This book results from my own exposure, through surface survey in many regions of Greece since the early 1970s, to the incredible richness and variety of Greek archaeology beyond the traditional foci of the Classical Greek and Bronze Ages. As a doctoral student, traveling frequently on the bus from Athens to Navplion in the Peloponnese, I was struck by the diversity of historic landscapes, monuments, and ruins which I passed through. Isolated Byzantine churches far from any village, or the crumbling Medieval castellated walls of the Acrocorinth, seemed to hint at another kind of Greek archaeology from that found in popular textbooks. Since then, so much has developed in our archaeological understanding of the whole span of Greek Prehistory and History, from the Palaeolithic to the Early Modern era, that it seemed to me timely to make a first attempt at a synthesis of the key points both for the student and for the general reader fascinated by Greece, its past, its landscape, and its people.
David Clarke, in his iconoclastic textbook for a more truly scientific “New Archaeology,” Analytical Archaeology (1968), admitted candidly that inventing, and at the same time composing a guide to, a new form of archaeology was rash, premature, but necessary. In humility, and with a nod to this book’s reviewers, I feel in the same position regarding this first book, to my knowledge, which treats “The Archaeology ofGreece” quite literally. Understandably, in the scope of 22 chapters, coverage of each phase can only paint the general picture. Period specialists might regret the inevitable superficiality, but hopefully not find erroneous oversimplification. However, my aim is to give the reader, within one volume, an understanding of the development of human society in Greece from the earliest human traces up till the early twentieth century ad. For the contemporary visitor to Greece, whether you are there for a beach-based holiday, or a cultural tour, or as a student, I would like to think that this volume can give you a basis for contextualizing your casual or detailed encounters with museums, Bronze Age palaces, Classical city walls or great intercity sanctuaries, Roman stadia, Byzantine churches, isolated Frankish towers, Ottoman mosques, and traditional villages, without forgetting those ubiquitous broken potsherds that you can find in the open fields or on the shore.
The archaeology of Greece is an ever-expanding tree but with more limited roots (MacKendrick 1962, Snodgrass 1987, McDonald and Thomas 1990, Etienne and Etienne 1992, Schnapp 1993, Morris 1994, Fitton 1996, Shanks 1997, Etienne et al. 2000, Whitley 2001, Morris 2004). Its foundation is the investigation of Classical Greece, emanating from Renaissance and Enlightenment scholarship during the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries ad. But precocious beginnings can be dated to Roman times, when the new rulers of the Mediterranean toured the
The Complete Archaeology of Greece: From Hunter-Gatherers to the 20th Century AD, First Edition. John Bintliff. © 2012 John Bintliff. Published 2012 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Aegean Sea to discover that Classical tradition of which they saw themselves as inheritors. An interest in Greek antiquity could link the intellectual Cicero, one of many members of the Roman elite who were educated in Greece, and those Roman former slaves who resettled Corinth a century after its Roman destruction in the second century BC and pillaged Classical cemeteries for items for the Italian antiquities trade. The Romanized Greek travel-writer Pausanias, in the second century ad, represents the ancient model for Baedeker’s Early Modern handbook of sites worthy to be visited by foreigners, focusing on major monuments and works of art, with selective historical titbits to bring them to life (Elsner 1992, Alcock et al. 2001).
Ancient Greece and Rome were of fundamental importance for European national identities and a sense of special providence in the time of European world hegemony in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries (Morris 2004), each civilization providing complementary origin myths for the assumed superior qualities of Western civilization and empires. Apart from the surviving ancient texts, objects of Greco-Roman culture were attributed the same qualities of exceptional sophistication, even as works of genius whenever there was clear artistic merit (not merely temples and sculptures, but vases with painted scenes, and coins). Greek archaeology was essentially synonymous with Classical Greece and with an approach linking ancient texts with Art History, mostly focused on large-scale works of public art or private art objects belonging to the elite of ancient society.
If this led to an emphasis on museum cases filled with fine art, a parallel tradition was rapidly evolving, topographic fieldwork. For educated people whose imagination was stirred by ancient texts describing cities, sanctuaries, and battlefields, but who were unable to travel to Greece to see what was left of these places, a small army of “Travelers” sprang up to offer the fireside reader a taste of modern and ancient Greece (Tsigakou 1981, Angelomatis-Tsougarakis 1990, Eisner 1991). Beginning as early as the fifteenth century (for example Buondelmonti), learned travelers from Western Europe voyaged in increasing numbers to Greece, especially in the nineteenth century, to compose travelogues frequently illustrated by maps and pictures.
The primary aim was to identify major towns and shrines mentioned by Classical sources, record inscriptions, and describe (often with the aim of removing them to Western Europe), works of mobile and immobile art. If the main focus remained Classical and Hellenistic Greece, minor attention was given to Roman sites, and even occasionally to Medieval and later monuments.
The scientific ethos in European scholarship, growing with increasing Enlightenment influence during the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries, led to such detailed Travelers’ descriptions that only modern scholars with other aims appreciate such information. Lolling’s meticulous guidebook, rejected by Baedeker, has only recently been published (1989). Today the incidental detail on Early Modern villages, and many ancient monuments now lost, make such books invaluable for long-term landscape history (Bennet et al. 2000, Bintliff 2007).
During the late nineteenth century, Greek archaeology’s scope widened, with the discovery and then systematization of the _pre-Classical or prehistoric eras, and a rising interest in the history and monuments of the post-Classical eras, which meant Medieval times (the Byzantine and occasionally the Crusader-Frankish periods). The polymath approach which nineteenth-century scholarship aspired to and which could still be accomplished within the limits of available information, reached its peak in Greece in the decades around 1900. For example, young scholars associated with Alan Wace could publish on prehistoric and Classical sites, Byzantine churches (Fletcher and Kitson 1895-1896), Medieval castles (Traquair 1905-1906), Crusader sculpture (Wace 1904-1905), ethnography (Wace and Thompson 1914), and even traditional Cycladic embroidery (Wace 1914).InTurkey, Heinrich Schliemann’s Troy project involved the history of metallurgy, regional geomorphological developments, and local epidemiology (Aslan and Thumm 2001).
This was also a critical era in the wider development of the Science of Archaeology, and as a result we see the inception of research excavations at key Aegean sites. Naturally Greco-Roman towns and sanctuaries are the primary focus, with a secondary emphasis on major centers of the newly-discovered Bronze Age civilizations of the Minoan on Crete and the Mycenaean on the Southern Mainland. Yet the
Figure 0.1 German excavations at the Heroon in Olympia, 1880. In the foreground are Richard Borrmann and Wilhelm Dorpfeld.
© bpk, Berlin.
Open-minded scholarship of this phase allowed the relatively unspectacular Neolithic tell (artificial settlement mound) cultures of Northern Greece to be discovered and excavated by Tsountas (1908), whilst another innovative Greek, Xanthoudides (1924), brought to light the tholos-tomb culture of Crete, an important Early Bronze Age predecessor to the Minoan palatial societies of the later Bronze Age periods.
Most of the twentieth century is dominated by long-term excavation projects, usually the responsibility of one Foreign School of archaeologists. Bronze
Age Mycenae (French 2002) has been investigated by German, British, and Greek expeditions, but more typically the Classical sanctuaries of Delphi (Bommelaer and Laroche 1991) and Olympia (Kyrieleis 2002: see Figure 0.1) remain associated with the French and German Schools. Classical Athens’ central square (the Agora) (Camp 1986, 2006), and the city of Corinth (Williams and Bookidis 2003), have been essentially American excavations. These major projects have produced bookshelves of specialist monographs representing 100—150 years of ongoing research.
One by-product of these excavation programs has been increasing attention to all the archaeological information they offer. At first they emphasized major architecture and the finer works of mobile art. But the vast quantities of everyday household objects revealed, encouraged study in their own right. Yet till recently domestic pottery and houses were relatively neglected in Greek historical archaeology. Likewise, a traditional emphasis on Classical Greece inhibited research into Roman, Medieval, and post-Medieval times (Mouliou 1994, 2009). The Bronze Age fared better, envisaged as a uniquely “European” civilization underlying Classical Greece. Again, since Classical Greece in ancient texts was basically that of the cities of the Southern Mainland, archaeological research in Northern Greece, Crete, and the other Aegean islands was far more limited till the latter part of the twentieth century, with the exception of major Bronze Age centers, since it was recognized that in contrast the Minoan-Mycenaean (and the related Cycladic) civilizations of the Bronze Age occupied a wider zone of the Aegean.
Despite this broadening of methods and timescales which Greek archaeology adopted between the later nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries, the special relationship to Classical texts and the History of Art led by the 1960s to an increasing “Great Divide” between developments in “mainstream” archaeology (“The New Archaeology”: Greene 2002) and approaches in use in Aegean research (Renfrew 1980, Snodgrass 1985).
In the succeeding generation, there has been considerable integration into mainstream practices, yet the picture at the start of the 2000s remains patchy. Greek national archaeology and that of the Foreign Schools show a mosaic of traditions of work and interpretation. In terms of the more science-focused “New Archaeology” agenda, still only a minority of excavations in the Aegean collect environmental data or “ecofacts” (animal bones, seeds, etc.), or submit human remains for anthropological study. The commonest remnant from the Greek past, the broken potsherd, provides a similar disparity: few field projects publish domestic wares as well as the decorated table and funerary wares. Physical and chemical scientific analysis of artifacts and sites remains a rare addition to traditional forms of excavation and object study. More radical developments are visible in the types of site being investigated. Classical rural farms and Roman villas are being excavated in increasing numbers, with Greek scholars leading the way. The excellent museum in the new Athens Airport showing the rural landscape revealed during its construction (Tsouni 2001) is symptomatic, and advertises the international quality of contemporary Greek museums. Greater engagement with the Greek and foreign public is occurring at a rapid scale, with the refurbishing of museums throughout the country and with major changes to school textbooks, in particular emphasizing local history and archaeology of all periods. An excellent model for “outreach” from a regional excavation project is offered by Kostas Kotsakis and his team on the Paliambela Project in Macedonia (Kotsakis 2007, cf. also Bintliff 2004a).
Recent interactions between mainstream archaeology and that of Greece have been more positive. Since the 1980s a significant trend in archaeology has been Post-Processualism, which forefronts approaches where Classical archaeology has long been a world leader (Shanks 1997, Morris 2004). These include an emphasis on symbolic representations (essentially artistic creations), and seeing artifacts or architecture as “texts” relatable to the written sources, lifestyles, and mentalities of past peoples.
Also from the late twentieth century new perspectives emerged with the rapid takeoff of archaeological surface survey. Aegean scholarship was always a pioneer in landscape archaeology, but the mapping of ancient sites took on new dimensions with the arrival of regional interdisciplinary survey projects. Pride of place goes to the 1960s Minnesota University extensive survey in Messenia (McDonald and Rapp 1972), followed elsewhere during the 1970s with the first intensive (field by field) surface surveys (Cherry 1983, Bintliff 1994). These latter transect blocks of countryside on foot, recording spreads of surface pottery, lithics, and building material, which mark the disturbed deposits of archaeological sites of all sizes, from a few graves, through farms and villages, to ancient cities of a square kilometer or more (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988a, Bintliff 2000a, Alcock and Cherry 2004).
In the 1980s, mapping all visible “sites” was supplemented by “siteless” survey, in which the occurrence of pre-Modern artifacts, rather than “sites” (foci of concentrated human activity), is the primary focus. It appears that much of lowland Greece is “an artifact,” since such signs of human activity are almost continuously encountered between settlements (Bintliff and Snodgrass 1988b, Bintliff and Howard 2004). Alongside mapping settlement patterns, period by period, other forms of human impact on the Greek landscape now became apparent. Although some “offsite” debris represents eroded settlements, and the scattering of finds by weather and cultivation, the denser “carpets” probably record intense land use, especially through manuring (still a controversial theory, cf. Alcock et al. 1994 with Snodgrass 1994).
Intensive survey from the 1970s onwards discovered that the Aegean countryside is as rich in surface sites of post-Roman as of Greco-Roman and Bronze Age date. Dealing with the surface ceramics of the post-Roman era, and exploring the rich archival resources for these 1500 years, has encouraged vigorous new research into Byzantine, Frankish-Crusader, Ottoman-Venetian, and Early Modern archaeology in Greece (Lock and Sanders 1996, Bintliff2000b, Davies and Davis 2007).
Turning now to this volume’s structure, the core is a period-based overview of material culture and society, preceded by an introduction to the Greek landscape. Where the evidence is very rich, I have split period treatment into a chapter focusing on more “functional” aspects such as demography, settlement patterns, and the forms of material culture, followed by a chapter dealing with “symbolic” or “representational” culture (the ways in which architecture and portable objects can reveal the social order or the mentalities of past societies). Summing-up each period, I have reflected on our knowledge of each era in two ways. Firstly through the approach of French historians called the Annales group, where we trace the interaction of processes operating at different timescales. Secondly, I offer a “reflexive” view, with my own reactions to our current “biopic” or scenario for each period.
The French historians who focused their work around the journal Annales (1929—present, with various forms of title), most notably Fernand Braudel and Le Roy Ladurie, developed an insightful model of analysis for past societies (Bintliff 1991, Knapp 1992,
Bintliff 2004b). They argued that History is made through a dialectic (mutual interaction) of forces. Any event is the product of short-term actions and factors (the world of evenements) interacting with processes unfolding on a longer timescale, the medium term of several generations or centuries (the moyenne duree), but also with processes at a far longer timescale (the longue duree). The real historical outcomes are unpredictable, but through seeking to isolate both the key elements at each layer of parallel time, and their mutual interplay, the historian can come closer to comprehending why the past developed the way it appears to have done. This has been termed “postdiction” by the historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, as opposed to “prediction” (Gould 1989, cf. Bintliff 1999). Significantly, the Annales historians see historical processes as combining the actions and beliefs of communities and of individuals, emphasizing that History was made not just by actions and factors of production such as technology or economy, but also by ideas, by symbolic culture and ways of seeing the world (mentalites).
The brief injection of my own reflexive response to our current knowledge of each period of Greek archaeology, which rounds off each chapter or chapter-pair, has been encouraged by that aspect of “Post-Processual” archaeological theory which reminds us of the dialectic in which archaeologists and historians are always engaged when they encounter past societies. We cannot help but reflect on the ways a past world differs or compares to our own, and must use our embedded knowledge of the world today to comprehend past worlds. On the other hand, I am far from being a relativist. Our interpretative concepts are certainly influenced by our own lives, but we also have a wealth of anthropology and history to broaden our interpretative models of the past beyond our own meager physical experience, and when you are doing Archaeology and History honestly and attentively, the past will constantly surprise you with evidence you were not prepared for and may have difficulty in making sense of.
This volume involved very wide-ranging reading, and inevitably the time required for its authoring and production processes has meant that quite a few important new books and papers could not be studied and incorporated into the text before you. In addition there is much more detail that I gathered together which had to be left out due to constraints on this book’s length. Happily the publishersWiley-Blackwell have set up an on-line resource for purchasers of this volume, in which I have been able not only to add an extensive set of additional notes to all the chapters, but also to update the book on some key recent publications.
Color Plate 0.1 has been provided in order to orient the reader to the main provinces of Greece and the key modern and ancient centers, as well as the physical geography of the country.
Finally to help the reader navigate through the many periods of time which a complete Archaeology of Greece should encompass, there follows a basic time-chart.
World History
