Household and City Organization at Olynthus

Olynthus, an ancient city in northern Greece, was preserved in an exceptionally complete state after its abrupt sacking by Phillip II of Macedon in 348 B.C., and excavations in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered more than a hundred houses and their contents. In this book Nicholas Cahill analyzes the results of the excavations to reconstruct the daily lives of the ancient Greeks, the organization of their public and domestic space, and the economic and social patterns in the city. Cahill compares the realities of daily life as revealed by the archaeological remains with theories of ideal social and household organization espoused by ancient Greek authors. Describing the enormous variety of domestic arrangements, he examines patterns and differences in the design of houses, in the occupations of owners, and in the articulations between household and urban economies, the value of land, and other aspects of ancient life throughout the city. He thus challenges the traditional view that the Greeks had one standard household model and approach to city planning. He shows how the Greeks reconciled conflicting demands of ideal and practice, for instance between egalitarianism and social inequality or between the normative roles of men and women and roles demanded by economic necessities. The book, which is extensively illustrated with plans and photographs, is supported by a Web site containing a database of the architecture and finds from the excavations linked to plans of the site. "Olynthus, an ancient city in northern Greece, was preserved in an exceptionally complete state after its abrupt sacking by Phillip II of Macedon in 348 B.C., and excavations in the 1920s and 1930s uncovered more than a hundred houses and their contents. In this book Nicholas Cahill analyzed the results of the excavations to reconstruct the daily lives of the ancient Greeks, the organization of their public and domestic space, and the economic and social patterns in the city.". "The book, which is illustrated with plans and photographs, is supported by a Web site containing a database of the architecture and finds from the excavations linked to plans of the site."--BOOK JACKET. This book explains the relationships between house and city, between household and community, as they were worked out in practice at Olynthus in northern Greece. This polis was occupied for a short period of time, for eighty-four years at the most, and was then violently destroyed, leaving tens of thousands of artifacts on the final floors of its houses, and for the most part never reoccupied. A large part of the city was excavated between 1928 and 1938 by David M. Robinson, who published his findings in fourteen massive volumes. The archaeology of Olynthus offers a fuller and richer picture of Greek domestic and civic life than almost any other Greek site Contents 5 Preface 7 Acknowledgments 11 Chapter 1. Greek City Planning in Theory and Practice 15 Chapter 2. History and Archaeology at Olynthus 37 Chapter 3. The Houses Described 88 Chapter 4. The Houses Organized 162 Chapter 5. The Organization of Blocks 208 Chapter 6. The Economies of Olynthus 237 Appendix 1. Cluster Analysis of Room Areas, Five-Cluster Solution 303 Appendix 2. Sales Inscriptions from Olynthus 307 Notes 315 Bibliography 357 Illustration Credits 384 General Index 385 Index of Houses and Buildings, Blocks, Trenches, and Streets 391 Index of Artifacts 395