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House types of the Early Iron Age

The period of the Early Iron Age (EIA) covers approximately 1100-700 BC and encompasses the so called 'Dark Ages' which followed the Mycenaean collapse and which ends in the transition to the Early Archaic period of the 7th century. It can be divided into the Protogeometric and Geometric periods of 1100-900 and 900-700BC respectively.

It is Mazarakis Ainian's main argument that due to the apparent absence of temples of any kind within settlements prior to the mid 8th century BC, rulers' dwellings instead served as centres of communal cult (1988: 106). It would therefore be useful to look at the range of house forms known from this early period, to identify what separates elite housing from other building types and also the evidence they contain to suggest ritual or religious activity.

Although there are relatively few settlement sites remaining, particularly ones containing identifiable house remains or foundations, in comparison to later periods in the Greek World, Lang recognizes two main types of house arrangement; detached and agglomerated. Both types of settlement usually show that they were unplanned, featuring irregular street layouts which most often follow the local topography (Lang 2007: 183). The settlement of Zagora on the island of Andros is demonstrative of the agglomerated house type https://www.51lunwen.org/StudentPapers/ while Emporio on Chios shows detached. This may however be reflective of settlement size; Zagora may well have begun with a detached house arrangement but its location on a cliff top plateau and resulting limits on space, any increase in population may have required new houses to be built in close proximity to existing ones. The change from small to large clusters of houses can be seen in the plans drawn of the EIA and Archaic remains at the site (fig. 1). This has however led to several scholars suggesting that the house layout of Zagora reflects an early example of the courtyard house prevalent in the Classical Period (Coucouzeli 2007: 169-181, Morris 1998). The argument for this does not seem entirely convincing, but I shall not address it further in this paper.

House types within these arrangements also varied. They were most commonly composed of one or two small rooms with rectangular, oval, apsidal or the slightly less common circular ground plans (Mazarakis Ainian 1997: Ch. 1). The agglomerated settlement lent itself best to rectangular ground plans as seen with Zagora (figure 1). Geographical location appears to have played a part in the distribution of the different house types with, for example, oval buildings of the Geometric Period being mainly found in Attica and Euboea, the East Greek islands and West coast Asia Minor but rarely identified elsewhere (Mazarakis Ainian 1997: 86).

It is the buildings of apsidal and rectangular plans that Mazarakis Ainian suggests were the antecedents of the Archaic temple and the most preferred designs for ruler's dwellings. They can be divided into two groups; those with a closed facade are classified as 'oikoi' and those with an open facade are known as anta buildings (1997: 259). At many of the settlements https://www.51lunwen.org/StudentPapers/ there is usually a dwelling that stands out in terms of size, plan and location from all others in the vicinity and it is these that are assumed rulers' dwellings. Figure 2 highlights this in a comparison of el本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。