A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400-146 BC)

A Landscape of Conflict? Rural Fortifications in the Argolid (400-146 BC) is the first systematic study of Late Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications in the territories of ancient Argos and the city-states of the Argolic Akte (northeastern Peloponnese).Based on one of the largest regional corpora of Greek fortified sites to date, the volume investigates the function of rural fortifications by placing them in the context of their surrounding landscape.This approach - combining ‘traditional’ methods of ancient history and landscape archaeology with GIS-based data analyses - helps to readdress the long-standing tension between ‘military-strategic’ and ‘non-military’ research agendas in Greek fortification studies, and highlights that Classical and Hellenistic rural fortifications are neither a priori fortified farmsteads nor parts of military-strategic networks of territorial defence.Instead, rural fortifications emerge in this monograph as multifunctional and multifaceted sites,