What might we expect to find in Greece for the immense timespan during which hunter-gatherers lived in Europe? Actually little to nothing, when we consider the geological processes which have destroyed or hidden the record of hundreds of thousands of years of human presence in Greece (Runnels 1995, Bailey et al. 1999, Perles 2000, Galanidou and Perles 2003).
However, if Europe was first colonized by Homo erectus 1—2 mya, with a likely entry-point through the Balkans, Greece could have seen human occupation during this period. A very early appearance might associate hominids with a chopper-flake industry, preceding the spread 1.5 mya onwards of the more elaborate Acheulean handaxe industries. But no Greek findspots are this early, or belong to a completely pre-Acheulean tradition. The oldest human activity appears to include handaxes, although no extensive site of this “technocomplex” (a toolkit used by many human groups rather than a culture associated with one) has been identified. Instead isolated finds at widespread points of the country, in outcrops of ancient landsurfaces, attest to derivative forms of Acheulean Lower (older) Palaeolithic culture throughout the Greek lowlands. These early handaxes seem late varieties. A “technocomplex” of varying chopper-flake and handaxe forms is likely to be characteristic of European early human settlement sites. Actually two of the best described early Greek sites may reflect such a mixed culture, although their dates are more appropriate for the Middle Palaeolithic. Kokkinopilos in Epirus has a handaxe in a stratigraphy around 150—200 kya, whilst Rodia in Thessaly is a chopper-and-flake industry with perhaps the limited presence of handaxes, ca. 200—400 kya. Secure radiometric dates (absolute dates from physics) for the Greek Palaeolithic only begin around 100 kya.
In 2008—2009 a team led by Curtis Runnels of Boston University, the Plakias Mesolithic Survey on Crete, made unexpected Palaeolithic discoveries in southern coastal Crete (Strasser et al. 2010). At 11 localities stone tool (lithic) scatters were found in geological contexts indicating an age of 130 kya or older, and belonging to forms typical for late Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulean handaxes and cleavers) and Middle Palaeolithic industries. The significance of this for maritime travel at such a remote period is remarkable, given the lack of known land-bridges between Crete and the Greek Mainland or the Cyclades even in times of low sea level in the Glacial eras.
From this stage of human occupation in Europe, the wider site evidence from the long duration of the Middle Palaeolithic (ca. 300—35 kya), allows reconstruction of the lifeways of Greece’s oldest occupants. Based on the European record, and its general agreement with the Greek material, Middle Palaeolithic hominids in Greece (Neanderthal Man), foraged in small groups, irregularly merging into larger social gatherings (up to about 150 individuals) at times of richest resource profusion. Rather than remaining in one location they ranged over a large annual territory, to coincide with the seasonal appearance of herds of animals or stocks of edible plants in particular areas of the regional landscape, as well as to visit geological outcrops to obtain raw material for tools. Sourcing the lithics in use has shown that band movements of this kind could extend 100 km.
If there had been later Lower Palaeolithic human colonizers of Greece, they were probably already very early Neanderthals. This distinct species, Homo nean-derthalensis, competed successfully in the Levant with expanding fully modern Homo sapiens from around 100 kya, and then unsuccessfully in Europe after 45 kya, but through interbreeding did contribute to the latter’s genetic make-up. Greece’s first human remains, like its oldest well-dated open air lithic sites, appear to be early Middle Palaeolithic, and come from the Petralona Cave in Northern Greece, probably ca. 300 kya; they may indeed be Neanderthal Man.
It was these later Neanderthal populations in Europe who adopted new technologies which were diffusing through the Old World, significantly expanding stone toolkits beyond handaxes and chopper-flake tools, into more complex tool manufacturing and tool diversity. Around 300 kya, these new forms of stone-tool preparation appear, distinctive for the Middle Palaeolithic era and known collectively as the Levallois-Mousterian tradition. Manufacturing techniques include specially prepared cores with tortoiseshell shaped platforms from which radial flakes are struck. This technology, especially suited for making hafted implements, only appears sporadically in the early Middle Palaeolithic in Greece. More elaborate toolkits known as the mature Mousterian tradition appear in Greece from around 150 kya. A type-site is the cave of Asprochaliko in Epirus, where the oldest excavated levels are ca. 100 kya. Nearby at Kokkinopilos, ancient sediments called Red Beds, which also produced some of the few even earlier Acheulean handaxes, gave finds of open-air Mousterian activity from 150 kya onwards. Mousterian populations on this evidence were till recently argued to have favored the wetter, more varied landscapes of Northwestern Mainland Greece during the final period of the last Interglacial and the first half of the last Ice Age, their sites only appearing in the drier East and South after 55 kya. However, a series of new sites has shifted our focus toward the latter regions, cave sites in the arid and rocky Mani peninsula in the Southern Mainland, Kalamakia and Lakonis, and the most recent finds from the south coast of Crete (Strasser et al. 2010). In particular, Lakonis has dense occupation layers dated
Figure 2.1 Peneios River open valley terraces, Thessaly, with archaeologists recording lithic finds from Palaeolithic hunter-gatherer activity.
Courtesy of Curtis Runnels.
Between 100 and 40 kya, including a Neanderthal tooth (Panagopoulou et al. 2004).
Fieldwork in the plains of Thessaly (East-Central Greece) offers insights into how Middle Palaeolithic communities used the landscape (Runnels 1989, Runnels and van Andel 1993). Tectonic sinking of these plains has caused gradual lowering of river levels, achieved by their cutting down through much older deposits, but luckily the rivers remained in similar locations. Very ancient river terraces and banks are thus exposed, places where hunters camped, prepared tools and cut up their prey, those animals being attracted to the rivers for water and grazing. Series of such activity foci have been mapped from eroding ancient river-terraces west of the modern town of Larisa. However, these stone tools and animal bones are not found in their original place (in situ), but were reworked by changing river channels. Yet geomorphological and stratigraphic study confirms that these remains lie close to the original places of hunters’ activity. The great grassy plains of Thessaly with their large, permanent rivers would have attracted considerable herds of game, a resource underpinning the economic and social structure of Middle Palaeolithic hominids.
The oldest of the Thessalian early Middle Palaeolithic river-gravel findspots is at Rodia (ca. 400—200 kya), and may form part of the Europeanwide flexible cultural tradition tying together use of handaxes and chopper-flakes. After a long absence of human activity, a new colonization of this landscape is evidenced by numerous late Middle Palaeolithic or mature Mousterian sites, datable after 60 kya.
Figure 2.1 shows how the Peneios river passes through the Thessalian Plain. Animals moving along the river could be ambushed by hunters and it is in the relict gravel banks and flood deposits eroding by the present riverbank that archaeologists can discover stone tools used by these foragers and the bones of contemporary animals grazing and seeking water.
Increasing evidence identifies locations preferred by Neanderthal hunter-gatherers in choosing where to camp, temporarily or for longer periods, within a seasonal round of several sites (Papagianni 2000). Riversides and coastal marshes and estuaries are selected, whilst the many Middle Palaeolithic sites in
Northwest Greece associated with “terra rossa” sediments termed “Red Beds” were formerly seasonal lakes and marshes, where sediments accumulated during the Pleistocene within limestone (karst) depressions possessing underground drainage. Also favored are locations where the movements of game herds could be monitored without disturbing them, such as rockshelters high above passes and narrow valleys (for example Asprochaliko). Papagianni suggests that in the rich hunter-gatherer environment of the Epiros lowlands, base camps for longer residence lay a day’s travel apart (around 30 km), between which occur many smaller lithic sites, evidence of short-lived hunting, gathering or raw material procurement activities. Strontium isotopes from a Neanderthal tooth from Lakonis (see below) suggest that this individual probably foraged over a landscape, at least at some period of its life, at least 20 km from the cave where the body was found (Richards et al. 2008).
The Thessaly Mousterian assemblages are late enough to contain possible borrowing from the yet more advanced stone industry, the Aurignacian, which replaces them throughout Europe during the second half of the last Glacial period. This early form of Upper Palaeolithic culture is associated however with the spread of our own species, anatomically modern humans, Homo sapiens. Modern humans with Upper Palaeolithic culture probably colonized the Balkans from the Middle East and the Black Sea steppes around 45—30 kya. By 30 kya Neanderthals and the Mousterian have died out throughout Europe, so that Upper Palaeolithic modern humans and their novel toolkits are now the only people and culture throughout the subcontinent.
There is lively debate on the interactions between European Neanderthal and incoming Homo sapiens populations, both in terms of physical contact and mixing of cultural traditions. The open-air riverside sites of Middle Palaeolithic hunters in Thessaly occasionally include Upper Palaeolithic tools, but since these deposits are reworked by the river and represent accumulations from many encampments, it is impossible to exclude mixing of older and younger assemblages. Indeed, the cave of Theopetra inThessaly, probably one base in a seasonal round of camps including open-air river sites, was formerly suggested to show a transitional lithic assemblage between Middle and
Upper Palaeolithic, but now thermoluminescence dates (TL) indicate the likelihood that these deposits are also artificially mixed together (Valladas et al. 2007).
In contrast, Lakonis cave in the Southern Mainland, on the Mani peninsula (Panagopoulou et al. 2004) offers evidence for Neanderthal populations adopting Upper Palaeolithic tool-types without a break in occupation. Absolute dates (from physical science) and stratigraphy suggest continuity of population and occupation from a dominant Middle to a dominant Upper Palaeolithic assemblage. A Neanderthal tooth from this transitional era confirms the likely acculturation due to contact with Modern Humans. The latest genetic evidence for interbreeding between Neanderthals and Modern Humans agrees very well with these cultural interchanges.
However, this particular period coincided with the worst climate in Europe for more than 100,000 years, the Ice Age climax, 30—20 kya, causing human populations to gather in the far south of the subcontinent to find warmth to survive in, and a sufficient density of animals and plants to live off. Even in Southern Europe only some regions fulfilled these needs, and here Jochim (1987) argues that the close packing of refugee hunter-gatherer groups may have stimulated unparalleled symbolic activity (cave art and mobile art objects). The classic refuges are Southwest France and the Spanish coastal Pyrenees, where less severe climate was linked to proximity to the Atlantic. Greece was not overall such a favored ecological zone during the height of the Glacial, and evidence for early Upper Palaeolithic populations is very slight, notably when compared to Middle Palaeolithic activity. Hyperaridity was the limiting factor. Symptomatic is the virtual absence of open-air sites from the early Upper Palaeolithic, contrasted to the frequency of Middle Palaeolithic examples in regions such as Epirus, Thessaly, and the Western Peloponnese. The exceptional discovery of Lakonis and other recent sites in the coastal South Peloponnese may argue that these environments, as other Mediterranean peninsulas, encouraged refuge occupation: they offered milder temperatures and adjacent extensive coastal plains (now submerged by sea level rises), with marshy river deltas backed by hills with open scrubby vegetation. Larger game recovered from the Lakonis domestic debris include wild cattle, pig, and deer.
After the cold, arid maximum around 18 kya, the final Glacial sees warmth returning to Greece, but more tardily increased moisture. Upper Palaeolithic activity becomes visible again, including the expansion of hunting sites into the now more attractive high uplands, still open and with milder climates (for example in Epirus). A reorientation of hunter-gatherer annual ranges (seasonal movements) and economic strategies occurred. In Thessaly the riverine campsites of the Plain are not in significant use in Upper Palaeolithic or Mesolithic times, although seasonal cave use at long-used locations persists. The raw materials in use for tool-making at Theopetra Cave now shift from local stone, suiting a confined regional annual round, to significant amounts of long-distance imports. This change could reflect expanding trade networks, but in the context of the contemporary evidence for the colonization of the Pindus Mountains by summer hunting bands and the disappearance of the Plain camps, might rather point to lowland foragers now themselves expanding their annual seasonal movements into the uplands, as the lowlands gradually became wooded and less attractive to game herds throughout the year.
A key site for Upper Palaeolithic occupation, although never permanent through the year, is the Franchthi Cave (see Text Box) in the Northeast Peloponnese, a coastal limestone peninsula bordering Koilada Bay. Here there was also Middle Palaeolithic occupation, and a very significant occupation in the Early Holocene (Postglacial) period, when human activity in Greece as a whole has proved difficult to identify. Perles argues that human use of this spacious, well-located shelter varied from regular seasonal occupation for a variety of hunter-gatherer activities, to sporadic and highly specialized foraging for short periods, so that it was always just one of a series of camps utilized discontinuously for some 100,000 years. Nonetheless, the innovative excavation methods and large scientific staff brought together by Tom Jacobsen has produced one of our best insights into the different ways foragers in Greece could use the same landscape (Jacobsen 1987-2010; Perles 1999, 2001).
Until recently Franchthi Cave was the only site where the transition from Late Glacial to Early Holocene could be observed. However in Thessaly we now possess the major findspot ofTheopetra Cave was occupied from Middle Palaeolithic to Late Neolithic times, including the period lacking in the Thessalian river camps, the transition from Upper Palaeolithic to early Holocene Mesolithic (Kyparissi-Apostolika 1999, Panagopoulou 1999). Other recent Mesolithic discoveries (Figure 2.2), are Klisoura Cave (Northeast Peloponnese) and the Cave of Cyclope (Sporades Islands).
Theopetra cave lies in limestone hills marking the edge of the western plain of Thessaly and the start of the Pindus Mountains, which here divide West and East Greece. The oldest layers belong to the older Middle Palaeolithic, perhaps even earlier. However the dominant Middle Palaeolithic occupation is a late phase of that tradition, contemporary to the open-air camps studied by previous teams in Thessaly, and belongs to the middle of the Last Glacial (ca. 50-30 kya). Environmental studies portray the Plain as a steppe and the hills and mountains with limited deciduous and more pine woodland: bear and deer are hunted, and probably gathering ofedible steppe grasses and legumes occurred. There follows an Upper Palaeolithic occupation from 38 kya till 25,300 BP, when as elsewhere in Greece, the peak cold and aridity of the Glacial caused abandonment; vegetation seems to have been negligible. Reoccupation by late Upper Palaeolithic foragers, 15-11 kya, was followed by an Early Holocene Mesolithic phase dated 10-8 kya. Whereas the warming climate in the former, final Glacial times caused pine and steppe to expand, low moisture still kept this Tardiglacial period very arid. But with the advent of the Early Holocene and the Mesolithic occupation, both high altitude pine and lower altitude oak expanded considerably. The game brought back to the cave, wild goat or chamois (a form of ibex), deer, wild cattle and pig, hare, and birds, and the plants gathered (grasses and legumes), became more plentiful as climate improved from Late Upper Palaeolithic into Mesolithic times, but increasing afforestation encouraged seasonal use of the adjacent uplands.
Like Franchthi, the Theopetra Mesolithic stone-tool assemblage does not resemble adaptive technologies found elsewhere across Europe in response to the spread of modern climate and vegetation, suggesting that Greek landscapes posed particular requirements for survival, and also that the country became isolated from wider cultural developments. There are better
Figure 2.2 Key Mesolithic sites in Greece.
N. Galanidou and C. Perles (eds.), The Greek Mesolithic. Problems and Perspectives. London 2003, Figure 1.1.
Parallels, however, over an intermediate geographical scale (Tourloukis and Palli 2009). As in the Balkans as a whole, “Mesolithic” or “Epipalaeolithic” industries tend to replace blades with flake tools.
The long use of the site reflects its very favorable location for exploiting a series of terrain-types, where varied food sources could be tapped. It remains uncertain if Theopetra was a permanent base-camp, rather than a seasonal camp in an annual range incorporating numerous other locations, as has been argued for Franchthi. Significantly, in the Middle Palaeolithic occupation layers, the raw material for stone tools came predominantly from within a 10 km radius; this is a maximum predicted site
The Franchthi Cave
Franchthi Cave is a large rockshelter in a dry, scrub-and cultivation-covered region, now on the sea and even in the peak of Last Glacial low sea levels, never more than 5 km distant. Throughout the Upper and Final Palaeolithic and early Holocene cave occupation, lower marine levels created a plain with a river beside and ahead of the cave, making it much more attractive to occupy than its present barren headland location washed by the sea.
The Upper Palaeolithic occupation has a first phase when the regional environment was dry and cold steppe vegetation, since at this time, ca. 30—17 kya, the Last Glacial was reaching its maximum severity. Hunting groups utilizing Franchthi as temporary residence pursued deer and wild horse or ass (the lithic assemblage is predominantly the type called backed-bladelets, used mounted in wood for hunting projectiles), and their sporadic, short-lived occupation left thin debris. After an abandonment of the site for several millennia, doubtless a response to the Glacial climax, reoccupation around 13 kya is different enough to justify the term Tardiglacial (Late Glacial), whilst changes in culture and economy anticipate those seen elsewhere in Europe where they accompany a new form of life, the Mesolithic.
The stone tool assemblage now diversifies along with far more rubbish build-up, indicating longer use and more varied activities at Franchthi. Wild cattle and goat join the game hunted, and collected seeds include wild vegetables and wild cereals. Furthermore, shellfish and fish are added to the diet. Perles categorizes these changes ca. 13—10kya as the creation of a “broad-spectrum economy,” where in contrast to earlier phases of use at Franchthi, whole domestic units of men, women, and children spent long periods annually living in and in front of the cave, occupied with a wide range of subsistence strategies. Undoubtedly these transformations reflect rising temperatures and moisture as the Glacial waned and global climates were transformed into the current Interglacial, the Holocene, but also to the specific way these changes affected a site near the coast. A milder climate created a richer Mediterranean scrub-savannah landscape, stimulating more varied if less concentrated game, and edible plants, whilst rising sea levels brought more accessible seafood. During this phase an exotic raw material is used for tool preparation: obsidian from the distant Cycladic island of Melos. I suggested many years ago (Bintliff 1977) that the development of fishing may have stimulated the discovery of the rich Melos obsidian outcrops, as well as the means for its transport to the Mainland, since traditional fishermen have ranged over the same wide territories following the seasonal appearances of great shoals of the same species (notably the giant tuna). As however the first appearance of obsidian predates at this site the evidence for special tools for marine hunting and great amounts of fishbone, perhaps Franchthi began as a consumer of other Tardiglacial fishing forays into the Cyclades.
Around 10 kya, Franchthi enters its Mesolithic phase, and exhibits two contrasted ways that hunter-gatherers adapted to a climate comparable to today, if perhaps drier. The Lower (older) Mesolithic shows an economy specialized in plant foods and shellfish, with little land game or fish. Stone tools are limited and unsophisticated, largely used for reed - and wood-working. The contemporary dry plant cover supported a low density of game, but this favored legumes and edible wild cereals. Remarkably, this scanty occupation is associated with a cemetery, possibly including collective burials (Cullen 1995). In hunter-gatherer societies in the Tardiglacial and Mesolithic of the Near East and Europe the appearance of formal burial areas seems to mark highly productive foraging at certain locations, often based on a rich resource such as marine, estuarine or lake fauna and flora. Here the ancestors might be placed to signify the centrality of the site for a particular band, and as a territorial claim to its use. Since Franchthi remained just one of a seasonal range of foraging sites, it probably did form a ritual focus in a more varied set of camps, whose totality might have created this kind of stability. Till very recently, such a network eluded discovery (see below).
Figure 2.3 Upper Mesolithic stone-tool assemblage from Franchthi Cave. Most of the small tools or microliths (right) are related to fishing: tools for preparing nets and traps for the capture of fish and then their processing for eating and storage. Shellfish collection and processing would also benefit from some of these small tools but also from some larger tools (left). The curved trapezoidal arrows however (upper right) could also be used for the land game, red deer and boar, identified in the Cave deposits. Many of the larger cutting and scraping tools (left) would be useful for processing land animals. Plant remains include wild fruits, nuts, and cereals, but no specific tools can yet be associated with these.
C. Perles, The Early Neolithic in Greece. Cambridge University Press 2001, Figures 2.4 and 2.5.
Collection. The tools (Figure 2.3) are largely for catching and processing marine fish. This use of Franchthi was highly seasonal, since fish such as tuna appear at limited times in varied parts of the Aegean coasts, although in impressive shoals.
Even scantier activity marks the late ninth millennium BP (before present), Final Mesolithic, but the intervening Upper Mesolithic, earlier ninth millennium, sees the cave occupants take up sea-fishing, especially tuna, as their dominant activity, with supplementary hunting and plant
Territory for a hunter-gatherer settlement, although as noted, perhaps other local sites were in use seasonally. In contrast, as noted earlier in this chapter, the Final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic evidence for long-distance stone imports may show a greatly enlarged yearly territory of exploitation.
The Cyclope Cave on the island ofYoura in the Sporades lies east of Thessaly and has revealed a long
Mesolithic use ca. 8700—7000 BC (Sampson 2006). During the peak of the preceding Ice Age these islands were linked to the Mainland owing to low sea levels, but in this Early Holocene period a smaller channel than today existed, although the import of obsidian from the Cycladic island of Melos to Franchthi Cave before this phase already evidences that adequate boat technology was available in Mesolithic Greece. The economy reflects a “broad spectrum” expansion from traditional Palaeolithic larger game, since fishing (including large species such as tuna), shellfishing, and land mollusc collecting are central sources of nourishment, alongside birds. It is suggested that fish were smoked and dried, whilst the species caught required both open-sea and coastal fishing. The suggestion that the site was used by migratory (“transmerant”) fishermen reinforces the model I proposed for fishing and exotic imports into the final Palaeolithic and Mesolithic at Franchthi.
Another near-Mainland island, Kythnos, in the western Cyclades, has an open settlement with traces of round houses and formal burials of Mesolithic age, and seems to belong to the same expansive Broad-Spectrum economy (Sampson 2006). Significantly, intensive use of marine resources is a Mediterranean trend from the final Glacial and earliest Holocene: on the coasts of Mount Carmel open-air “fishing villages” are known, now submerged by rising sea levels (Galili et al. 2002), developing from around 10,000 BP. Also intensive use of marine and freshwater resources is a shared concern with the rest of early Holocene Europe, both in site locations, fauna, and tool specializations (Tourloukis and Palli 2009).
There had been a window of opportunity in the final Glacial and earliest Holocene periods (see Klithi Cave Box below), which had allowed a burst of human exploitation in the high mountains of Greece: there was a warmer climate but still insufficient rainfall to promote the recovery of woodland (afforestation), which would progressively close down open-country hunting and plant-gathering. But now in the mature Holocene such afforestation did occur. Partial compensation came from better stream flow through the year, and the expansion of lake and marsh environments, which offered alternative food sources. Human groups also made increased exploitation of the sea for fish, shellfish, and marine mammals. However, claims for incipient domestication of the key species of domestic animals and plants, such as wheat and barley, sheep and goats, at sites such as Theopetra and the Cyclope Cave, are suspected by most specialists to be intrusions into Mesolithic layers from later activity at these sites, or in the case of Franchthi (where at an early stage of the excavations a similar local development was voiced), to contacts with contemporary immigrant farming groups in the region.
The mature Early Holocene environment, then, offered much compensation for the loss of large coastal plains now submerged below rising sea levels, and of the previous dry steppe climate with limited woodland supporting game herds but limited plants. In its place came far more running freshwater, with marshes, lakes, varied forms of woodland, and a wider fauna and flora. Replacing a lifestyle of wide-ranging hunter-gatherers of the Palaeolithic phases, Mesolithic foragers could find more localized niches with a mosaic of resources. Our expectation might well be then for favored locations in such a landscape to encourage dense pockets of population. The formal burials in Franchthi Cave in theory seem to suggest that its occupants were indeed part of such a local network of regionally dense hunter-gatherers. As Cullen (1995) comments: “At Franchthi, the concern to preserve the bones of the deceased within the living space may signal an emphasis on the continuity and definition of the social group, a possibility supported by the coinciding appearance of personal ornaments and ochre.” They would have been supported, according to the reconstruction of resources exploited by the Franchthi foragers of this period, by a diet of deer and wild pig, land and marine molluscs, fish, nuts, legumes, and wild cereals.
Fulfilling these expectations, a recent field survey in the coastal region west of Franchthi (Runnels et al. 2005) has documented exactly such a dense network ofMesolithic sites (Figure 2.4). Interestingly, Runnels’ success where almost all previous researchers had failed, in showing that Greece did not lack a flourishing Mesolithic population, lay in his reverting to traditional forms of landscape research for hunter-gatherer sites, whilst retaining some state-of-the-art
Figure 2.4 Mesolithic settlement system in the Argolid.
C. Runnels et al., “A Mesolithic landscape in Greece: Testing a site-location model in the Argolid at Kandia" Journal of Mediterranean Archaeology 18 (2005), 259-285, Figure 2.
Theory. Whilst intensive survey without prior selection of terrain has proven largely unsuccessful in documenting significant lithic findspots for Holocene foragers, seemingly supporting the traditional view of a real poverty of sites and minimal populations, Runnels targeted microlandscapes (small districts) which should in terms of human ecology have offered the ideal locations for contemporary hunter-gatherers. These were minor coastal plains, with springs and streams, marshland and backing hills, in which a similar wide range of land and sea resources would be easily accessible. Fifteen Mesolithic sites were found by scouring the slopes below caves suitable for occupation and in adjacent landscapes (two were in fact open-air sites). Two caves had sufficient debris to suggest lengthy residential use as “base-camps,” whilst the remainder might have been part of a mobile strategy of camping temporarily at a series of locations.
Runnels and colleagues have now had equal success applying the same targeted survey in finding the first clear evidence for Mesolithic communities on Crete, where the same locational preferences by the coast were revealed (Strasser et al. 2010).
Equally surprising have been the results of recent surface survey in a very different physical environment, the high mountains of Mainland Greece. An international team is investigating how ancient was the traditional use of summer seasonal pastureland in the high mountain plateaux that form the watershed zone in Northern Greece between the western lowlands of Epirus and those on the east in Macedonia and Epiros (Efstratiou et al. 2006). At this altitude, 1400—1900 meters above sea level, lie flysch (limestone erosion sediment) basins between rugged limestone, offering excellent summer grazing, whereas in winter they are harsh, inhospitable landscapes, forcing grazing animals to retreat to warmer lower altitudes (or as today to be kept in stalls and given supplementary fodder). The survey team discovered more than 90 open-air lithic findspots, documenting repeated and significant use of these high mountains. The earlier findspots are Middle Palaeolithic, and would suit milder intervals during the earlier phases of the last Glacial, whilst limited Upper Palaeolithic finds agrees with the most severe climate inhibiting regular use.
At the end of the Glacial and in the earliest Holocene, hunters returned with the warming climate, following their quarry of large herds of game, just as we shall see in the uplands of Epirus at the Klithi and Kastritsa rockshelters. However, the inexorable extension of pine and fir forests made such seasonal upland hunting increasingly impractical without woodland clearance.
World History
