Dr. Donald Haggis and an international team of archaeologists, representing a collaboration of fields of prehistory, palaeoethnobotany, zooarchaeology, anthropology, and ancient history, will conduct three seasons of archaeological field work on the island of Crete in the Aegean, exploring the emergence of early cities and the economic and political conditions involved in the formation of the first Greek city-states. The crux of the project is the excavation of the Iron Age town of Azoria, examining the growth of the settlement from its earliest foundations (ca. 1200-700 B.C.) until its establishment as a fully-formed urban center (700-500 B.C.) with all the accoutrements of government. The plan of work sets out to study how the civic center was formed and organized, how agricultural and pastoral production was managed on household and public levels, and what archaeological contexts of food storage, processing, and distribution can reveal about the sociopolitical transformation leading to urbanization in the Iron Age Mediterranean.
Ancient cities, like their modern counterparts, were centers of complex socioeconomic interactions and political configurations; they transformed their surrounding landscapes, organized labor, and procured, processed, and redistributed foodstuff for public and private consumption. The Azoria Project focuses on the reorganization of the food-producing countryside during periods of city-state formation, by recovering remains of ancient plants and animals in diverse urban contexts. The aim is to identify corporate groups in the emergent city and ultimately to define the political structure of the nascent city-state by relating patterns of crop processing and animal husbandry to models of land use and power relationships,
The main goal of the project is to recover archaeological evidence for household and civic organization that can help to establish links between agricultural and pastoral production, economic and political structure, and social identity. The main hypotheses of the study, to be tested through excavation, are that evidence of production and consumption of food in the urban center reflects land-use strategies out side of the city, and that the latter are linked directly to specific social roles and the political status of individuals in the community. While the presence and absence of certain crops, types of wood remains, and animal species can tell us about likely rural sources and conditions of agricultural production, the urban center's relationships to the countryside is also evident in the volume and type of available storage and stages and methods of food processing, permitting a nuanced interpretation of social contexts and economic relationships in the city itself.
The study augments significantly our knowledge of the resource base of early Mediterranean societies-communities on the verge of becoming cities with developed political institutions-as well as the process of urbanization in the Mediterranean fringe and beyond. The project brings together archaeologists with widely differing experiences, backgrounds, and regional as well as methodological perspectives, to form a dialogue on the question of the urbanization: asking why and how towns became cities in the first millennium B.C. Integrating the results of a wide range of analyses into the study of human-environment interaction, the study strives to visualize the ancient occupants of Azoria as producers and consumers, and as agents of environmental change in the landscape. The results of this work will affect our understanding of the origins and ultimately the form of Mediterranean civilizations as diachronically changing scales of human interaction across diverse and overlapping natural environments and cultural spheres.
