Introduction

This period lasting from ca. 3500/3200 to ca. 2000/1900 BC is widely considered as the birth phase of Aegean civilization (general reading: Shelmerdine 2008, Cline 2010, Mee 2011). Colin Renfrew (1972, 1973), highlighted the “high cultures” of the Early Bronze Age (EBA) as preparatory to the true civilizations which followed in Middle and Late Bronze Age times (MBA, LBA). Key indicators of transformation were: the rise of a more productive agricultural economy in the Southern Mainland and the islands, based on the “Mediterranean triad” of cereals, olive oil (see Figure 1.1), and wine (“polyculture”); the impact of bronze metallurgy; the appearance of “central places” dominating local settlement clusters; and by the end of the period, the localized appearance of nucleated, town-like settlements with elaborate fortifications. He considered the associated cultures of the EBA 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.

Previous scenarios emphasized migrations or invasions, or strong imitation of Near Eastern societies, as critical to the appearance of Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations. Renfrew envisaged those palace societies as the logical outcome of internal developments which had commenced during later Neolithic times and accelerated in the EBA. He still conceded that diffusion from the Near East and the North Balkans was an essential component: metallurgy was introduced from the precocious copper - then bronze-using societies to the north of Greece, and from Northwest Anatolia; the cultivation of the olive was a diffusion of know-how (but the tree was local) from the Levant, that of the grape vine probably from Northern Greece or adjacent areas in the South Balkans. Most importantly, the remarkable EBA developments in political organization and proto-urbanism were confined to Southern Mainland Greece and the Aegean islands, indicating apparent stagnation in political complexity within Northern Greece after the Final Neolithic.

As this tendency toward regionalization of culture and socio-political trajectories becomes increasingly pronounced during the course of the EBA, we shall follow custom and treat the key regions of the Aegean separately: the Southern Mainland EBA/EH (Early Helladic Culture), the Cretan EBA/EM (Early Minoan Culture), the EBA/EC on the Cycladic and North Aegean Islands (the Early Cycladic and related culture further north in the Aegean Sea), and finally the EBA in the Northern Mainland.

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.