Surplus, storage and status in a rural Greek community

ABSTRACT

This study draws on a range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century ethnographic materials from an agrarian community in Greece to explore the links between a nexus of behaviours related to avoiding subsistence risk. Producing a ‘normal surplus’, along with storage strategies and the growing of a wide range of crops, was part of a mix of risk-avoidance behaviours. Ultimately, however, the success of these behaviours depended on access to sufficient agricultural land. A lack of intra-community status differentiation based on land ownership noted during ethnographic fieldwork in the later twentieth century partly resulted from two historical factors: (1) households lacking sufficient land to produce an adequate ‘normal surplus’ left the community to take up other lower status activities in the wider (‘complex’) society of Greece; (2) wealthier households, unable to generate substantial wealth from sales of agricultural surpluses beyond the community, sold their property to generate capital for participation in other economic activities elsewhere.

KEYWORDS:

• Food surplus
• storage
• social status
• environmental hazard
• smallholder farmers

Acknowledgements

Some of the ideas presented here derive from a paper presented to a workshop on storage near Tucson, Arizona, in 2012: I wish to thank Ian Kuijt for inviting me to that event. My thanks also go to Amy Bogaard for inviting me to provide the present contribution. Finally, I wish to acknowledge the filoxenia of all those Methanites who made me so welcome in their homes and villages and provided me with the information presented here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hamish Forbes

Hamish Forbes is an honorary research fellow in the Department of Archaeology at the University of Nottingham. His research interests primarily involve the integration of ethnographic and archaeological approaches in the Mediterranean region, particularly Greece. His main focus is on social issues, and environmental concerns relating to agriculture, pastoralism and the meanings of landscapes. He is the author of Meaning and Identity in a Greek Landscape: An Archaeological Ethnography (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and ‘Off-site Scatters and the Manuring Hypothesis in Greek Survey Archaeology: An Ethnographic Approach’, Hesperia 82 (2013): 551–94.