The Urban Structure of Hellenistic Lousoi (Greece)

The ancient site of Lousoi in the northern Peloponnese gives insight into the many facets of ancient Greek urban culture from the perspective of a small town located in a cultural contact zone between the ancient territories of Arkadia and Achaea. Its peculiar material culture is characterized not only by deeply rooted local traditions but also by supra-regional contacts and influences. Thanks to the importance of its sanctuary of Artemis Hemera, the city had become part of a network of economic relationships and socio-political interactions already during the Archaic and Classical periods. Following wider regional trends, the city flourished in Hellenistic times and grew rapidly especially between the late 4th and the 2nd century BC. The interdisciplinary project The Urban Structure of Hellenistic Lousoi undertaken by the Austrian Archaeological Institute pursues the objective to analyse the urban layout of the Hellenistic city as well as the structure of its civic centre, considering both the unique local factors and the wider supra-regional trends in architecture and town-planning that had an impact on the urban fabric. In a first step, the hitherto unknown geographic extent and the spatial configuration of the urban area will be studied with surveying and remote sensing methods. The citys modest size of approximately 25-35ha and the absence of a post-antique settlement favour such large-area investigations. For Lousoi, this will be the first systematic attempt to link the previous research areas to their urban surroundings and gain insight into the overall layout of the city. Especially for the region of Northern Arkadia, such systematic and comprehensive historical urban studies are still essentially lacking. As a second step, the focus of archaeological research will be put on the civic centre of Lousoi. In light of the available archaeological and epigraphic data we may suppose that the heart of the Hellenistic city corresponded to established architectural and urbanistic standards of the Hellenistic world. At the same time, the structural layout, the architectural design, and subsequently also the functions of the civic centre responded to unique local conditions. Using both non-invasive (geophysics and remote sensing) and invasive (excavation) methods, detailed research in this city area will allow us to address essential questions regarding public infrastructure and urban dynamics against the background of local history and identity as well as changing political and social realities. From a small town perspective, these studies can be expected to contribute significantly to a more balanced understanding of the development of commercial and civic space in the Peloponnese and in mainland Greece.

The ancient town of Lousoi can help us to understand what the enormous spread of urbanity during the Late Classical and Hellenistic periods actually meant from the perspective of one of the many small agropastoralist communities of the Greek oecumene, so far been underrepresented in ancient urban studies. The site is located in a contact zone between ancient Arkadia and Achaea, in the unique environment of the highest upland karst plain of the Peloponnese. Combining various methods of field survey and remote sensing with archeological excavations we succeeded in the reconstruction of crucial elements of the urban structure and of major steps of urbanisation and de-urbanisation between the 4th century BC and the 1st century AD. The ancient town extended on just less than 20ha over the mountain slopes east of an elongated karst basin. The recorded data reveal a division into the mostly residential upper town, the lower town with a specific inventory of public buildings, and the south necropolis. The partial adoption of widespread principles of town-planning and the layouts of public and private buildings suggest that the community endeavoured to keep pace with contemporary developments in larger cities, even if the planning concepts had to be adapted to fit the particular local requirements. At its two ends the long-stretched town area was bordered by two major sanctuaries, which had served as sacred gathering places from the 9th century BC onward and linked the community to its territory spatially, but also mentally through the character of the cults. With this particular constellation, Lousoi is a fine example to illustrate that the relationship between the two essential polis entities of town and territory was not to a dichotomy but rather a rural-urban continuum. The striking absence of a fortification circuit, highly unusual for the region and the focus period, was potentially related to a special, religiously legitimized status of the towns main sanctuary of Artemis. The achieved project results also open up new perspectives for studying the polis territory. They shed light on how the ancient population responded to the particular conditions of the upland basin and produced the living environment in the towns surroundings with regard to diverse aspects such as draining interventions for flood prevention, the installation of road and defence networks and rural land division. The main outcomes of the project not only open up a wide range of new perspectives for future work in the micro-region, but also contribute to a more nuanced view of an age that is often understood primarily as a time of cultural standardization. We hope that they can give new impetus to the study of the diversified character of urbanism and urbanity in the Hellenistic period, particularly in small towns.