To reap a rich harvest: experiencing agricultural labour in ancient Greece

ABSTRACT

In ancient Greece, the harvest was a time of high stress and intense labour, when farmers engaged in continuous work to reap, transport, and process their agricultural yields. For the harvest to be successful, not only did the individual need to be prepared for hard work, but they were reliant on their local agrarian community to offer support and share labour demands. As such, the harvest was an opportunity for workers to experience shared labour and express physically the ideals of hard work, reciprocity, and connectivity. By considering the mechanisms of agriculture in ancient landscapes, along with measuring the physical stress this had on the individual, and the means by which workers could come together to share labour, this article examines the lived experience of ancient farmers during this crucial period of the agricultural calendar, in order to better understand the immaterial aspects of connectivity and community interaction in the ancient countryside.

KEYWORDS:

• Ancient Greek farming
• agricultural production
• connectivity
• community
• taskscapes

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Peter van Dommelen and the anonymous reviewers for their useful and informative feedback. My sincerest gratitude goes to Catherine Steidl, Evan Levine, and Sarah Murray for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. All errors are my own.

Notes

1. The topic of ancient communities as a concept is discussed further in the following section. Importantly, for this paper, the term is applied to describe groupings of individuals engaged in agricultural labour who may or may not share familial or neighbourly connections, and may have participated under compulsion, i.e. as a slave, or for financial gain as hired labour, alongside the farmer and other household participants.