UC Berkeley

This project explores choices pertaining to cooperative or noncooperative managementstrategies of forests and agricultural land in Bronze Age western Messenia, and how those strategies changed over time through coercive state action during the Mycenaean palatial period. When resource governance shifts from stake-holder to profit centers, sustainability measures may be deferred or subject to exogenous policies that promote extraction, commodification, and/or maximization over resource longevity and systems health. My objective is to a) determine if there were efforts made toward sustainability, cooperation, and longevity, b) detect response strategies to depletion or differential access, and c) couple the diachronic changes in plant communities with archaeologically invisible phenomena within the social and political landscape, revealing the institutions that drive policy and practices. Through an environmental reconstruction, I detected a deforestation event exclusive to the local pine population during the first 200 years of Mycenaean state formation, while deciduous oak populations remained healthy. This indicates that valuable oak wood was protected from over-extraction and deforestation by means of socially enforced procurement rules, and the pine absorbed the costs of growing populations and increased industrial outputs despite its overall inferiority. While initially these rules were likely community enforced, the consumption behavior of the palace at its height of power asserts that they either co-opted the administration of the procurement institutions in order to secure their own material gain and reinforce palatial authority. A parallel move toward privatizing key resources is observable in the administrative records dedicated to transactions related to private and communal landholdings. Here, private property was set apart from the common-pool and, I argue, became subject to tenure-bound service requirements in the form of forced redistribution in return for the state’s acknowledgment of property boundaries and sole control over surplus. In both strata, the privatization of arable land/oak resources both accommodated the threat of scarcity under conditions of exponential demographic growth and consolidated sources of social and economic capital. Ultimately, the state inserted itself into various fields of power; they were appropriating the measures taken by communities to stymie scarcity while simultaneously creating scarcity through intensive extraction, disrupting community autonomy and threats to their own authority, and crafting statist capital with the spoliated institutions of a subjugated populace.