This chapter gathers together a series of articulations, a series of fields of archaeological interest and endeavor associated with the southern Argolid countryside. The arrangement of these fields, predicated on connection and association, follows the links, no matter how concrete or contingent, implicated in engagements, whether archaeological or otherwise, with the material pasts of the southern Argolid. Moreover, I compound this iteration of the southern Argolid landscape with some classic issues of both Classical topography and intensive survey—the location of place names mentioned in the Periegesis or the debate around the ‘farmstead’ as an unit of analysis in surface survey. This discussion occurs in step with an attention to aspects of corporeal presence. In so doing I make the most of the diversity of materials and media—i.e. the textual, photographic, video and survey evidence—gathered together in this dissertation. In this endeavor I move fast and take shortcuts. These actions are warranted, given the physical character of the land and its multiplicity.

First, however, more clarification is warranted in relation to the notion of landscape set forth in this dissertation. Landscape is an ensemble, a gathering of activities, people and things within an aggregate mixture of disparate times. The landscapes of the southern Argolid are comprised of a diversity of entities and a variety of materials. Among others, processes of co-habitation, decay, fragmentation, accretion and (re)circulation shape these landscapes. These processes find their confluence in the theory percolation.

Time, as I discussed in the section on auditory archaeology the previous chapter, is not unidirectional, progressive or linear, which are qualities of a particular temporality—a modernist one. Time, as I stated earlier, is much more complex and far more chaotic. Turbulent in nature, time both passes and does not. As such, the theory of percolation holds that ‘it is the sorting that makes the times, not the times that make the sorting’ (Latour 1993, 76; also refer to Olivier 2003). In this tempest of percolating pasts, landscapes are saturated with multiplicities, which need not be situated in dualities or oppositions or solely reduced to historical narratives. An archaeology of landscape, I suggest, must step back and deal with not only the multisensual and multidimensional aspects of the material world, but also this polychronic ensemble on a regional scale. Something of various, often distant, pasts are simultaneously present. In this way landscape is the material fabric in which various times percolate.

In working toward this ensemble, I emphasize the pleats and folds in the fabric—a topological exercise—by following an seemingly erratic path of intimate association, course linkage and katachretic juxtaposition. My purpose in employing these strategies is to do more than simply flush out the meanings of things. My purpose is to suggest something of the complexity of the Greek countryside on paper. My project is an ontological one. As such, I am interested in how the material past is both encountered and has action in real-time. Moreover, what is presented here is an example of textual mediation. In other words, the narrative is linked in such a way as to follow the irregular path of connection and association, as one would encounter things on the ground. Still, landscape is not just about the material presence of slopes, valleys, terrace lines or cereal fields out there because so many aspects of landscape circulate in multiplicities of materials, other media, other voices—ceramics, building stone, pine resin, travelogues, archaeological reports, oral testimonies, memories, digital video and so on—beyond the spacio-temporal edges of the southern Argolid. Movements occur between these various fields in the process of synthesizing a landscape.

In what follows, I move between engagements recorded with the material pasts of the southern Argolid in various texts—whether that of Pausanias, Sir William Gell or the notebooks of the AEP, memories, photographs, materials and even digital video footage recorded on the ground. I both follow paths with explicit connections and follow others where they remain implicit. This synthesis leaves the sorting of the ensemble as it lies with its crumples, twists and folds. It begins with questions of boundaries in the north and moves south toward the more lacunae riddled areas of the south. My justification for this topology—a synthesis, which accentuates the proximities and points of contact/connection between disparate pasts (more will be said of this below)—is two-fold. First, I am interested in dealing with the landscapes and other fields of the southern Argolid on their own terms, as they exist and operate with their simultaneously present times. Second, an historical narrative of the southern Argolid has been excellently articulated by the AEP (Jameson, Runnels and van Andel 1994). In avoiding repetition this topology is offered as a compliment to their historical synthesis.

Return to Chapter 4: Reiterative issues

Forward to: A topology of the southern Argolid

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