Modeling Greek city-states’ territories with Least-Cost Site Catchment analysis: A case study of Lato, Crete

Abstract

Least-Cost Site Catchment (LCSC) analysis is a common tool to model the territories of polities of homogeneous size in a Geographical Information System (GIS) environment. With coexisting very small and larger city-states, the context of Hellenistic (323–66 BC) Crete, Greece, does not allow to model directly city-states’ territories with LCSC analysis. This paper proposes to model subunits of equivalent size within the Hellenistic territories with LCSC and combine them to delimit city-states’ territories. Based on the Normalpolis model, which describes early Greek city-states as autonomous villages that can grow and integrate neighbor cities as secondary centers, the archaic city-states of the 7th century BCE are tested as subunits of later Hellenistic city-states. The city-state of Lato (eastern Crete, Greece) appears to be a valuable case study to test such a modeling approach because late 2nd century BCE epigraphical documents provide information on its borderlines. Various cost functions from the archaeological GIS literature are tested to find the most suitable to model Greek city-states’ boundaries. The results of this study indicate that LCSC analysis applied to archaic city-states is an efficient tool to model the territories of Hellenistic city-states. This paper also suggests that the borders of city-states in the 2nd century BCE followed borders that delimited the territories of independent polities in the archaic period. Territorial units delimited at the birth of the city-state organization appear then to remain mostly in place until the end of the Hellenistic period, former archaic city-states becoming subunits of Hellenistic city-states assembled depending on successive conquests.