Despite the fragmented state of the archaeological evidence, Early Iron Age Athens is often treated as a role model in research on urbanization processes and the construction of a communal identity – the ‘rise’ of the polis. Many of these models suggest that Athens developed to become the urban centre of Attica in the eighth century BCE and imply that the urbanization process was mirrored by the evolution of a more or less homogeneously structured Athenian ‘society’ to a ‘Greek citizenstate’. The present paper aims to explore the perception of territory in Early Athens, drawing from a discussion of the archaeological evidence of the
Athenian settlement remains and its controversial interpretations, anthropological and sociological studies of agro-pastoral groups, as well as Early Greek literature. Until now, the asty of Early Iron Age Athens has been reconstructed either as a proto-urban nucleus or an agglomeration of scattered hamlets. I would like to try to reach beyond this opposition and to consider other types of settlements which can add to the discussion, such as low-density cities and ‘power-spaces’. Both static perceptions of ‘place’ and evolutionistic models sketching a linear progress of rural to urban societies tend to obscure the diversity of differently organized social groups inhabiting a region or overlapping regions. The evidence assembled puts the often proposed eighth century BCE revolution in Athens into doubt, since during this period neither a homogenous understanding of ‘territory’ nor a single common territorial strategy can be identified. The construction of group identities with strong cohesion and a growing desire to differentiate ‘insiders’ from ‘outsiders’ may thus instead be processes characterising the seventh and especially the sixth century BCE.