Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape
An Archaeological Ethnography

An interdisciplinary study exploring how Greek villagers understood and reacted to their landscapes.

Hamish Forbes (Author)

9780521866996, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 1 October 2007

462 pages
23.4 x 15.9 x 2.7 cm, 0.756 kg

Review of the hardback: '… one can only be grateful to Forbes that decades of experiencing the cultures of Methana from the inside allow him to share with us here both the 'language' and 'literature' of its landscapes.' Cambridge Archaeological Journal

In this study, Hamish Forbes explores how Greek villagers have understood and reacted to their landscapes over the centuries, from the late medieval period to the present. Analyzing how they have seen themselves belonging to their local communities and within both local and wider landscapes, Forbes examines how these aspects of belonging have informed each other. Forbes also illuminates cross-disciplinary interests in memory and the importance of monuments. Based on data gathered over 25 years, Forbes' study combines the rich detail of ethnographic field work with historical and archaeological time-depth, showing how landscapes have important meaning beyond the religious sphere in terms of kinship, ideas about the past, and in their role as productive assets.

1. Introduction
2. Landscape studies
3. Historical background to the landscape of Methana
4. Conducting fieldwork on Methana
5. Kinship, marriage, and the transmission of names and property
6. The productive landscape
7. The historical landscape: memory, monumentality, and time-depth
8. The kinship landscape
9. The religious landscape
10. Conclusions: a Greek landscape with relatives.

Subject Areas: Classical Greek & Roman archaeology [HDDK], Archaeology [HD], Historical geography [HBTP]