Monuments of rural archaeology: Medieval settlements in the northwestern Peloponnese (Greece)

The northwestern Peloponnese is an area rich in archaeological material with a history of settlement from prehistory to the present. Here for the first time, physical and textual evidence for 127 medieval sites is put together in juxtaposition, revealing a unique historical geography for a rural landscape previously ignored. While different disciplines have addressed medieval material culture, none have incorporated the extensive evidence of villages surveyed in this study. The contributions of Christian archaeology, the Annales School and survey archaeology are considered in light of the new material evidence collected by the Morea Project.; The settlements of the northwestern Peloponnese offer the first complete corpus of rural villages in medieval Greece; they testify to common principles of urban organization, standardized domestic form and unique building types of ecclesiastical and productive functions. The settlements are nucleated villages and contain clusters of seven to 250 dwellings. They are situated on hilltops that exploit a middle altitude between the low plains and the high mountains, an ideal location for defense, agriculture, husbandry and the exploitation of water sources. A network of settlements extends through the hinterland offering connections of communication and defense across a rugged territory. At the top of each settlement, a fortified citadel with a tower/cistern commands the cultivated landscape. Organized in consecutive linear terraces, the houses extend along the slopes below.; The exploitation of the Peloponnesian landscape at such a great scale occurred after the Byzantine re-conquest of the region in 805 and continued through two and a half centuries of the Frankish Principality established in 1205. The settlements were abandoned by the seventeenth century before an entirely new system of inhabitation came into being reflecting early modern practices. The paucity of surviving textual sources for the medieval period makes the archaeology of the settlements central to the reconstruction of the region's rural history. Chronicles, feudal lists, saint lives, censuses and other contemporary documents provide limited glimpses for the economic, productive and demographic role that the medieval village played in a distinctive landscape made up of a closely knit system of inhabited nodes.