The book under review seeks to understand the nature of regional economies in Boeotia from the Hellenistic to the Late Roman period (mid-2nd BCE–end of the 7th CE). Following recent trends in the study of ancient economies, the evidentiary basis of the work is archaeological, specifically ceramics collected during pedestrian surface survey from four areas in Boeotia: Thespiae, Askra and the Valley of the Muses, Hyettos, and Tanagra.[1] The book is a welcome addition to the Archaeopress Roman and Late Antique Mediterranean Pottery series and enhances current knowledge of Boeotian history, while advancing a creative methodology for using archaeological survey data.
The work is organized in 15 chapters and an introduction. Chapter 1 outlines the project’s theoretical foundations and reviews previous scholarly literature on ancient economies and geography. Peeters prefers theoretical flexibility and draws on multiple scholarly traditions to scaffold his analyses. He places particular emphasis on New Institutional Economics (NIE), an interpretive framework from the field of economics that foregrounds the effect of political, social, and cultural institutions on economic structure and performance. Also important is New Regional Geography (NRG), a theoretical development of the 1980s and 1990s that emphasizes the importance of social practice in the formation of regional space. NRG, Peeters suggests, offers a way to consider how the different regions of Boeotian emerged and functioned internally.
In Chapter 2, Peeters provides a brief geographical overview of Boeotia, emphasizing the region’s topographical diversity. Chapter 3 gives a “socioeconomically geared history” of the region, drawing on recent scholarship in ancient history to present relevant epigraphic and textual evidence for political organization, taxation, and social structure.
Chapter 4 synthesizes the settlement data (site counts, patterning, and sizes) from the four Boeotian surface surveys as proxies for local economies. While variation exists between Thespiae, the Valley of the Muses, Hyettos, and Tanagra, the same general pattern of settlement does seem to exist: in the Late Hellenistic and Early Roman periods, there was a decrease in the size of cities with a concomitant decrease in non-urban settlement. In the Late Roman period, urban land use diversified and was accompanied by the expansion of non-urban land use. The use of settlement patterns to assess economic change is well-established in the study of Hellenistic and Roman Greece[2] and is an important foundation for Peeters’ interpretations. The book’s methodological focus on ceramics ultimately adds qualitative texture to these analyses of settlement patterns.
Chapters 5-13 are the analytical core of the book. Chapters 5 and 6 outline Peeters’ methodology, while chapters 7-9 are focused on ceramic production and Chapters 10-13 on circulation and consumption. The discussion of production in Chapter 7 begins with a thorough presentation of local wares produced at each of the four areas of investigation. This includes detailed regional fabric descriptions and shape repertoires that will be useful references for ceramicists working in Greece. Additionally, in a series of well-illustrated maps, Peeters presents the distribution of ceramic manufacturing artifacts: kilns, molds, and wasters. He suggests that most ceramic production was located at the center or near periphery of nucleated settlements, a pattern that he argues is the result of market infrastructure, geography, and access to natural resources, such as clay sources (p. 168).
As part of the book’s discussion of Boeotian ceramic production, Chapter 8 includes the analysis of locally produced ceramics using portable X-Ray Fluorescence Spectroscopy (pXRF). With a sample of 225 sherds, Peeters and his collaborators used pXRF to test the chemical coherence of the macroscopically identified local ceramic groups and to link ceramic wasters with their hypothesized areas of production. These analyses were largely successful, with the fabric groups proving to be chemically coherent, though not necessarily otherwise distinguishable from one another. Peeters cautions that the pXRF is only an archaeometric first step for identifying ceramic provenance and should be used in conjunction with other analytical techniques (p.166). This is a promising methodological experiment and may prove a useful example for future Mediterranean surveys; pXRF could serve as a less expensive and quicker alternative to petrography or neutron activation analysis for chemically characterizing large ceramic assemblages.
Chapters 11-13 examine the circulation and consumption of both locally produced and imported ceramics. Each chapter focuses on a different survey region (with Thespiae, Askra, and the Valley of the Muses treated in a single chapter). Peeters analyzes the data according to ceramic functional category (primarily tableware and amphorae/storage vessels) as well as by vessel provenance. The resulting analysis shows diachronic changes in collected ceramic quantities based on specific provenance (e.g., “African Red Slip”) or general origin (e.g., “imported” vs. “Boeotian”). Peeters also presents the data spatially, with maps of ceramic distributions based on provenance and functional type.
Chapters 14 and 15 synthesize the data evaluated in previous sections, offering a conclusion to the work. Peeters highlights similarities and differences in the ceramic patterning of these regions and contextualizes these results with findings from elsewhere in Central Greece (e.g., Euboea). He concludes by placing the analysis of ceramics in dialogue with other historical and archaeological evidence from Boeotia. In some cases, this evidence serves to explain the ceramic patterning presented in the volume. In other instances, discussed below, these different sources of evidence work in conjunction to form a complex narrative of regional economies.
The variability of ceramic patterning across different functional groups—among both imports and locally produced pottery—shows that the regions of Boeotia experienced diverse economic trajectories. This interpretation joins recent scholarly reassessments that have rejected monolithic models of economic change in the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods in Greece.[3] One example of such diversity is the existence of an “east-west divide” in the patterning of early Roman imported amphorae and table wares: the settlements of Thespiae and Askra, situated in western Boeotia, consumed more Italian and Adriatic imports, while Tanagra in eastern Boeotia received more imports from the Aegean (pp. 327-331). Interestingly, these differences ceased in the Middle and Late Roman periods, when African Red Slip was imported in equal proportions to both eastern and western parts of Boeotia. Such patterning and its cessation, Peeters suggests, was shaped by a complex set of factors, from geography to differences in entrenched political and social institutions, such as proxenia.
It is notable that Peeters’ analysis considers locally/regionally produced ceramics alongside ceramic imports, an emphasis sometimes missing in ceramic-based studies of ancient economies. Indeed, given the relative paucity of knowledge of Late Hellenistic and Roman ceramic production in Greece, one of the book’s most critical contributions is the comprehensive presentation of Boeotian-produced ceramics. Peeters demonstrates that ceramic production regimes in Boeotia were localized and variable. Potters at Askra, for example, specialized in the manufacturing of beehives that were used at nearby rural sites in the Valley of the Muses (pp. 113-114). Peeters suggests that this ceramic production was linked to the region’s viticulture, where honey may have been added to wine as flavoring. Peeters concludes that most Boeotian ceramics were used in close proximity to their place of production (p. 348). These regional productions supplied local markets shaped by specific cultural practices, material needs, and political economies. Such observations add nuance to simple explanations of ceramic consumption or production that are extrapolated from settlement size or location.
The book’s use of ceramic assemblages drawn from intensive pedestrian surveys will also be of interest to readers. Rather than simply forming the basis of site identification, Peeters shows that survey pottery has the unique capacity to underpin spatially extensive economic analysis at local and regional scales. Such analysis can articulate meaningful differences in consumption and production patterns between urban and rural contexts (and the gradations therein). Surface assemblages, of course, have significant limitations, both in the degree to which they are representative of subsurface assemblages and in the extent to which they are chronologically diagnostic. Peeters is aware of these limitations and does an excellent job of using methodological corrections and interpretive caveats to temper his findings.[4] As such, the work is a noteworthy case study for assessing the extent to which narratives about regional economies can be formed from survey data. The aforementioned east-west divide of imported ceramics may be persuasive, but an argument for the urban consumption of goods packaged in Cretan amphorae in the area of Hyettos (p. 263) is less so. This is a useful methodological problem; it will be stimulating to evaluate Peeters’ findings alongside excavation data sets that approach the spatially extensive quality of archaeological survey,[5] an opportunity to assess the limitations of archaeological evidence in reconstructing ancient economic activity.
As the book’s title suggests, the work has a stated interest in interrogating the function and organization of regions (i.e., “regionality”) (pp. 18-19). Drawing from the work of NRG, Peeters argues that regions emerge from a range of social and cultural practices and are therefore fluid in definition, changing over time and space. This is true of ceramic production and consumption, where a shared repertoire of cooking vessels, for example, can be the basis of a region (i.e., a ceramic koine) (pp. 345-346). The connection between this generally compelling theoretical argument and the book’s empirical evidence, however, is ultimately underdeveloped. In an already lengthy book, further discussion is needed to clarify the relationship between specific historical practices and the development of the Boeotian regions discussed in the text. (How did the use of distinctly Boeotian cooking vessels effect eating practices and, thus, a shared sense of place?) At the same time, the diverse (spatial and temporal) patterning of the work’s ceramic data convincingly show that the use of “region” as an analytical category by Mediterranean archaeologists requires further scrutiny. The spatial limits of ceramics collected by pedestrian survey, or the boundaries of a Classical Polis, are only two heuristics (among many) for analyzing regional economies. Regions are constructed by scholars along a range of criteria, better or worse suited to specific forms of analysis.
The production quality of the book is commendable and its presentation of figures satisfactory. There are numerous graphs, maps, and illustrations of pottery. Given the work’s emphasis on regional economic units, and its gestures towards how individuals may have experienced these regions, it was surprising that the book does not include a single photograph of Boeotia (only satellite map images). The work also contains typos, grammatical errors, and convoluted sentences that, at times, obscure argumentation: unfortunate oversights of the production process. These criticisms notwithstanding, the book can be recommended to researchers interested in archaeological survey methodology, economies of the ancient Mediterranean, and Hellenistic and Roman ceramics. The work is an excellent addition to our knowledge of ceramics in Greece and furthers an understanding of Late Hellenistic and Roman Greece that supersedes simple narratives of economic boom and bust.
Notes
[1] These areas were subject to intensive archaeological surveys as part of the ongoing multi-campaign Boeotia Project initiated in the late 1970s.
[2] S. Alcock. 1993. Graecia Capta: The Landscapes of Roman Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
[3] See various contributions in V. Di Napoli et al. (eds.). 2018. What’s New in Roman Greece? Recent Work on the Greek Mainland and the Islands in the Roman Period: Proceedings of a Conference Held in Athens, 8–10 October 2015. Meletemata 80. Athens: National Hellenic Research Foundation.
[4] One such method is probabilistic chronological distributions for ceramic assemblages. Such distributions estimate the probability that a vessel was consumed in a specific year based on its typologically ascribed date range.
[5] E.g., K. Bowes (ed.). 2021. The Roman Peasant Project 2009-2014. Excavating the Roman Rural Poor. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.