There are over 170 stone-built settlements in the Mani Peninsula that scholars believe were inhabited from the Middle Byzantine period (eighth to thirteenth centuries AD) up until the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries. These enigmatic sites are known as palaiomaniatika, and roughly half of them are abandoned today, their massive stone walls in various stages of collapse and overgrown by olive trees and unchecked brush. This paper reviews the state of scholarship on the sites, outlining the typical characteristics of the vernacular architecture and discussing variations in settlement size and layout. A case study of the abandoned village of Koulouvades is offered to illustrate how targeted archaeological sampling and archival analysis can be fruitfully combined to illuminate the timeline of village abandonment. The final part of this paper is a call to action to archaeologists of the medieval and post-medieval eastern Mediterranean to adopt the theoretical lens of household archaeology. Through excavations of rural villages, data can be gathered that can answer questions about social process from a “bottom-up” perspective. Despite the body of art historical and architectural studies that have been carried out at the palaiomaniatika over the past 40 years, the lack of archaeological excavations limits the questions we can ask about daily life in these villages, as well as about the factors that contributed to their abandonment. Yet, they are an ideal candidate for household-scale excavations that would contribute to a wider understanding of social process in rural landscapes, not only in the Peloponnese but across the eastern Mediterranean as a whole.