Pylos Regional Archaeological Project, Part IV: Change and the Human Landscape in a Modern Greek Village in Messenia

Abstract

1. Davis et al. 1997; Zangger et al. 1997. This article presents the results offieldwork, interviews, and archival research into how land use and agricultural choices in the post-1829 era have affected the landscape around the village of Maryeli in Messenia, Greece. Although relatively isolated, and never demographically significant, Maryeli's landscape bears visible marks of the ebbs and flows of world trade. While in many ways the methods of land use in Maryeli are still visibly preindustrial, the goals of land use have long been "modern" in their relationship to capitalism and international market forces. Those goals repeatedly have reshaped the land. From 1992 to 1994 the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) conducted an intensive archaeological survey in southwest Messenia, Greece. Some of the results of that project have already been published in this journal.' During PRAP's final field season, our experiences while fieldwalking in and around the small mountain village of Maryeli encouraged us to conduct a deeper investigation of that village and its surrounding area (see Figs. 1 and 3). A first, unthinking look at Maryeli seemed to reveal a kind of "pristine" landscape, one conforming to all the stereotypes of a remote peasant village. The survey team found a village tightly nucleated around a central spring, and comprised of homes that were excellent examples of 19thand early-20th-century Peloponnesian architecture (see Fig. 2). Furthermore, Maryeli's many abandoned fields, relatively limited bulldozer use, and numerous preconcrete field structures all contrasted sharply with most of the other areas in which PRAP had worked. While less prosperous and less demographically robust than the study region as a whole, Maryeli's better-preserved material record of the prewar era provided an excellent opportunity to examine change and the human presence in the landscape since Greek independence in 1829. Studies of modern Greek villages typically have fallen into one of two camps: the ethnographic or the ethnoarchaeological. The ethnographers, relying on interviews, participant-observation, and local statistics (particularly of landholding patterns), have tended to emphasize such things as village belief systems, social structures, and kinship networks. Recent ethnographic work of a materialist vein has correctly pointed out the treAmerican School of Classical Studies at Athens is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to Hesperia www.jstor.org ®