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Mediterranean households, British colonial statistics and Greek insular landscapes: insights from nineteenth-century Antikythera

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2019

Andrew Bevan*
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London
Brenna Ryan Hassett
Affiliation:
Institute of Archaeology, University College London
*
*Corresponding author. Email: a.bevan@ucl.ac.uk

Abstract

This article addresses a 250-year episode of human colonisation, community growth and subsequent decline on the small Greek island of Antikythera (ad 1770 to present), focusing on rich documentary sources from four decades of British rule in the early nineteenth century. In particular, a series of nominal censuses and accompanying agricultural statistics can be combined with intensive landscape archaeological survey evidence to explore evidence for changing nineteenth-century households, household economies, and how these are manifest across an entire physical landscape. We also contextualise this well-recorded, most recent historical episode within the island's deeper population history stretching back at least seven millennia.

French abstract

Les auteurs considèrent la croissance d'une communauté humaine puis son déclin, sur la petite île grecque d'Anticythère, de 1770 à nos jours, épisode de deux siècles et demi d'occupation. Ils se concentrent sur les riches sources documentaires datant des quatre décennies de domination britannique advenues au début du XIXe siècle. En particulier, des séries de recensements nominatifs et statistiques agricoles qui leur correspondent peuvent être combinées à une observation archéologique intensive du paysage rural, afin d’étudier les traces visibles de l’évolution des ménages paysans au XIXe siècle, leur écosystème et la manière dont ces derniers se manifestent à travers les spécificités physiques de tout un paysage. Ils replacent également cet épisode récent, qui est le mieux renseigné, dans le cadre beaucoup plus large de l'histoire longue, et profondément marquante, du peuplement de l’île, qui remonte au moins à sept millénaires.

German abstract

Dieser Beitrag behandelt ein 250jähriges Kapitel der Besiedlung, des Wachstums und des anschließenden Rückgangs eines Gemeinwesens auf der kleinen griechischen Insel Antikythera (1770 bis heute). Der Schwerpunkt liegt auf den reichhaltigen dokumentarischen Quellen, die den vier Jahrzehnten britischer Herrschaft im frühen 19. Jahrhundert erwachsen sind, insbesondere auf einer Reihe von Volkszählungen mit personenbezogenen Daten und begleitender Landwirtschaftsstatistik, die sich mit intensiven archäologischen Landschaftsaufnahmen verknüpfen lassen, um den Wandel von Haushalten und Hauswirtschaftssystemen zu untersuchen und zu erkennen, wie diese Veränderungen die gesamte physische Landschaft betrafen. Wir stellen dieses gut dokumentierte Kapitel der jüngsten Geschichte auch in den Zusammenhang der langfristigen Bevölkerungsentwicklung der Insel, die mindestens sieben Jahrhunderte zurückreicht.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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References

Notes

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23 The exact date for this early census is not directly given on the document, but is very likely to fall between 1811 and 1814 on the basis of several forms of evidence. First, the handwriting is consistent with land and animal tax documents from 1811–1814 (the animal count of May 1814, which is likely to be the same recorder), and there are no clear tax, births, marriages and deaths, or census documents in the archive earlier than 1811. Statistical comparison of the ages of men that clearly appear in both this and the 1840 census also suggests an average difference of 27 years. See AK Απογραφή Αντικυθηρίων 1811–1815 (the Kythera-based archive), c. 1814; TNA CO 136/1333, 1825; TNA CO 136/1339, 1840; TAK Απογραφή Αντικυθηρίων 1844–1848, 1845.

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27 On a larger sample, it would be perhaps useful to attempt estimates of fertility based on the ‘own children’ method (for example, Scalone, F. and Dribe, M., ‘Testing child-woman ratios and the own-children method on the 1900 Sweden census: examples of indirect fertility estimates by socioeconomic status in a historical population’, Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History 50, 1 (2016), 1629CrossRefGoogle Scholar) but we have decided not to do so here given the small size of the overall population.

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32 Hionidou, ‘“They used to go and come”?’.

33 Although we have not come across evidence for Antikythera specifically, it is worth noting that further means of financial improvement and geographic mobility for nineteenth-century females from the Ionian Islands was sex work. For example, there is evidence for Kytherans working as prostitutes in Hermoupolis, where 45 per cent of the prostitutes came from the Ionian Islands. See Dritsas, T., H πορνεία στην Ερμούπολη το 19o αιώνα (Athens, 2002), 24, 69Google Scholar.

34 For example, a letter mentioning the crisis by Antikythera's chief of police in 1824, TNA CO 136/1334; see also Leontsinis, The island of Kythera, 190–2.

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38 The survey was conducted in 2005–2007 with the raw data published in full as Bevan, A. and Conolly, J., ‘Intensive survey data from Antikythera, Greece’, Journal of Open Archaeology Data 1, 1 (2012), doi:10.5334/4f3bcb3f7f21dGoogle Scholar, and for wider discussion of results, see Bevan and Conolly, Mediterranean islands.

39 Tzortzopoulou-Gregory, L., ‘Remembering and forgetting: the relationship between memory and the abandonment of graves in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Greek cemeteries’, International Journal of Historical Archaeology 14, 2 (2010), 285301CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For an exception, see Anastasopoulos, A., ‘The Islamic gravestones of Ottoman Rethymno: preliminary remarks and thoughts about them’, in Anastasopoulos, A. ed., The eastern Mediterranean under Ottoman Rule: Crete, 1645–1840. Halcyon days in Crete VI. A symposium held in Rethymno, 13–15 January 2006 (Crete, 2008), 317–29Google Scholar.

40 For discussion of this surface pottery, see Bevan and Conolly, Mediterranean islands, 72–3, 85–111.

41 Bevan, A., Conolly, J., Colledge, S., Frederick, C., Palmer, C., Siddall, R. and Stellatou, A., ‘The long-term ecology of agricultural terraces and enclosed fields from Antikythera, Greece’, Human Ecology 41 (2013), 255–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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