Rural Communities and Households: A Case Study from Southern Greece

The foundation of Byzantine society rested on agriculture and rural life. While most of the population lived in villages and farming communities, these rural areas are less well documented than the empire’s cities. The scarcity of surviving written sources, such as tax registers and census records, limits our ability to reconstruct the details of daily rural existence. However, archaeological research, especially the rise of landscape archaeology over the past fifty years, has significantly broadened our understanding of village life and the material culture of rural households. Through archaeological surveys and excavations, we have gained new insights into the living spaces, and everyday objects that shaped rural Byzantine society. The case study in this presentation is the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project, an archaeological survey of the region of Nemea, in the NE Peloponnese, combined with archaeological data recovered from the excavations at the sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea. A series of trash middens from the excavations of the stadium and the early-Christian basilica contained large quantities of ceramics and coins dating to the 12th and 13th centuries. These represent domestic refuse and include well-preserved glazed and coarse wares. These vessels were used for daily tasks; they include containers for transport, storage, food preparation, cooking and serving of food and wine. These deposits inform us about the archaeology of households and help us understand functions and activities that rural households performed. This research enables us to analyze rural communities within their broader environmental and socio-economic contexts, while also revealing how households and settlements were integrated into the broader political and economic frameworks of Byzantium.