Preface

Men and women make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please. They make it not under circumstances that they have chosen themselves, but under conditions inherited from the past and imposed on them by the material world. The most fundamental of these conditions is the physical environment in which people live. Geology, botany and climate offer possibilities, and impose limits; how people respond to those possibilities depends on a wide range of social factors, including the personalities and choices of individuals. Uncovering this dialectical relationship between men and women and their environment over time is the proper task of historical geography.

This book is a study of the historical geography of the valley of the river Maeander in western Asia Minor. Its main contention is that the economic relationships, social structures, cultural identities, and ritual behaviour of the human communities of the Maeander valley in Graeco-Roman antiquity and the Byzantine middle ages were specifically and contingently affected by the fact that those communities were situated in a particular physical space, a valley fringed by mountains on either side, with a major perennial river running down the middle of it to the sea. After describing the physical space itself (Chapter 1), I focus on six separate aspects of the relationship between the peoples of the Maeander and their local environments: sacred geography (Chapter 2), markets and mobility (Chapter 3), mental maps and conceptual boundaries (Chapter 4), pastoral dynamics (Chapter 5), elite behaviour and interaction (Chapter 6) and the productive rural landscape (Chapter 7). In the course of these six chapters, we shall also travel slowly down the course of the river, from its source at Apamea-Celaenae (Chapters 2–3), through the upper Maeander valley (Chapter 4) to the Çal highlands and the plain of Denizli (Chapters 5–6), and into the lower Maeander floodplain (Chapter 7). The final chapter (Chapter 8) is an extended description of dynamic interaction between men and women and their landscape, focused on the changing responses of the inhabitants of the lower Maeander valley to the advance of the delta front (itself the result of human activity), from the Hellenistic period to the present day.