Overview

Any activity requires the expenditure of energy, and the larger the scale of the undertakings, the more careful and strategic planning in advance is required. In focusing on labouring by humans and other animals, the papers in this volume investigate through a wide range of contexts how past people achieved their multiple daily tasks while remaining resilient in anticipation of adverse events and periods. Each paper investigates the resource requirements of combined activities, from conducting agriculture or trade, over many different crafts, constructing houses and monumental buildings, and how the available resources were employed successfully. Multilayered data sets are employed to illuminate the many interconnected networks of humans and resources that impacted on people’s day-to-day activities, but also to discuss the economic, cultural and socio-political relationships over time in different regions. Each of us aimed to discuss novel perspectives in which the landscape in its widest sense is connected to interdisciplinary architectural and/or crafting perspectives. Rural landscapes and their populace formed the backbone of pre-industrial societies. Analyses of the rural ‘hinterland’, the foci of cities and other central places (often with monumental architecture) and the communication between these are essential for the papers of this volume. These different agents and phenomena and their connections are crucial to our understanding how political units functioned at several socially interconnected levels. Bottom-up approaches can dissolve “monolithic” understandings of societies, the elite-labour/farmer and the centre/rural dichotomies, because the many social groups co-depended on each other, albeit perhaps in unequal measure depending on the given context.

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Reviews

"""...must be acclaimed for its very existence. Each chapter presents an argument specific to its context, dominated by the Aegean, with a sprinkling of Mesoamerican, African, Oceanic, and continental European cases. In most chapters, there is a shared (explicit or implicit) interest in shed[1]ding more light on bottom-up/nonelite experiences in response to the long-established focus on top-down/elite experiences.""--Leah McCurdy ""Journal of Anthropological Research, Winter 2023"""

Author Information

Ann Brysbaert is Professor in Ancient Technologies, Materials and Crafts at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University (NL), and since 1/3/2022 also the Director of the Netherlands Institute in Athens (NIA). She is Principal Investigator of the SETinSTONE project (ERC-CoG, grant nbr 646667) held at Leiden University. Previously, she held permanent and senior research positions at the Universities of Leicester, Glasgow, Heidelberg and Leiden. In 2014, she was Professeur Invitée at Bordeaux Montaigne University. Her main book publications to-date are: (2021) Building BIG – Constructing Economies: from Design to Long-Term Impact of Large-Scale Building Projects. Panel 3.6. (Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World. Heidelberg: Propylaeum (with J. Pakkanen); (2018) Constructing Monuments, Perceiving Monumentality and the Economics of Building. Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Built Environment. Leiden: Sidestone Press (with V. Klinkenberg, A. Gutièrrez Garcia-M. and I. Vikatou); (2017) Artisans versus Nobility? Multiple identities of elites and ‘commoners’ viewed through the lens of crafting from the Chalcolithic to the Iron Ages in Europe and the Mediterranean. Leiden: Sidestone Press (with A. Gorgues); (2014) Material Crossovers: Knowledge Networks and the Movement of Technological Knowledge between Craft Traditions. London: Routledge (with K. Rebay-Salisbury and L. Foxhall); (2011) Tracing Prehistoric Social Networks through Technology: A Diachronic Perspective on the Aegean. London: Routledge; (2008) Power of Technology in the Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. The Case of Painted Plaster, London: Equinox. Irene Vikatou was assisting Prof. dr. Ann Brysbaert with her research on the SETinSTONE project at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University (NL) until August 2020. During this time, she was also one of the co-editors of the project’s second edited volume entitled: Constructing Monuments, Perceiving Monumentality and the Economics of Building. Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to the Built Environment, (Sidestone, 2018). From September 2020 she started her PhD at the same university on the topic of ancient Greek road networks in the Greek region, during pre-Roman and Roman times. The purpose of this research is to assess the extent to which Greek roads served as predecessors to the Roman ones. She studied Biology at the University of Athens and completed an M.Sc. in Osteoarchaeology and Funerary Archaeology at Leiden University in 2013. In this programme, she specialized in the analysis of human skeletal remains from archaeological excavations, focusing on pathological lesions caused by external factors, such as trauma and strenuous physical activity. Her master thesis, (2013) Are these clogs made for walking: Osteochondritis Dissecans: Evidence of strenuous activity and trauma in skeletal elements of the foot from a post-medieval rural society in the Netherlands, was supervised by Dr. Andrea Waters-Rist (now Western University) and Dr. Menno Hoogland (Leiden University) and was published in the International Journal of Palaeopathology 19 (2017). Jari Pakkanen is Professor of Greek Archaeology at Royal Holloway, University of London. He was the Director of the Finnish Institute at Athens in 2013–2017 and he has directed and co-directed several archaeological projects in the Greece and Sicily which have concentrated on the built environment. His main book publications to-date are as follows: J. Pakkanen and A. Brysbaert (eds., 2021) Building BIG – Constructing Economies: from Design to Long-Term Impact of Large-Scale Building Projects. Panel 3.6. Archaeology and Economy in the Ancient World. Proceedings of the 19th International Congress of Classical Archaeology, Cologne/Bonn 2018, vol. 10. Heidelberg: Propylaeum; J. Pakkanen (2013), Classical Greek Architectural Design: a Quantitative Approach, Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at Athens, vol. 18, Helsinki: Foundation of the Finnish Institute at Athens; D. Blackman, B. Rankov, K. Baika, H. Gerding and J. Pakkanen (2013) Shipsheds of the Ancient Mediterranean, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; J. Pakkanen (1998) The Temple of Athena Alea at Tegea. A Reconstruction of the Peristyle Column, Publications by the Department of Art History at the University of Helsinki 18. Helsinki: Department of Art History at the University of Helsinki and Foundation of the Finnish Institute at Athens.

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