(p. 83a) Colin Renfrew (1972, 1973) highlighted the "high cultures" of the Early Bronze Age as preparatory to the true civilizations which followed in Middle and Late Bronze Age times
Colin Renfrew developed these ideas in the 1960s-1970s, under the influence of contemporary American anthropological archaeology and its neo-evolutionary schemes for the development of human societies worldwide (Bintliff 1984). His contribution began with a massive synthesis of the rise of the Minoan and Mycenaean palace societies (Renfrew 1972), and expanded into a more wide-ranging and popular presentation of the Aegean Bronze Age in its European context (Renfrew 1973).
(p. 83b) He considered the associated cultures of the Early Bronze Age as intermediate between the tribal, egalitarian, or Big Man societies of the Neolithic, and the state forms of the later palace civilizations: "High Cultures" in which chiefdoms might have arisen in key places
Following the social evolutionary ladder of political development which he popularized for the prehistoric European context, from schemes developed in the United States (Bintliff 1984).
(p. 83c) This period lasting from ca. 3500/3200 - ca. 2000/1900 BC [in calendar years]
The timescale of the Early Bronze Age in the different regions of the Aegean is not identical.
(p. 85a) Dismissal of the polyculture thesis appears premature
Cretan Bronze Age specialist Jennifer Moody believes that Cretans were already developing the new crops from the Late Neolithic onward (cited in Asouti 2003).
(p. 85b) Two varieties of pithos for near-base liquid-pouring are registered, and these are known from other Early Bronze Age Aegean sites. Ethnohistorical comparisons suggest they stored wine and olive oil, respectively, and indeed a "wine" pithos type from the Agios Kosmas site contained grape pips
In contrast, chemical analysis of the lipid residues from Minoan lamps, supposed on ancient parallels to be filled with olive oil (Evershed 1997), produced a surprise, since beeswax and animal fat were identified as the principal fuel. However, Vitelli (2000) adds a warning note to the current rush to identify ceramic vessel function from residues trapped in the pot's fabric. She points out that many ceramic fabrics have problems with porosity, and ethnographic examples show that this can be solved through adding sealants such as pine resin, wax, vegetable oil, milk, or animal fat.
(p. 85c) Wine has a secondary advantage of providing safer refreshment than water in large settlements
But one might suspect that polluted drinking-water was probably a very localized problem at all stages of the Bronze Age.
(p. 86a) It is surely significant that the metal and lithic sources did not encourage the emergence of major controlling communities in their vicinity, taking advantage of such widespread demand
It is also worth pointing out, that an extensive Bronze Age settlement or cluster of settlements with an unusually large assemblage of exotic material need not imply that the community concerned was one of "merchants." It is equally likely that larger settlements had a greater demand for exotica, and more exchange potential, as well as wider social contacts, to help procure these. Most recently Carter (in Brodie et al. 2008) stresses the fact that certain larger settlements on the Mainland (e. g., Lithares, A. Kosmas, Fournoi), have more obsidian than can be found even on Cycladic islands which are much closer to the sources, and thus represent "centers of accessibility". However, far from following more traditional concepts of commercial centers for these sites, he prefers to argue that they are foci of other social and economic interactions, into which obsidian stockpiling is added. Kouka (in Brodie et al. 2008) goes for me to an implausible extreme by first elevating the village-scale Early Bronze 3 centers of the Mainland and islands into urban foci, then assuming that the effective circulation of obsidian, andesite, marble, and metals created a series of such centers of economic power over wide districts.
(p. 86b) Brodie has recently underlined the revolutionary importance of the evidence for the spread of donkeys in the Early Bronze Age Aegean for facilitating trade and agricultural transport
It seems possible that the well-attested metals caravans linking Eastern Anatolia to the Middle East during the later Bronze Age may have begun in the Early Bronze Age period, and Brodie suggests that caravan routes using donkeys running from there to the Aegean coasts, especially to precocious metallurgical foci such as Troy in coastal Northwest Turkey, played a major role in the the development of Aegean metallurgy.
(p. 86c) Differences in land potential, or in the local history of a village, might create smaller and larger neighboring communities, without implying political dominance. On the other hand, large sites surrounded by several smaller, may exercise "social power," a pathway to possible emergence at a later date of small statelets
This topic will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 6, where we find especially insightful the empirical ethnographic data and archaeological case-studies by Lehmann (2004) for Iron Age and Late Bronze Age Israel. Large communities have considerable advantages over smaller neighbors as large marriage pools, as well as generally benefiting from larger resource concentrations. Other district functions may thus tend to gravitate toward the most populous settlements.
(p. 88a) The Bronze Age settlement of Kolonna on Aegina island
Aegina is an island just off the east coast of the Peloponnese and also adjacent to Central Greece to the north. As with the not too far distant island of Kea, which lies off Mainland Attica, it forms part of the Mainland Early Helladic cultural sphere, although both show links to the Cycladic island culture of the Early Bronze Age (Early Cycladic).
(p. 88b) Corridor Houses: another distinctive feature is a roof of stone or ceramic tiles
This unusual level of sophistication has led to a Courtyard House identification from the presence of this element alone among the finds on some Early Helladic surface sites, even when no other evidence for a Corridor House is available. The presence of similar tiles at one of the larger scatters in the Argolid Survey (Fournoi) adds greater credence to its suggested "central place" status.
(p. 88c) A mysterious round building at the large settlement at Tiryns
Marzolff has published an updated study of the Tiryns "Rundbau" (2009). It was constructed of two circular stone walls, 2 m thick, above which rose an upper story of mudbrick. The inner area contained 13 small apartments around what may well have been a lightwell. The outside was designed to awe the visitor with some 42 giant bastion-like pillars faced with a striking red flysch. Schist and terracotta tiles covered a sloping roof. The absence of seals/sealings and large storage vessels and the desire for spectacular effect make the original thesis of a corn store improbable, and current thinking prefers a status meeting place with storage for smaller items. The location is on the highest point of the Upper Citadel, significantly underneath the main reception room of the later Mycenaean palace, the Great Megaron. Underlining its role as the central-status building of the Early Helladic 2 settlement is the new discovery that the Rundbau saw two phases. In Phase 2 the building just described was rebuilt after a (fire?) destruction in a much simplified form: over the bastions a great mudbrick glacis was laid and in the inner part of the structure walls defined quadrants but were covered by a tumulus. There was no further use and this deliberate burial ensured the partial survival of the monument through much later prehistoric and historic construction. The parallels are drawn to the tumulus burial of the House of the Tiles at Lerna after its destruction and the great mound at Olympia of EH3 data which might conceal an older building too. Finally Marzolff point to the interesting parallel between the two competing (?) monuments of Lerna and Tiryns facing each other across the Gulf of Argos and the Late Bronze Age situation, when Tiryns appears to compete with Mycenae in the inner Plain for monumental impressiveness and maybe also for power.
(p. 88d) Recent discoveries of sealings from the contemporary Cyclades, and widespread seal-use in Early Minoan Crete, point to a wider proto-bureaucracy
Pullen's (1994) discussion adds much to our appreciation of Mainland Early Helladic sealing. First, while acknowledging the existence of seals in the Neolithic tell societies of Greece, even with some ancestral designs to Early Bronze Age examples, he nonetheless finds functional and artistic reasons to claim a reintroduction from the Near East by Early Bronze 2, for more elaborate uses. He then points out that Wiencke's analysis at Lerna of sealing forms led to her hypothesis that the storage room had contained some 56 boxes, 21 jars, and 24 baskets all with sealings attached. The use of 70 different seals and the absence of a single "administrative" seal tends to argue for personal seals, and therefore that the items stored represented material contributed by a particular person or family. Since Lerna was only 1-2 ha in size, perhaps a couple of hundred people at the most, one would argue that people from surrounding settlements were involved to reach such a high number of contributing individuals. Moreover the small room size suggests storage of small, not bulk, items (such as cereals), perhaps to maintain an elite, or for ritual ceremonies or feasts.
Recently the use of sealings has been re-emphasized through the discovery of 80 impressions in a storage room at the fortified EH2 settlement of Geraki in inland Laconia (Weingarten et al. 2011). In a casemate room between two concentric defense walls lay a store room where the contents, mostly large jars, were sealed with 15 different seal stamp designs. The fire destruction of the settlement in EH2B preserved the scenario. The excavators speculate reasonably that there might well lie a major administrative building in the settlement, yet to be discovered, since only 5 percent of the defended area has been dug. The increasing numbers of sites with sealings of this age are listed and confirm the present view that seal use was probably very common in the major settlements of Crete, the Cyclades, and the Southern Mainland. However, although Weingarten repeats her view that Anatolian traders, metallurgists, and even colonists spread across the Aegean to stimulate the remarkable architectural complexes of EBA Mainland and the Cyclades, excavators were unable to find significant imports at Geraki which is very remote from the Aegean, and this to my mind suggests that other explanations are required.
(p. 89a) EH Kolonna on Aegina _ more than one potential "mansion" has been identified here See Felten et al. (2007).
(p. 89b) Significantly, "mansion-like" enclosed sites, with bastioned walls, are a contemporary development in the North Aegean at the settlement of Troy II. Similar phenomena occur at several islands of the Eastern and Northeastern Aegean, and elsewhere in West Turkey
The recent discovery of small fortified and bastioned settlements in the Corinthia region (Tartaron et al. 2003, 2006) is so far of unclear significance in this respect, although a further proliferation of small "central places" might elevate to a more general trend the evidence of the handful of such sites clearly identified so far. One is tempted to infer a special role in maritime contacts with the coastal location of most of the Corridor Houses, and the fact that Lerna and Tiryns (with its alternative monumental structure) find no echo in their deeper inland neighbor at Argos. Pierart and
Touchais (1996) would seem to support this, but the parallel buildings at Tsoungiza, Zygouries, Thebes, and elsewhere (Eutresis?) now enlarge the environmental context to settlements remote from the coast, as does inland fortified Geraki with sealings in Laconia. Even more striking is the recent discovery of a large cache of sealings in a small Early Helladic house at Petri near Nemea (Zachos and Dousougli in Brodie et al. 2008), which seems to show that elaborate storage recording may have been commoner and in wider social use than the current focus on Corridor Houses has allowed for.
(p. 89c) In dramatic contrast are the rich Early Helladic 2 tumulus, "R" graves of the island of Levkas, Western Greece, although they remain with unclear local origins or detailed settlement context
This can remind us that archaeology has for too long had its dominant focus on Southern Greece, so that unusual discoveries in more peripheral provinces are hard to evaluate in the absence of full local knowledge of their cultural context within regional developments. In fact these tumulus burials hint at quite different cultural orientations for this region of Northwest Greece in the Ionian Sea, since if anything they seem to be part of a tradition of mound cemeteries running north into the eastern coastlands of the Adriatic. An excellent link appears further up the Adriatic in Montenegro, where two great tumuli at Mala Gruda and Velika Gruda lie adjacent to each other in the coastal plain of Tivat by the deep Bay of Kotor (Primas 1996). Of similar age to the Levkas graves, both mounds have adult male burials with rich gifts, including prestige objects in gold and silver, and cultural connections ranging from Northern Italy into the North Balkans, as well as to Levkas and then the Aegean. Maran (2007) critically evaluates the necessary balance between such wide contacts in 3rd-millennium BC Continental Europe and the Central and West Mediterranean, and the small scale of contemporary Aegean communities and of their social hierarchies. He concludes that networks made up of many step-by-step links between adjacent settlements or local societies seem more logical at this stage of research than long-distance trade and extensive political systems.
(p. 91a) What was the source of power on Levkas, without mineral resources, and with unexceptional agricultural potential? _ a significant western trade-network has yet to be demonstrated
On the other hand, as observed in the previous note, at this time the tumulus burial custom is paralleled only in the far north of Greece, while that area and the Ionian Islands seem to be on the southern fringe of a practice which is common from Central Europe through to the Black Sea steppes at this time. This might indicate that Levkas sat between cultural traditions, a suitable position to stimulate economic exchanges.
(p. 91b) Early Helladic 2 tumulus burials appear very rarely in other peripheral parts of Greece, but subsequently monumental tumuli occur in Early Helladic 3 at wider points of the Mainland. Some are burials, others ritual mounds
Forsen (1992) believes that already in Early Helladic 2 such ritual tumuli were being erected at the site of the later Classical sanctuary site of Olympia (much later to provide a mythical focus for the historical Panhellenic center), and at the Ampheion on the periphery of the prehistoric settlement at Thebes. The last example remains enigmatic, not least owing to limited published evidence from its excavation: an artificial mound contained a looted cist, but the suspected burial is not clearly of the same age as the mound (and probably transitional Middle-Late Bronze Age). A recent find of a second mound at Olympia, this time perhaps a burial from Early Helladic 3, gives further hints of continuity into the general spread of tumulus burial over much of Mainland Greece in the succeeding early Middle Bronze Mainland, or Middle Helladic 1 phase.
(p. 92a) Renfrew's thesis that Indo-European speakers arrived with the Neolithic colonization of Greece appears more plausible than a late Early Bronze Age colonization of the country from the Black Sea steppes
Although archaeologists are mostly opposed to major folk movements in the late Early Bronze Age Aegean from the North, linguists still prefer to seek the arrival of Indo-European languages, in the form of Greek, in these major disruptions. They have long argued for an Aegean-wide distribution of "pre-Hellenic" place names, not least on the Mainland, as proof of a relatively recent indigenous population speaking a non Indo-European language (Chadwick 1995). Theic contrast between Mainland Early Helladic ceramics and the striking dark wares of Middle Helladic "Grey Minyan" used to be seen as evidence of migration out of Anatolia, but recent study argues that Grey Minyan developed in the Early Helladic 3 Peloponnese under influence from Anatolian cup forms, then the hybrid innovation was later exported purely as a popular style to Anatolia (e. g., at Troy) (Schachner 1994-95). Rutter (2008) describes how Early Helladic 3 assemblages in Southern Mainland Greece develop as a local merger of drinking-vessel styles from Anatolia and large jar types from the late Early Cycladic culture, maybe as part of the cultural diffusion of a ceremonial drinking-kit comparable to West Mediterranean and Continental European subcultures of the same period (the so-called Beaker and Corded Ware phenomena). To add to the evidence of increased cultural "colonization" during the Early Bronze Age 3 period, whether or not to be associated with movement of people, is the case for the presence of the Central Mediterranean Cetina Culture in the Peloponnese (e. g., at Olympia). Maran (2007) suggests that we should add to Rutter's Helladic-Cycladic-Anatolian merger of culture at this time, a West Balkan-South Italian-West Mainland ceramic interaction, hypothesizing that in this time of deep Mediterranean unrest, West Balkan traders and settlers explored new territories.
(p. 92b) We seem without an explanation for the demographic collapse that occurs over later Early Helladic 2 and in Early Helladic 3, with lasting effects well into Middle Helladic, although almost all excavated sites suffered violent human destruction
The arrival of domestic horses by Early Helladic 3 brings Greece into a broader Old World diffusion of horse-riding elite warfare, whether simple horseback or chariot-based. This could have spread into Greece from the Black Sea steppe zones via the North Balkans or through Anatolia, or from the Levant or Egypt via Crete. On the one hand this could be seen as strengthening the view of some scholars that there was a destructive invasion from these areas over the Early Bronze Age 2-3 era into the Aegean, but the lack of accompanying material culture for immigrant warrior people undermines this approach. Did new forms of warfare destabilize Aegean societies?
(p. 92c) To add to the troubles besetting later Early Helladic societies on the Mainland, there is evidence from the Argolid and Attica for a phase of significant landscape change, arguably caused by soil erosion between late Early Helladic and early Middle Helladic times
A further complication is added by a reanalysis of the claimed major erosion deposits in the Plain of Argos (Shriner and Murray 2003). These authors claim that the soil erosion deposits on technical analysis appear rather to be typical river sediments deposited as a result of worldwide changes in sea-level dynamics in coastal hinterlands. When the fast-rise phase of post-glacial sea rise shifted to a very slow rise or relative stable levels, around 6000 years ago, natural river sediment loads brought to the coasts began to halt and even reverse the previous seemingly inexorable encroachment of the sea on the land (cf. Chapter 1; also Bintliff 2000). Initially such river delta infill accumulated largely offshore, where previous very low sea levels of the last glacial had created steep slopes to deposit into. After some millennia, however, the river deposits, having filled in these underwater slopes, would begin to rise to form open-air coastal deltas and also cause back-depositing into plain hinterlands. Shriner and Murray, building on earlier work by Stanley, argue that the Early Helladic near-coastal sediments are a consequence of these natural processes, rather than erosion deposits deriving from over-cultivated or otherwise neglected expanses of agricultural soil in the hinterland.
(p. 92d) The major site of Knossos in North-Central Crete is a focus of attention owing to its gradual expansion in settlement size over the many millennia of Neolithic occupation
It is worth emphasizing the Neolithic background once more, especially since a critical phase, Final Neolithic-Early Minoan 1 spans this chapter and the previous one. Although Cyprus has recently given evidence for an early hunter-gatherer exploration from the Near Eastern Mainland (the site of Aetokremnos (Guilaine and Le Brun 2003)), till very recently Crete and almost all the other Aegean islands appeared empty of human population when colonized by Neolithic settlers. In conformity with current theory, the farming colonization of Greece was not a gradual exploration but carried out as a planned migration of whole communities with their crop seed and domestic stock. In fact Knossos on Crete provided one of the strongest arguments for pure colonization, with the earliest dates for a farming village in Greece, ca. 7000 BC, and a full agricultural and pastoral way of life (Efstratiou 2005). Differences, however, in its detailed economy and material culture from the Greek Mainland suggested a source for immigrants that diverged from the latter, rather essential since the Cretans by the Middle Bronze Age seem to have spoken a quite different language from that of the Mainland. As noted, however, in Chapters 2 and 3, the latest survey by Runnels and colleagues has shown that Crete did have Mesolithic inhabitants. The implications of this for the earliest Neolithic at Knossos will take time to digest, but the remarkably exotic and fully fledged nature of the Knossos settlement, its material culture and domestic plants and animals, still favor foreign colonizers.
(p. 93a) A good case exists for a small Cycladic colony on the north coast of Crete in Early Minoan times at Aghia Photia, while Cretans themselves colonized Kythera island, off the south coast of the Mainland, in Early Minoan 2
A short horizon of defensible and some fortified sites on Crete dated to Final Neolithic-Early Minoan 1 has, nonetheless, been presented by Nowicki (1999) as evidence of serious unrest, perhaps related to migration to the island. The suspected Cycladic coastal colony-entrepot (trading station) of Aghia Photia is already settled during Early Minoan 1 (cf. Karantzali in Brodie et al. 2008). For Kythera see Bevan 2002.
(p. 93b) The search for progressive social evolution has encouraged scholars to find intermediate steps between the typical largely autonomous and egalitarian villages of the Greek Neolithic, and the hierarchical palace civilizations of the Middle-Late Bronze Age
We have seen this in the importance always attached to Middle and Late Neolithic Sesklo and Dhimini, and more recently to the unusually extensive later Neolithic settlements at Knossos and Phaistos.
(p. 93c) Myrtos-Fournou Korifi on the south coast of Crete, possessed an outer wall and tower, and its village inhabitants were originally claimed to have produced textiles on an industrial scale (Warren 1968). Reanalysis by Whitelaw
Whitelaw's (1983) and Tenwolde's (1992) reworking of the Fournou Korifi excavation data was made possible because of the remarkably high quality of Peter Warren's records.
(p. 94a) Fournou Korifi: the abundance of vessels for processing, storage, and consumption of liquids seems excessive for self-sufficiency, and taken with the evidence for wine and olive production _
We have already noted that household production of wine and olive oil for family needs only has in the Mediterranean traditionally been carried out without the need for stone press installations. While on the one hand this makes recognition of the importance of these products problematic, especially in the Aegean where the recovery and analysis of plant remains from excavations still remains relatively rare, a positive result of this fact is that the discovery of substantial press settings, at a small community such as Myrtos, may well point to production for export.
(p. 94b) The village site of Vasiliki in East-Central Crete
Vasiliki was one of several pioneer, early twentieth-century American, excavations on Crete, of exceptional quality for their time, in this case directed by Seager.
(p. 94c) Until recently, the small towns at Knossos and Phaistos were considered to lack signs in Early Minoan of architectural elaboration
Perhaps unsurprisingly then Vance Watrous, in his fine (1994) overview of recent developments in Minoan archaeology, concluded that Early Minoan Crete did not see an intermediate complex High Culture with significant emergent political hierarchy, bridging the Neolithic villages and the fullblown palaces of the Middle Bronze Age (Middle Minoan). Thus external stimuli would have been necessary, such as increasing contacts to the Eastern Mediterranean state societies, to catalyze Cretan development toward civilization.
(p. 95) At Phaistos, the FN settlement is already notable for its rich ceramic assemblages in which drinking-vessels are unusually prominent, leading Relaki (2004) to hypothesize that such large sites acted as foci for surrounding smaller settlements to participate in ceremonial feasting. EM Phaistos possesses similar assemblages
Schoep (2010) notes the recent suggestion that, as early as the late Final Neolithic, Knossos may have had a ceremonial court beneath the later Central Court, and by EM2A the first discrete buildings were erected around it, while at Phaistos in late FN there was also feasting in the later lower West Court. She adds how significant it is that courtyard complex courts kept their orientation and role till the end, at Knossos for example up to the Late Minoan 3A2 phase ca. 1375 BC.
(p. 96) The stimulus role all these coastal "gateways" (Poros, Mochlos, Aghia Photia) played in the increasing elaboration of Early Minoan society is currently being stressed
Recent thinking on the Cycladic cultural diffusion into North Crete and the Eastern Mainland (Karantzali, and Day et al., in Brodie et al. 2008) suggests a combination of small-scale freelance trade from specific islands to adjacent coasts, including the settlement of colonies or traders into indigenous communities, and the adoption of Cycladic objects and styles for their exotic nature and raw materials, not least by local status families. Crete required copper, silver, lead, obsidian, and marble and perhaps could offer staple food surpluses in return.
(p. 97) Nonetheless we should not underestimate the range of powerful stimuli given to EM society, and to a lesser extent to EH and EC communities, by these persistent low-level contacts to a wider and more developed world
In a recent paper, Colburn (2008) has focused on the significance and context of Eastern Mediterranean imports to Crete in EM2. That they are found in clusters indicates to her that they were used to emphasize elite identities, and many occur in the more monumental tombs, and since also they often were items of dress, elite appearance with exotica set them apart from other members of local society.
(pp. 97-98a) At an Early Minoan burial, mourners apparently poured libations and consumed liquids within the tomb confines, and later revisited the tomb for similar "feasts of the dead," to judge by broken libation-vessels and cups outside the tholos
At Kamilari for example, hundreds of cups were found in and around the tholos.
(p. 98b) Multiple tholoi probably reflect the size of the associated settlement rather than political rank
A warning against assuming that grand tombs must point to complex social classes can be derived from the later prehistory of Western Europe. In the Early Neolithic, giant earth and stone tombs were constructed by essentially egalitarian societies, whose houses were even less substantial than those of Early Minoan Crete (Whittle 1996).
(p. 100a) I examined estimates for body counts among the dug Messara region tholoi, and taking the length of tomb use into account, confirmed that the typical tomb-using group was just a few families
More recently Branigan (1993) has redone these calculations on the basis of updated tomb data, and reconfirmed this result. The Agiofarango surface survey was able to show the likely contemporaneity of many of the tombs, farms, and peak shrines, but other mapped elements should be from different phases within the long Early-Middle Minoan eras. This district of South Crete has also been revisited for a one-man extensive "resurvey" by Vasilakis (1989), taking in a larger area than the original Blackman-Branigan team. Additional sites have been found and different interpretations offered for some locations, but the suggestion that the peak sanctuaries could have been domestic is, at least for the original survey area, highly improbable given the unsuitability of several of them for everyday residence.
(p. 100b) The Minoan population of the Agiofarango Valley inhabited a small nucleation and a series of satellite farms, distributed following the patches of cultivable land, and accompanied by similarly dispersed small (family?) shrines
Since this first, pioneer intensive survey of a Minoan landscape, additional projects have produced the same image of a dense and highly dispersed settlement system. On Kythera, a Minoan colony, unusual preservation has allowed elaborate analysis of social and economic factors in such a landscape (Bevan 2002), while on the Cycladic island of Santorini-Thera, the settlement dispersal in Middle Bronze Age (Middle Cycladic) and Late Bronze Age (Late Cycladic) times, counter to the typical nucleated patterns on other Cycladic islands, has been used as an argument to confirm a deep "Minoization" or adoption of Minoan lifestyles of that community (Forsyth 1999).
(p. 101) The more prominent and monumental house-tombs are associated with gifts of silver and gold cups and other precious finds, while such tombs have built terraces, shrines, and elaborate paved piazzas
Nonetheless it must borne in mind that the appearance or not of special items may be due to other factors than status. Thus Karytinos (1998) has observed that seals and copper are known to have varied in their availability over time, and that the use of a particular tomb may have fluctuated in intensity, while the association of seals and daggers by gender and social roles remains a matter for continuing discussion. Nonetheless Soles (1992) believes that the rich and more prominent and elaborate tombs at Mochlos represent an elite group within the settlement. Moreover the communal cemeteries appear to focus on the complex paved areas and terraces by the supposed elite tombs, suggesting that significant ceremonies took place there (Whitelaw 2004).
(p. 102a) The end of Early Minoan 2 sees destruction
The violent nature of this phenomenon is clear from the fact that several key sites are burned down.
(p. 102b) Early Minoan 3-Middle Minoan 1: a wave of new settlement locations in Eastern Crete might represent colonizers from the Cyclades
The site of Agia Photia on the coast of Northeastern Crete possesses, as noted earlier, an Early Minoan cemetery with so many Cycladic (Early Cycladic 1-2) imports that some have claimed it as a colony, but also as a bastioned, walled Middle Minoan 1A settlement (Preziosi and Hitchcock 1999), all conducive to raise speculations on migration and military instability over this transitional era.
(p. 102c) Apart from the researches of Colin Renfrew on the Cyclades _
Another major contribution to Cycladic Bronze Age studies has been made by Christos Doumas, including numerous publications on Cycladic figurines, the excavations at Akrotiri on Thera, and his still fundamental study of Early Cycladic burial customs (1977).
(p. 103a) The perception that traditional Cycladic island life before mechanization has probably changed little from prehistory
Hence archaeologists have commonly drawn comparisons with the marvelous nineteenth-century travel ethnography of Theodore Bent (2002 [1885]).
(p. 103b) The density of the Cyclades is without Mediterranean parallel
With some 30 substantial islands and innumerable islets.
(p. 103c) Cycladic culture has always been a community of inter-island links
Broodbank reminds us that the distance between islands is often less than their length.
(p. 103d) The first common Cycladic settlement sites show a strong locational interest in deep fish-rich bays, particularly in the first clear culture, that of Saliagos
Previous visits had been occurring since the Upper Palaeolithic for Melian obsidian, and must have been very frequent during earlier Neolithic times. I have suggested (1977) that "transmerance" for fishing may have been a significant context for raw material procurement before lasting settlement. That Saliagos sites include finds of pottery from the Greek Mainland (Broodbank 2000) may also relate to a continued wide mobility of early Cycladic colonizers.
(p. 103e) For viable demography, several of these small Late Neolithic-Final Neolithic settlements must have combined in exogamous marriage networks
These suggestions are all the more likely given the small number of known Late Neolithic-Final Neolithic sites recorded.
(p. 104) Early Cycladic farmers presumably exploited estates for a limited period, then shifted to another patch of fertile land
Site locations, as examined for the island of Melos, confirm a comparable correlation to that shown in the Agiofarango Valley between dispersed rural cemeteries and pockets of fertile land (Bintliff 1977).
(pp. 105-107a) What kind of boats were in use?
For the latest overview see Guttandin et al. (2011).
(p. 107b) The Mainland Early Helladic Corridor Houses, Anatolian Troy, the Northeast Aegean fortified villages, and perhaps also Manika may well evidence complex societies
Attention has been drawn (Broodbank 2000) to the clustering of large villages along the adjacent coasts of Attica, Euboea, and nearby Cycladic islands, among which the giant settlement of Manika is located, and which share cultural mixing of Early Helladic and Early Cycladic styles of artifact and burial tradition. Whether this implies a "central-place" potential for Manika is a question for which we need more details of that extraordinary site. But if we consider the theory (Lehmann 2004) that large population centers can fill a vital role if they dominate a landscape of many smaller settlements which are not, in contrast, self-sufficient to reproduce their human populations, and that this situation can become conducive to relations of social power, and if Manika was as vast as has been claimed, it might well have formed a regional focus.
(p. 107c) Chalandriani-Kastri (Syros)
The settlement is under ongoing excavation (Whitley et al. 2007).
(p. 110a) Kavos on Keros: unparalleled ceremonial deposition of hundreds of already broken figurines, marble bowls, and ceramics, as well as localized parts of human bodies
There is increasing evidence to support Doumas' ideas that Early Cycladic burials may at times have been reopened and their bones and gifts collected and redeposited in complex and separate ways.
At Rivari on Melos (Televantou in Brodie et al. 2008) large pits contain what may be secondary deposits of Early Cycladic 2-3 grave goods. Such customs might provide a broader context for the Kavos Special Deposit. The Early Helladic cemetery in coastal Attica at Tsepi (Pantelidou Gofa in Brodie et al. 2008), with its pronounced Cycladic burial and artifact links, has also revealed a large pit filled with suspected grave gifts. A major preliminary report from Renfrew's excavations (Renfrew et al. 2007) at Dhaskaleio-Kavos appears to be resolving many uncertainties about this remarkable pair of adjacent sites. The tiny islet of Dhaskaleio seems to be a significant fortified EC2 island settlement, whose building stone was, remarkably, conveyed from Naxos. Opposite on the mainland of the larger island of Kavos excavation into the extensive deposits of EC2 material shows a total absence of human remains and a dense mass of broken figurines, marble vessels, and pots. Matches are almost non-existent for the studied figurines and this confirms the argument that all this material was broken elsewhere (seemingly not on Keros but on other islands) and conveyed to Kavos for structured deposition as a ritual center. Whether Dhaskaleio was coordinating this anticipation of the sacred Cycladic island of Delos of Classical Greek times, or also existed as a commercial center, remains to be explored. The existence of the associated metalworking zone might indicate that the settlement, the ritual center, and the industrial area were all part of a dispersed single community with wide connections.
(p. 110b) Late Early Cycladic 2 clay sealings from the cave of Zas
Younger (1996) points out that the Zas finds show that jars were sealed and resealed there, since the sealings incorporate cave earth, indicating a recurrent cache of recorded stored products. A more recent discussion is Zachos and Dousougli (in Brodie et al. 2008).
(p. 111a) The founding of small-scale Cycladic colonies in such areas has been proposed, and may indicate opportunistic trading ventures, for which the Neolithic model of Perles provides an older foundation
One gets the growing impression that maritime mobility through the Aegean should be a given from Late Palaeolithic times onward, combining extraction and exchange of Cycladic mineral resources with fishing, hunting, later grazing and farming, and social mobility especially for intercommunity mating networks. Opportunistic settlement on a permanent or temporary basis would be a natural outgrowth of such recurrent travel.
(p. 111b) Renfrew portrayed the Early Bronze Age as a chieftain society. Yet the Cyclades offer ambiguous evidence. Larger sites with a wider variety and number of trade goods, as well as weaponry in some graves, and individual burials with more than average gifts in larger cemeteries, need not imply permanent chieftains. Richer graves could be older males of more prominent families, key nodes in small-scale kin-based societies, rather than an elite. Broodbank sees them as "Big Men," persons of temporary community status based on individual achievement in social or economic affairs
This downscaling of rich burials is indeed a current trend throughout the European Bronze Age (cf. Fokkens 1999). Nonetheless, even as early as the Late Neolithic Saliagos Culture, Sampson (in Brodie et al. 2008) has suggested that a large stone building of "megaron" form (a linear sequence of rooms) at the small settlement of Ftelia might have belonged to a "chief." A large and elaborate building at Final Neolithic Strofilas is, however, interpreted by Televantou (in Brodie et al. 2008) as a sanctuary.
(p. 111c) Broodbank suggests that longboat trips gave rise to songs and poems of the deeds of the ancestors, while the boats themselves, requiring communal effort, were probably surrounded by ritual
The obvious parallel is with the Trobriand Islanders' boat ceremonies recorded by Malinowski (1922).
(p. 111d) Burials in the Early Cycladic are cist graves for individuals, or rarely for several presumed family members, usually with limited, probably personal objects as gifts
Rambach's (2000) analysis of recorded graves found that 25 percent of Early Cycladic burials had no gifts, another 25 percent just a single pot, while the remainder are dominated by a few simple gifts, underlining the unusual nature of "rich" graves with numerous objects and/or prestigious objects of precious metal.
(p. 112a) Chalandriani: The graves face east and down to the sea and a small bay. Is this alignment, like Cretan tholos tombs, facing the life-giving sun but away from the sight of the living? Hekman prefers a prosaic explanation, the dominant sloping topography
This seems confirmed by the cemetery of Tsikniades on Naxos, where the Early Cycladic graves are placed south-facing into the slope of a steep north-south trending hill (Philaniotou in Brodie et al. 2008).
(p. 112b) Chalandriani: Hekman argues that the 25 percent wealthier graves were heads of families, both male and female, while the richest exceptional burials in the sample are representative of single community leaders, perhaps for each generation of use of the site
The analysis of the cemetery is complicated by the different grades of information available from a long history of investigations by numerous archaeologists. Very detailed records are restricted to a minority, so that social analysis is based on a sample of the estimated grave total as well as inferences from the best-recorded to the poorer-documented burials.
(p. 113a) Early Cycladic 2 Late and Early Cycladic 3: Migrations are seen skeptically _
However, it must be admitted that this tendency has been general in prehistoric European archaeology since the 1960s and has justly come under criticism lately.
(p. 113b) This Kastri subphase has been connected to these novelties, to suggest an invasion or migration into Southern Greece by people from the North Aegean or adjacent Mainlands
Pullen comments: "We still do not understand what is behind the Lefkandi I assemblage/Kastri group. Does this represent actual new arrivals? A new ceremonial/religious orientation? Or just a switch to a new drinking practice?" (2006: 506).
(p. 113c) Since there are certainly serious human destructions throughout the EB 3 Aegean, one should be cautious in denying that cultural redirections and increased signs of intercommunity warfare in the preceding late Early Cycladic 2 period might not shed light on this
In this phase, Chalandriani on Syros suffers human destruction, while Panormos on Naxos provides graphic evidence of the threat and reality of serious warfare (Angelopoulou in Brodie et al. 2008): a small, 500 sq m acropolis site with bastioned wall and some 20 rooms was burned down in the Kastri period. Excavation revealed intact pottery with an emphasis on storage vessels, as well as slingshot pebbles and a spear at the acropolis entrance. It is suggested that the inhabitants of an adjacent open settlement created this fort as a refuge from attack.
(p. 113d) All these theories, whether individual or combined, need to account for both the apparent disappearance and at times destruction of large numbers of Early Bronze Age sites, and then at the same time, for exceptional settlements which survive the EB 3 era
The recent identification of a bridging phase of ceramics between Early Cycladic 3 and the oldest Middle Cycladic culture, that of Phylakopi 1, on Melos (Renfrew in Brodie et al. 2008) makes the disruption less complete, but Renfrew still agrees that occupational discontinuity remains the norm elsewhere. The situation at Kolonna on Aegina is still a little confusing as each yearly excavation report modifies the narrative and is not always internally consistent. Gauss and Smetana (2007) seem to argue for a total site destruction, with lots of whole pots buried on the debris in EH3, followed by a partial reconstruction also in EH3 (all this in their Phase V), and then a transitional phase final EH3-Middle Helladic 1 when a major site defense wall is constructed (Phase VI). It is necessary to stress then that Kolonna felt the full force of the late EH destructions, but managed to rebuild and in the MBA grow to even greater complexity.
(p. 114) Cycladic figurines: Graves are undoubtedly the final depositional context for the majority, and it is suggested that the finer pieces may have been made for grave-goods. But also they occur in settlements
At the Early Helladic culture, but Early Cycladic-influenced, settlement of Aghia Irini on the island of Kea, figurines were numerous from the domestic areas, leading the excavator Caskey to observe that the rarity of dug Cycladic settlements compared to the innumerable graves may have created an overemphasis on the burial context for Cycladic figurines (Stergiopoulos 2002).
(p. 118) Factors behind the rise and decline of the Early Bronze Age Aegean complex cultures: some would add migration, and long-distance commerce (core-periphery dependency effects involving the Near East as a dominant economy impacting on a less developed Aegean periphery)
Maran (2007), I think correctly, challenges the use of Core-Periphery Theory for the undeniable influence of the Near East on the Early Bronze Age Aegean, and prefers to see the former's search for metals and other resources as a powerful stimulus encouraging internal change, with many local Aegean and Adriatic economic and social networks chaining closer together.
World History
