments in Greek society were reXected in its ground plan and through household organization. The Polis of Leukas Leukas was founded as a Corinthian colony in the seventh century B.C. The settlement was situated on the Acarnanian-Leucadian strait between Chapter 7 Houses at Leukas in Acarnania: A Case Study in Ancient Household Organization Manuel Fiedler the island and the Acarnanian shore, and so lay directly on the essential trade route between Greece and the Adriatic Sea. The size of the town (covering ca. 100 ha), references in the primary sources, and its impressive remains, for example, the longest stone bridge known from ancient Greece (Negris 1904; Fiedler 2003, 22–25) and an impressive harbor mole with extensive defense posts nearby (Dörpfeld, Goessler et al. 1927, 269– 271; Murray 1982, 266, 1988), illustrate that Leukas must have been an important city in northwestern Greece. For several decades during the third and second centuries Leukas gained political signiWcance as the capital of the Acarnanian league, “caput Acarnaniae” as Livy (33.17.1) informs us. After 31 B.C., when the battle of Actium took place northeast of the island, Octavian founded Nikopolis ad Actio as a monument of his victory. Henceforth, speaking of the Greek cities around the Ambracian Gulf, Strabo says, “most of which, or rather all, have become dependencies of Nikopolis” (10.2.2; trans. H. L. Jones, Loeb ed., 1961). But the archaeological evidence indicates that several of these settlements were forsaken altogether, as were Kassope and Ambrakia (Hoepfner and Schwandner 1994, 117; Schwandner 2001, 112; Karatzeni 1999, 243– 244). It appears that the inhabitants of Leukas were also required to leave their homes in order to colonize the newly founded “city of victory” (Fiedler 1999, 2003; Morris 2001, 287). Street System and Houses Recent excavations have shown that Leukas was laid out on an orthogonal grid, probably already in the sixth century B.C. The insulae were divided into approximately square house plots. These plot sizes inXuenced the ground-plans of private houses over the subsequent centuries. The plan of the Late Archaic or Early Classical House AII.2 (Fig. 7.1) was designed in three parallel, north-south oriented strips in which two or three rooms of different sizes were positioned around a deep courtyard (k/m). Similar arrangements can be found in other Classical and Hellenistic houses at the site, and are seen in the Hellenistic House BII.3 (Fig. 7.2), with its central courtyard (G1) and adjacent rooms that were also located in three parallel, north-south oriented strips. Obviously, those ground-plans which were predetermined by the Archaic house-plots were developed in Late Archaic or Early Classical times and inXuenced the house’s design subsequently into the Classical and Hellenistic periods. Contrary to the Classical “Typenhäuser” (as deWned by Hoepfner and Schwandner 1994), it is not the ad-hoc repetition of ground-plans that was carried out at Leukas, but rather the houses’ layout followed local traditions...