¹ With the notable exception of Hesiod's Works and Days, which is one of a very few properly ‘primary’ sources for the period.

² Halstead, P., ‘Agriculture in the Bronze Age: towards a model of palatial economy’, in Wells, B. (ed.), Agriculture in Ancient Greece (Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium at the Swedish Institute at Athens (Skrifter utgivna av Svenska Institutet i Athen, series in 4to, 42; Stockholm, 1992), 105–17Google Scholar; id., ‘The Mycenaean palatial economy: making the most of the gaps in the evidence’, PCPS 38 (1992), 57–86.

³ Killen, J. T., ‘The Linear B tablets and the Mycenaean economy’, in Morpurgo-Davies, A. and Duhoux, Y. (eds), Linear B: A 1984 Survey (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1988), 241–305Google Scholar. The precise way in which it is legitimate to draw parallels between Near Eastern and Aegean palatial systems is, however, much debated: see de Fidio, P., ‘Mycènes et Proche-Orient, ou le théorème des modèles’, in Olivier, J.-P. (ed.), Mykenaïka: actes du 9e Colloque Internationale sur les Textes Mycéniens et Égéens (BCH supp. 25; Paris, 1992), 173–96.Google Scholar

⁴ There has been considerable scholarly discussion of the role of irrigation in state formation processes in Egypt and the Near East, in the course of which it has clearly emerged that for small-scale irrigation state authority is not essential: e.g. Hunt, R. C. and Hunt, E., ‘Canal irrigation and local social organization’, Current Anthropology, 17, 389–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Butzer, K. W., Early Hydraulic Civilization in Egypt (Chicago, 1976)Google Scholar; Wright, H. T., ‘Recent research on the origin of the state’, American Review of Anthropology, 6 (19xx), 379–97Google Scholar. Certainly irrigation cannot be cited as a major causal agent in the formation of states in the region; however, by the time fully-fledged states have taken over the management of canal systems (which they do quite early in many places) the agricultural and economic systems have become sufficiently complex and entangled with the state so that its role in managing irrigation has become essential even for subsistence cultivators; see, most recently, the collection of papers presented in Postgate, N. and Powell, M. (eds), Irrigation and Cultivation in Mesopotamia, i–ii (Bulletin on Sumerian Agriculture, 4; Cambridge, 1988)Google Scholar, esp. R. C. Hunt's paper ‘Hydraulic management in southern Mesopotamia in Sumerian times: some observations’, ibid. i. 195–6.

⁵ Cf. Halstead, P., ‘The economy has a normal surplus: economic stability and social change among early farming communities of Thessaly, Greece’, in Halstead, P. and O'Shea, J. (eds), Bad Year Economics: Cultural Responses to Risk and Uncertainty (Cambridge, 1989), 77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, on the importance of centralized food storage on prehistoric Aegean sites in this regard. Cf. Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 68–70, on the possible impact of palace surpluses on risk-buffereing strategies.

⁶ See Halstead and O'Shea (n. 5); Forbes, H. A., Strategies and Soils: Technology, Production and Environment in the Peninsula of Methana, Greece (Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1982).Google Scholar The most notable (as well as successful) example of the latter strategy on the part of Greek central authorities is the present Agricultural Bank of Greece, which from the 1920s onward has given small farmers access to such inputs as subsidized chemical fertilizers, which vastly increased cereal yields per hectare.

⁷ Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 68–70, 73–4.

⁸ The configuration of landholdings in the Linear B tablets raises some interesting questions. Accepting that the numbers with ‘pe-mo Wheat’ designate land area expressed as amounts of seed corn needed to sow the plot, it should theoretically be possible to reconstruct plot sizes (cf. attempts of Bennett, E. L., ‘The landholders of Pylos’, AJA 60 (1956), 103–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ventris, M. and Chadwick, J., Documents in Mycenaean Greece (1st and 2nd edns: Cambridge, 1956 and 1973)Google Scholar; Chadwick, J., The Mycenaean World (Cambridge, 1976)Google Scholar; Duhoux, Y., ‘Les mesures mycéniennes de surface’, Kadmos, 13 (1974), 27–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar; R. Palmer, ‘Wheat and barley in Mycenaean society’, in Olivier (n. 3), 475–97).

In practice this is not so easy. If Mycenaeans really thought in terms of land area, and had some sort of nominal conversion figure to use as a rule of thumb for seed corn, plot sizes would be directly calculable. Indeed, this is the methodology in effect followed by most of the scholars cited. Duhoux attempts to use a range of values, but the lower end of the range is provided by cereals grown under Mesopotamian regimes of irrigation agriculture, where sowing rates are completely different. The figure he uses as the upper end of his range (175 1/ha = 135 kg/ha) is probably more realistic.

But the main difficulty in going from sowing rates to plot sizes is that the quality and depth of soil, its moisture-retentive properties, and the aspect of the plot determine the amounts actually sown, which can vary greatly. Generally speaking, less seed is sown in poorer, thinner, drier, rockier soils, greater amounts in better locations, since in the latter plants growing close together will still grow adequately. On poor soils or in dry places plants growing too close together are likely to suffer from water stress and, to a lesser extent, nutrient stress. Sowing rates are also lower on plots with crop trees growing on them. On modern Methana (which has particularly good, moisture-retentive soils despite the numerous rocks) the sowing rate for free-threshing wheat is around 120–150 kg/ha. Van Wersch, H. J., in MME 179 and 185Google Scholar, found a sowing rate of about 88 kg/ha for free-threshing wheat, and around 70 kg/ha for hulled barley. Assuming ‘field’ rather than ‘garden’ cultivation of cereals (see Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 65–6) is practised (which would be more comparable to modern sowing rates), and assuming that the volumes listed really do refer to free-threshing wheat rather than hulled wheats (which, because of the hulls, weigh less per unit of volume, so the numbers would represent smaller amounts of seed corn), the modern Greek range of sowing ‘rules of thumb’ probably represents the best attainable approximation. If these figures are remotely ‘in the ballpark’, by any reckoning, plots are relatively small.

I have used Chadwick's values for measures of volume (op. cit. 105–8). The king's temenos at Pylos (2,880 l × 0.772 kg/l wheat /s, where s = sowing rates of 88 to 150 kg/ha) works out at something between 15 and 25 ha. The smallest plot at Pylos works out at around 0.025 ha (0.25 stremmata), not an absurd size for intensive cultivation of garden crops, flax, or even cereals. Many plots seem to have been subdivided so that the operating units were actually smaller that the total size of the plot. (This is assuming an o-na-to was some sort of leasing arrangement; whether service was required in return, as Killen suggests, is irrelevant for my purposes here.) The size of plots varies widely, but for plots in the T 2 size range (which is common) the amount of Wheat this represents would sow around 0.1 ha (1 stremma), though one must keep in mind the hazards of doing this exercise at all. Few plots are more than 4–5 ha (and, as already noted, some of these are subdivided).

⁹ Melena, J. L., ‘Olive oil and other sorts of oil in the Mycenaean tablets’, Minos, 19 (1983), 89–123Google Scholar; Bennett, E. L., The Olive Oil Tablets of Pylos (Minos supp. 2; Salamanca, 1958).Google Scholar

¹⁰ Chadwick (n. 8), 122.

¹¹ Melena (n. 9), 96–102.

¹² The ratio of olives to oil (by weight) is about 20: 1 for ‘wild’ olives, in contrast to around 5–6: 1 or better for domesticated olives (H. A. Forbes/Greek Ministry of Agriculture, pers. comm.).

¹³ Melena's arguments from the classical sources are not convincing. Although oil from wild olives was occasionally used an an ‘exotic’ perfume base in classical and Roman times, generally the fruit and oil from wild olives was considered inferior to that from domestic olives. Melena (n. 9), 98, has misinterpreted Theophrastos (CP vi. 83; HP ii. 2. 12) and other sources when he assumes (with LSJ) that phaulia, ‘low-quality olives’, are produced only by wild trees. In fact, this is simply the word for low quality olives or windfalls from domestic trees, and Theophr. says that the fruit of the wild olive tree is like these domestic, low-quality olives in character.

¹⁴ Hansen, J., ‘Palaeoethnobotany in Cyprus: recent developments’, AJA (1985)Google Scholar; Runnels, C. and Hansen, J., ‘The olive in the prehistoric Aegean: the evidence for domestication in the early Bronze Age’, OJA 5 (1986), 301.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Forbes, H. A. and Foxhall, L., ‘“The queen of all trees”: preliminary notes on the archaeology of the olive’, Expedition, 21 (1978), 37–47.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Killen, J. T., ‘The wool industry of Crete in the Late Bronze Age’, BSA 59 (1964), 1–15.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Chadwick (n. 8) is one of the few scholars who has properly taken this on board.

¹⁸ Killen, J. T., ‘Some adjuncts to the Sheep ideogram on Knossos tablets’, Eranos, 61 (1963), 69–93Google Scholar; id. (n. 16); Cherry, J. F., ‘Pastoralism and the role of animals in the pre- and protohistoric economies of the Aegean’, in Whittaker, C. R. (ed.), Pastoral Economies in Classical Antiquity (PCPS supp. 14. Cambridge, 1988), 6–34Google Scholar; Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 68.

¹⁹ Forbes, H. A., ‘The identification of pastoralist sites within the context of estate-based agriculture in ancient Greece: beyond the transhumance v. agro-pastoralism debate’, BSA 90 (1995), 325–38.Google Scholar One useful feature of this study as a comparative reference point is that it is not founded in Sarakatsani type, long-distance transhumant pastoralism, which was probably not practised even in the relatively large-scale sheep rearing industry of the Mycenaean palaces: Cherry (n. 18), 12–17. There is no evidence for long-distance transhumance until relatively recently in the S. Argolid; it is not a recognizable feature of Venetian shepherding. Instead, shepherding regimes have been fairly localized and based on a mixed arable/stock-rearing strategy, with milk and meat the most important pastoral products and wool very much an afterthought; cf. Koster, H. A., The Ecology of Pastoralism in Relation to the Changing Patterns of Land Use in the Northeast Peloponnese (Ph.D. thesis, Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1977).Google Scholar

²⁰ See e.g. the problem of the roles of the ‘collectors’, extensively discussed by P. Carlier, J. Bennet, L. Godart, and J. Driessen in Olivier (n. 3).

²¹ Halstead (n. 2), both works.

²² The exact interpretation of the cereal ideograms Wheat and Barley has recently been questioned by Palmer (n. 8).

²³ Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 70–1, 73–4.

²⁴ Ibid. 64, 65–7; id., ‘Agriculture in the Bronze Age’ (n. 2), 106–9.

²⁵ de Fidio (n. 3), 186–93; cf. J. T. Killen, ‘PY An 1’, Minos, 18 (1983). 71–9.

²⁶ Killen (n. 25), 74–5, 79.

²⁷ Luckermann, F. and Moody, J., ‘Nichoria and vicinity: settlements and circulation’, in Rapp, G. and Aschenbrenner, S. E., Excavations at Nichoria in Southwest Greece (Minneapolis, 1978), 86–7.Google Scholar

²⁸ J. M. Shay and C. T. Shay, in Rapp and Aschenbrenner (n. 27), 54, tables 5–7.

²⁹ Snodgrass, A. M., An Archaeology of Greece: The Present State and Future Scope of a Discipline (Berkeley, 1987)Google Scholar; Morgan, C., Athletes and Oracles (Cambridge, 1990), 70.Google Scholar

³⁰ Shay and Shay (n. 28), 55.

³¹ Ibid. 55–6, tables 5–10.

³² Cattle pastoralists normally aim at least as much at milk (or blood) production as at meat production, so a ‘meat’ slaughter strategy is not what one would expect for a society heavily dependent on pastoral products.

³³ French, E. B., ‘Archaeology in Greece’, AR 36 (1989–90), 14.Google Scholar

³⁴ B. Wells, C. Runnels, and E. Zangger, ‘The Berbati Limnes archaeological survey: the 1988 season’, Op. Ath. 18. 15 (1990), 228.

³⁵ This pattern of total absence of settlement occupation of the countryside, combined with limited settlement evidence on nucleated sites, usually previous Mycenaean centres (not necessarily the main ones), may also be repeated in Boiotia: Bintliff, J. L. and Snodgrass, A. M., ‘The Cambridge/Bradford Boeotia Expedition: the first four years’, JFA 12 (1985), 123–61Google Scholar; iid., ‘Mediterranean survey and the city’, Antiquity, 62 (1988), 57–71.

³⁶ French, L. B., ‘Archaeology in Greece’, AR 40 (1993–1994), 13.Google Scholar

³⁷ There is some evidence that in the LBA parts, at least, of Euboea were within the administrative reach of Thebes: Aravantinos, V., ‘The Mycenaean inscribed sealings from Thebes: preliminary notes’, in Illevski, P. H. and Crepajac, L. (eds), Tractata Mycenaea (Skopje, 1987), 19–20Google Scholar; Piteros, C., Olivier, J.-P., and Melena, J. L., ‘Les inscriptions en linéaire B des nodules de Thèbes (1982): la fouille, les documents, les possibilités d'interprétation’, BCH 104 (1990), 103–84Google Scholar; T. G. Palaima, ‘The Knossos oxen dossier: the use of oxen in Mycenaean Crete, part 1: general background and scribe 107’, in Olivier (n. 3), 464–5.

³⁸ Popham, M. R., Calligas, P. G., and Sackett, L. H., ‘Further excavation of the Toumba cemetery at Lefkandi, 1984 and 1986: a preliminary report’, AR 35 (1988–1989), 123.Google Scholar

³⁹ Morris, I., Burial and Ancient Society (Cambridge, 1986), ch. 2Google Scholar; id., Death Ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge, 1992), 3–30.

⁴⁰ e.g. Quiller, B., ‘The dynamics of Homeric society’, Symbolae Osloenses, 56 (1981), 109–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Whitley, J., ‘Social diversity in Dark Age Greece’, BSA 86 (1991), 341–65, esp. 348–52, 361–5.Google Scholar

⁴¹ e.g. Murray, O., Early Greece (2nd edn; London, 1993), 44–5.Google Scholar

⁴² Popham, M. R., Sackett, L. H., and Themelis, P. G., Lefkandi, i: The Iron Age (BSA supp. vol. 11; London, 1980), i, 6.Google Scholar

⁴³ By way of comparison, the inhabitants of Methana exploited of the plain of Troezen – 6 hours' walk away – in the late 19th and early 20th cent. AD, for intensive, dry-garden cultivation of melons (xerika bostania). Historically specific political and economic circumstances made this worthwhile.

⁴⁴ In contrast to the argument of Killen (n. 3), 256–61, the use of local élites as provincial rulers and administrators was a standard technique of the governmental administration and tax/tribute collection of Near Eastern empires: cf. the Assyrians' management of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel, and the (earlier) control of Aramaic kingdoms in N. Syria, as documented by the Tell Fekheriyeh inscription: Millard, A. R. and Bordreuil, P., ‘A statue from Syria with Assyrian and Aramaic inscriptions’, Biblical Archeologist, summer 1982, 135–41Google Scholar. Although, as Killen notes, there is no evidence for this practice in the Linear B tablets, there is also no firm evidence against it. The tax/tribute/revenue situation may well be different for crops and enterprises in which the palaces had substantial and direct involvement and those with which they did not. If at least some of the ‘subsistence’ crops (e.g. emmer, legumes) coming into the palaces enter as taxes/tribute from ‘non-palatial’ land (see Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 59–60), who collected it locally?

⁴⁵ Jones, G., ‘Cereal and pulse remains from Protogeometric and Geometric Iolkos, Thessaly’, Ανθρωπολογιϰά 3 (1982), 75–8.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ The small area of decoration relative to black-glazed or unglazed areas on PG pottery is in sharp contrast to LG pottery, where even a small fragment is likely to be diagnostic. This means that the chances of identifying PG from survey material are much decreased: a small fragment of PG body sherd just looks black-glazed! Moreover, the obvious re-gearing of Greek economies in the Dark Ages must have substantially affected pottery production, especially if LBA fine wares were largely produced in conjunction with palace economies (albeit, perhaps outside them: see Halstead, ‘Mycenaean palatial economy’ (n. 2), 64, 72). Sherd scatters are as much an economic as a demographic phenomenon, and may thus say more about overall prosperity than about population.

⁴⁷ e.g. Snodgrass, A. M., ‘Archaeology and the study of the Greek city’, in Rich, J. and Wallace-Hadrill, A. (eds), City and Country in the Ancient World (Leicester–Nottingham Studies in Ancient Society, 2; London and New York, 1991), 1–23.Google Scholar

⁴⁸ van Effenterre, H., La Cité grecque: des origines à la défaite de Marathon (Paris, 1991).Google Scholar

⁴⁹ In other words, covering a wide range of aspects of life.

⁵⁰ In other words, increasingly restricting citizenship to those with the ‘correct’ descent, wealth, residence, and status qualifications.