Landscape Archaeology and the Medieval Countryside: Settlement and Abandonment in the Nemea Region Effie F. Athanassopoulos Published online: 24 February 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract This paper examines the processes of settlement and abandonment of the medieval countryside as revealed by archaeological surveys undertaken in southern Greece. The Nemea region, the focus of an intensive archaeological survey, serves as a case study. Early archaeological surveys approached this time period primarily from a historical point of view. Political history provided the textual frame while the archaeological data were expected to “fill in” the gaps of the historical record. In contrast, in the last twenty-five years the second generation of surveys has taken an active interest in the archaeological documentation of the medieval countryside. The settlement trends observed in Nemea are viewed as manifestations of a variety of political, social, and economic processes. Keywords Landscape archaeology . Medieval settlement . Peloponnesos . Nemea Introduction The purpose of this paper is to discuss the processes of settlement and abandonment during the medieval period in the Nemea Valley, located in the northeast part of the Peloponnesos, in southern Greece. The Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (NVAP) exemplifies the contribution of landscape archaeology to the understanding of the Greek countryside. In the last twenty five years, regional survey projects have produced a rich surface record of prehistoric as well as historic times. However, interest in the archaeology of the “later” historic periods, especially the medieval and post-medieval, was slow to develop. The early survey projects focused on the material remains of more remote time-periods. For example, the Minnesota- Messenia Expedition (MME), a pioneering project that introduced the methods of archaeological survey to Greece, placed emphasis on the Bronze Age. MME served Int J Histor Archaeol (2010) 14:255–270 DOI 10.1007/s10761-010-0106-x E. F. Athanassopoulos (*) Department of Anthropology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, 810 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0368, USA e-mail: efa@unl.edu