Introduction
The discovery of the Middle Helladic (MH) culture has built up gradually, since Schliemann during his excavations at Orchomenos in Central Greece in the late nineteenth century identified an unusual dark and heavily burnished ware, which he named after the legendary ruler at Orchomenos as Minyan Ware (Figure 6.5). Later, painted ceramics were also assigned to this era, termed Matt-Painted Ware. The pottery seemed dull and lifeless compared to contemporary pottery designs in Middle Minoan and Middle Cycladic societies.
Although simple and conservative (Rutter 2007), MH ceramics show a shift over time from a dominance of dark-burnished wares in varied colors, to paler forms such as Yellow Minyan, and this leads through further development and outside influences
Figure 6.5 Middle HeUadic gray Minyan ware goblet. © Trustees of the British Museum.
Figure 6.6 Middle Helladic village at Malthi, Peloponnese. E. Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age. Chicago 1964, Figure 14.
(adding lustrous paint) into Late Helladic or Mycenaean ceramics. In keeping with this negative comparison to Crete and the islands, settlement evidence showed the disappearance of elaborate architecture such as the “mansions” of the Mainland EH culture. Extensive survey already showed that compared to EH, site numbers in MH sank almost everywhere (McDonald and Rapp 1972; Renfrew 1972a-b; Bintliff 1977b), and they did not increase significantly when intensive survey improved our resolution of the evidence for smaller and less conspicuous sites. The type-site became a hilltop village in Messenia (Southwest Peloponnese), Malthi, published in the 1930s by Valmin (1938), which had a possible chief’s house in its center and peasant houses dispersed elsewhere inside its primitive fortification wall (Figure 6.6). The unimpressive construction and scale of Malthi’s buildings signaled a decline in culture and at most the existence ofpetty chieftains with very localized author-
Ity. In burials, the period is generally typified by pit and cist graves with a poverty of gifts, although it has gradually become accepted that in later MH the spread of earthen grave mounds containing multiple burials, followed by even more dramatic changes involving “shaft” graves and the first stone and earth tumuli (tholoi) with often rich gifts, signify a very different and swiftly emerging complex society (Voutsaki 1998).
Explanations for these changes have tended to adopt a narrative history approach in various forms, aiming to link changing patterns in material life with historical events and personalities. Firstly, the catastrophic destructions in EH2—3, paralleled as we have seen throughout the Aegean, are believed to have had far more severe effects on the Mainland, inhibiting recovery for several centuries, but for unclear reasons. Attempts to link these disasters (or alternatively the late MH appearance of elite graves) to the arrival in Greece of Indo-European speakers, are less popular today than previously, and I find Colin Renfrew’s (1987) radical rethinking of this question, from the archaeological and linguistic data, persuasive. He proposes that the Greek language arrived in Mainland Greece with the Neolithic colonizers.
In a similar fashion, in later MH times, the reversal of the signs of material culture decline and then stagnation which appeared to have hitherto dominated the era, has tended to be viewed in historical terms. At the end of MH (MHIII) the sudden appearance of elaborate built tombs, such as Shaft Graves in the Northeast Peloponnese and tholoi in the Southwest Peloponnese, with rich prestige goods and warrior equipment, is seen as too dramatic, and special factors have been adduced. Several ideas have been explored (Dickinson 1977):
The international trade crossroads model This model suggested that the late MH and early LH Mainlanders rose to prominence by creating a hub of long-distance trade networks running throughout Europe, the Mediterranean, and the Near East. It was Colin Renfrew who made a telling critique of this idea by the early 1970s (1968, 1973), not least by removing from serious consideration the suggestion that the great concentric monument of Stonehenge in England was a gift by Mycenaean (LH) architects for access to the tin resources of Cornwall. Simple archaeological considerations and a revised chronology based on calibrated C14 dates make this impossible. Likewise in a thorough examination of the evidence for, and nature of, exchange systems between late Middle Helladic and Late Helladic Greece and the rest of Europe, Anthony Harding (1984) reduced this network to a multiplicity of indirect links, without any vital significance to the origins and development of more complex societies in late MH and LH Mainland Greece.
The mercenary/pirate model
It would be a circumstance with many ancient and later historical parallels, to find a politically undeveloped society on the fringes of the civilized world using its warlike culture to gain wealth from the latter by either raiding or mercenary service. There is however no evidence so far in contemporary Near Eastern texts for Aegean forces, and this appears otherwise very hard to prove. In favor of the idea nonetheless, one can point to artistic representations in Cycladic,
Minoan, and later in Mycenaean art of scenes of marine warfare, land warfare, and attacks on coastal cities. Moreover, some of these scenes have been taken to show non-Aegean settings. These representations seem to make clear that the Aegean was probably the location of raiding or open war in MBA-LBA times, and that such activity also took Aegean forces elsewhere in the East Mediterranean. Hints of mercenary service in Egypt can also be cited (Kelder 2010).
The Minoan sphere of influence
Peter Warren in particular (1975, and in Bintliff1977a) has made a coherent case for placing the main explanatory emphasis for the radical transformation of late MH and early LH societies, on growing Cretan Second Palace involvement with the Mainland. The end of MH coincides with the creation of the Second Palaces on Crete, and in the following LM1 period there is a peak of expansion of Minoan activity in the Aegean. Not only do the prestigious artifacts placed in the Shaft Graves at Mycenae include Minoan imports, but locally made objects are also infused with Minoan culture. It has been normally accepted that Minoan craftsmen were employed to make many of these gifts, even if they can be shown to have responded to distinctive local tastes (for example in the recurrent emphasis on hunting and war). The positive effect of Minoan intervention in Mainland societies was to stimulate the emergence of regional centers of dynastic elite power. Unfortunately this led to the consequence that at the end of LM1B most scholars believe that the ungrateful early Mycenaean leaders attacked Crete, destroyed almost all its palatial centers, and ruled the island from Knossos (recalled in a garbled way in the later legend of Theseus and the Minotaur).
If MH society was ranked in some way, leading families would still probably have relied on land and stock for distinction, but in its final Shaft Grave subphase the availability of portable wealth may have dramatically diversified the means of economic and political power (Betancourt 2007). Indeed throughout much of Europe (Shennan 1993, Kristiansen 2001) a simple chiefdom society proliferates in the second millennium BC, linking elite warfare and expanding trade systems, and allowing regional hierarchies of centers and dynasties to emerge at varying times and places. However, the distinctive emphasis on masculine warrior lifestyles, seeming to set the final MH and then true Mycenaean LH apart from the Minoans, is not unparalleled in later Second Palace society on Crete (Kilian-Dirlmeier 1986), where a new iconography of male power, and the warrior graves at Poros (see Chapters 5 and 7), mark a novel direction at a period of critical influence on the Mainland.
Developments in Middle Helladic Messenia
Since construction of Mycenaean palaces and towns is a late phenomenon in the development of that Mainland civilization, the development of Mycenaean life from its MH beginnings must rely on transformations in rural settlements and burial traditions. Surprisingly some of the best evidence for that preceding phase comes from a peripheral region, Messenia. Although this remote province of the Southwest Peloponnese was long neglected by archaeologists owing to its limited Classical monuments, its potential as a major Bronze Age focus was signaled in Homeric legend, where King Nestor ruled at his palace at Pylos. In the 1930s the American scholar Carl Blegen succeeded in identifying this palace on the hill of Epano Englianos, in fertile rolling plateau land some kilometers from the coast, and excavated it in 1939 and then from 1952 to 1958. One of the most important finds from this palace was a rich archive in Mycenaean Linear B script, opening up a continuous research program into the organization of the Pylian state (McDonald and Rapp 1972, Chadwick 1976, Shelmerdine 1997). In the 1960s Richard Hope-Simpson and William McDonald conducted a pioneer large-scale regional field survey in Messenia, under the umbrella of the University of Minnesota, precisely with the idea of providing the settlement evidence to match the textual information for the state (McDonald and Rapp 1972). The monograph of this project remains a classic for regional archaeology, and for Mycenaean studies it succeeded in identifying the major centers and the general spread of settlement in Middle to Late Bronze Age Messenia, allowing informed insights into the genesis and then internal organization of a Mycenaean state centered on the palace at Pylos.
In the 1990s a new, intensive survey project was inaugurated in the Pylos palace region (Davis et al. 1997, Davis 1998, ongoing reports in Hesperia). As regards the Bronze Age there were three major aims: firstly to discover what differences intensive survey would make to our knowledge of the development of settlement before and contemporary to the rise of the Pylos palace; secondly to clarify the size and development ofthe extra-palatial settlement or “town” around the excavated palace; and thirdly, to synthesize the combined evidence from burial monuments (tumuli, tholos tombs), the origin and development of the palace, and changes in the regional settlement system, in order to reconstruct the historical processes behind the creation of the Mycenaean state in Messenia.
The Middle Helladic and Early Late Helladic mounded burials
Although there are several burial modes on the Mainland in MH, including intramural (within settlement) pithoi (giant storage-jars) and intra - and extramural cist (stone box) graves, particular attention has been focused on earthen mounds, often containing multiple graves of the same type as in non-mound contexts, and becoming common from MH1 (Kilian-Dirlmeier 2005). Whereas the settlement-based burials have been seen as representative of small domestic groups and their ancestors, the tumuli have been suggested to indicate low-level social elites within MH settlements. Through this interpretation the otherwise extremely limited evidence for status groups in settlements and the other burial forms can be contrasted to such widespread signs of a dispersed class of local clan-heads or Big-Men (ifnot chieftains). Such tumuli are especially frequent in Messenia province and it is here that a transformation in their construction appears first and perhaps originates, when a false-vaulted stone chamber and connected entrance passageway is inserted into some tumuli, creating the Mycenaean tholos tomb, the characteristic monument for Late Helladic elite burials. Hood’s (1960) suggestion that this emulates traditional Minoan stone tholos tomb construction, much criticized, has recently received new life from a reinterpretation of the earliest Pylos palace plan as of Minoan inspiration (see below).
In 1977 I suggested that the pattern of tholoi and associated tumuli in Messenia appeared to show small scale territoriality (marking of political units) (Bintliff 1977b), suitable for elites at the individual village level. This would support the concept that from late MH, when the more complex tholoi monuments are first constructed, into the early part of LH (after which their number decreases very sharply), power was practiced widely in Messenia. This period preceded the construction of the first palace at Pylos and could point to the importance in this early phase of Mycenaean development of multiple local elites in the organization of society. In mature LH times throughout Mycenaean Greece tholos tombs become far rarer, whilst appearing to dominate wider districts, and are argued to be reserved for the upper echelons of a hierarchical power structure within palace-based “polities” (states).
Subsequently Voutsaki, in studies of tumulus and tholos distributions on the Mainland, has argued for a more dramatic emergence of power in Messenia (Voutsaki 1995, 1998). She prefers to envisage the MH tumuli of Messenia as for all classes of the population. However their density, at least as so far known, would seem to require that only representative members of society were interred within them, with the remainder, perhaps the majority, of other bodies being placed in intramural or extramural flat graves. Nonetheless, so little has been excavated of Messenian MH settlements that it is far too early to generalize on the prevalence of flat graves (Bennet and Galanakis 2005). She nonetheless agrees with wider opinion that the late MH creation of the mounded stone-built tholos chamber creates a form of burial for local elites. We might note too that the older mounds could be used for consecutive burials and hence might already signify clan or dynastic groups, as opposed to adding graves to an undifferentiated communal flat cemetery. The tholos tomb even more clearly symbolizes dynastic attention, as its entry corridor and door not only made subsequent interment simple, but allowed ceremonial visits to the ancestors in a suitably theatrical architectural context.
Recently the Pylos Project team have considered the development of several settlements around the Pylos palace in order to contextualize the rise of the later palace community in terms of competitive local elites (Bennet 1999). This includes links between the erection of regional tumuli and later tholoi. It is not clear however if the clustering of villages and dispersed monumental tombs at and near the later palace must indicate rival elites vying to take control of the central homeland of the later Pylos state. Alternatively we could be seeing related elite families with discrete residential bases, within which a political hierarchy emerges to control the first palace in LH3A (the mature LBA). Interestingly, the concept of a cluster of local leading families around an emergent palatial center, creating its eventual managerial base, is reminiscent of recent “heterarchical” rethinking of the organization of Minoan palaces (see Chapter 5).
Nelson’s reworking of the original excavation records for Pylos palace (Nelson 2007, Rutter 2005), postulates an early mansion for LH1—2 associated with a gated defense wall, followed by the first palace in LH3A with a strongly Minoan design. These significant buildings agree with the Pylos site surface survey which shows a contemporary outer settlement which is precociously extensive for its region.
So far the reader can get the impression that the Mainland Middle Bronze Age is viewed less as a period in itself, than as a phase of lost achievement (the disappearance of the EH complex sites), delaying the reappearance of yet greater achievement (the following rise of the LH Mycenaean civilization). Let us instead try to give MH a significance and structure in its own right, perhaps thereby helping us understand better the otherwise still rather inexplicable swift changes in the final centuries of that era.
The Middle Bronze Age from the surface survey record
The traditional way of seeing the development of prehistoric farming settlements in Mainland Greece has been in social evolutionary terms, as expounded by Colin Renfrew, where the seemingly inevitable rise of Aegean palatial society suffers a local setback during Middle Bronze Age times. Renfrew also used extensive survey data to identify settlement decline in this Middle Helladic era (cf. Renfrew 1972a, 1972b).
Since that time, through intensive surface survey, we have gained a whole series of regional settlement histories. It is revealing to re-analyze the Neolithic to
Mycenaean settlement patterns of Southern Mainland Greece in order to clarify the place of the MH era within its development. During the Neolithic and the Early Helladic eras the range of settlement sizes and the variety of their spatial grouping is rather comparable. Small villages of 1—2 ha or less are typical, separated in fertile areas by a few kilometers, and south of Thessaly, often associated with dispersed farm/hamlet sites. Occasionally, a village may achieve 4—5 ha or more, whilst also rarely, small or large nucleations can evidence signs of special monumental buildings of a public or maybe elite character.
In the following Middle Helladic period, the overall impression is of similarity to these earlier periods, in that the key element is a chain of nucleated villages or hamlets separated by a few kilometers, although a thinning out in landscape cover can be argued in most regions. The striking difference is the loss of most smaller rural sites. This confirms that Middle Helladic settlement patterns and population show strong reduction of occupation, rather than (as I once opined), merely show a process of population nuclea-tion following the abandonment of the many small dispersed settlements of the Early Helladic era. With the Late Helladic comes a fuller network of villages and a minor recovery of smaller rural sites, but in the focus on small population foci the overall picture remains similar to earlier periods, apart from the emergence of rare palaces and other high-ranking central places. We could take as an example for these later periods the Methana Survey (Mee and Forbes 1997). Early Helladic settlement consists of four villages a few kilometers apart, and numerous dispersed hamlets and farms, followed in Middle and Late Helladic times with three of these villages surviving as hamlets or villages, and a slight number of lesser Mycenaean (LH) rural sites.
Let us approach these settlement pattern similarities from the viewpoint of the Social Landscape. Here we shall return to two familiar models (Bintliff 1999; see Chapter 3). Firstly, a settlement of 150 or less people is the ideal, with growing social tensions at 200-300. Typical Neolithic and Bronze Age Mainland nucleated settlements are 1-2,5 ha, representing something like 100-300 inhabitants. We can hypothesize that a major factor in Mainland settlement systems, from Neolithic through to Middle Helladic times, was social pressure, to stay small to sustain an easily managed community life. But this demands local networks of village intermarriage to reach a viable 500 to 600-plus demographic pool. What follows from this model is that we should no longer focus on the individual settlement in later Greek prehistory, but must assume that nearly all sites were systematically tied into local social networks of marriage exchange. Given the extreme rarity of Mainland settlements, up to and including the Middle Helladic, which exceeded the parameters of face-to-face community size, we now realize that the Mainland was a mosaic of overlapping clusters of socially integrated villages, the spatial scale of which south of Thessaly was maybe 5-15 kilometers radius around any participating settlement. Traditional Palestinian villages provide good examples of such local networks (Lehmann 2004).
Our second model is that of arenas of Social Power. Anthropology also allows another important generalization concerning district marriage networks. If resources and technology permit, a community can solve its marriage needs through expanding to a size where it is predominantly endogamous. This also brings advantages and disadvantages. On the positive side, maintaining perfect relations with the neighbors is no longer a priority, and previous dowry arrangements could be replaced by the community assuming control of almost all its resources for itself. Indeed it is precisely in such settlements, larger than 500 or so inhabitants, that cross-cultural research has documented the emergence of town-like political behaviors. The implication is that later prehistoric Mainland communities of some 4-5 ha or more (generally seen as at or over the 500-600 inhabitant threshold), might be considered to have begun to develop political behaviors of an incipient city-state character. On the pre-Mycenaean Southern Mainland, on estimated settlement area, such proto city-state communities may be represented by the settlements at Early Bronze Age Tiryns and Middle Helladic Argos, and Fournoi in the Argolid in EH and MH times. Their potential populations could be close to demographic self-sufficiency, or at least in Lehmann’s model, represent dominant partners in district marriage networks.
What is the significance for neighboring settlements of the metamorphosis of a face-to-face village into a proto city-state? Well, such village-states are rarely totally endogamous, and Cosmopoulos’ (1998) figures for the size of EH Mainland settlements suggest that most potential examples are not yet autonomous demographically. Yet the swollen village-town dominates local politics by its demography, economic resources, and availability of excess marriage partners. Lehmann has modeled such marriage networks for site-clusters in Early Iron Age Palestine to demonstrate how districts dominated by single large settlements could have focused social interactions, claiming that this is one means through which such communities achieved political and economic preeminence.
Now a vital piece ofthe jigsaw: such enlarged communities need to be held together socially either through horizontal political subdivisions, for example clans, or through the existence of dominant families. We must expect therefore that Neolithic to Middle Helladic settlements of 4—5 ha or more would be run on a different social basis than the face-to-face villages of 100—300 people that were the norm throughout. In the case of MH Argos (Touchais 1998) and EH-MH Fournoi (Jameson et al. 1994),both in the Northeastern Peloponnese, the suggestion of multiple hamlets meets one of these alternatives.
Thus from the beginning of farming settlement in Greece, nearly all individual communities were part of local clusters with intense social bonds. The potential for one member of a cluster to achieve enhanced status is always present. Nevertheless this was generally inhibited throughout the Neolithic and most of the Bronze Age by the preferred aim of face-to-face political organization within each settlement, and the necessity in the case of expansion toward proto city-state size for an elaborate internal system of social control to be put in place: either a set of semi-autonomous quarters within the enlarged community, or the emergence of a minority ruling elite.
In the particular case of Middle Helladic settlement systems, we continue to see the emphasis of preceding periods on regularly spaced villages, mostly small, very rarely of “city-state” potential. The vast majority required several social partners for their reproduction and hence were set in clusters allowing significant scope for economic and political interaction. The changing fortunes of individual members must in part be linked to the dynamics of each cluster and of clus-ter-to-cluster interactions, including perhaps diversion of smaller settlements from the influence of one dominant village to that of another. A rare emergent super-village — for example the key MH sites of Argos and Mycenae — could exploit its advantages over its neighbors and presumably enhance its own leading families over theirs. Nonetheless, regional politics is not enough: I also agree with Wright (2004) that in Early and Middle Helladic times, enhanced participation by one member settlement in external political, military or economic contacts (see below) could elevate its regional status so as to reorientate the allegiances of minor sites into its social “field of gravity.” Indeed it seems likely that the sudden rise within the Plain of Argos in the relative status of Mycenae over Argos during the late MH period must be explained through these kinds of political shifts within local settlement networks, which have become entangled into increasing interactions with external societies and events in the wider Aegean world.
We might conclude that from the start of the Neolithic the emergence of more complex societies was always a possible outcome. The necessity for district social clusters, given the rareness of communities large enough to be self-sufficient “small worlds” or achieved city-states, created creative social “arenas.” These greatly facilitated a number of key potential developments: the mobilization of manpower for military purposes, of agricultural and other surpluses for economic purposes, and of participants for large-scale cult activities. In this model we may identify one of the mechanisms through which Bronze Age territorial states were formed. Essentially, breaking free of face-to-face limitations was of course a critical step toward state-formation, when individual nucleations emerged as district super-villages, out of interrelated village clusters.
The Argos Plain and Mycenae
As just introduced, the other key area for observing critical change in MH society is the opposing corner of the Peloponnese to Messenia (Northeast rather than Southwest): the region of the Plain of Argos and its surrounding hill land. Here the later MH era sees a revival of recorded settlements and evidence for a hierarchy of smaller and larger communities, with the probability that the latter are also centers of political power. The later palatial site of Mycenae is a settlement of minor significance until this late phase, in contrast to a clearly extensive and important focus through the era at the more central location of Argos, which is a large, multifocal community with a series of tumuli. Quite suddenly, however, the balance of power shifts, and within the very large but undistinguished MH cemetery at Mycenae, which as elsewhere mixes domestic areas with burial-clusters (French and Shelton 2005), a dramatic new form of burial appears, the Shaft Grave, beginning in late MH and continuing in construction into early LH.
The Mycenae Shaft Graves, their outstandingly rich contents, and historical significance have been central to discussion of the rise of Mycenaean civilization ever since Heinrich Schliemann uncovered the first cluster, Shaft Grave Circle A, in the 1870s. In the 1950s a Circle B was revealed by the Greek archaeologist Mylonas (see Text Box).
But we need to return to our earlier question: How did late MH/early LH Mycenae gain such wealth and justify its claims to importance?
Shaft Grave Circles A and B at Mycenae 3.
They are termed circles as both were defined in Mycenaean times by enclosures, to make clear the distinctive groupings of elite dead, whilst the A circle was subsequently re-enclosed in even more monumental form into a grand theatrical arena. The accumulated evidence from the two series of Shaft Graves demonstrates the rapid growth in wealth and status of the men and women interred in these deep pits, which contained single or multiple burials. In contrast to the poverty of grave goods from preceding phases of MH, the Shaft Grave period sees extraordinary grave gifts piled into the shafts, making novel statements about the international contacts of the elite at Mycenae. They had relatively swiftly gained the ability to access large amounts of precious metal, long-distance prestige goods (faience, amber), and the services of exceptionally skilled craftsmen (argued to have been Minoan) (Dickinson 1977). Above some of the tombs were stone stelae (tombstones) inscribed with heroic scenes.
The central issues concerning our understanding of the Mycenae Shaft Graves seem to be:
1. How can we explain the dramatic appearance of such wealth, and the evidence for elite families, at a previously low-status site?
2. How does this abrupt emergence of a new regional power at Mycenae create the basis for the subsequent establishment there of the great fortified palatial center in late LH times?
How do the two Circles relate to each other? and
4. What is the relationship between the Shaft Grave phenomenon at Mycenae and the tumu-lus-tholos developments in Messenia, which occur at a comparable historical moment?
Some of these questions are easier to propose answers to than others. Shaft Grave Circles A and B overlap, but B begins earlier and A lasts longer. Moreover it is only Circle A which is much later given the exceptional privilege of causing the LH3 circuit wall of the Mycenae citadel to bulge out so as to enclose it, leaving Circle B beyond the walls, at risk of pillage. This sequence suggests that the circles are for two distinct lineages, of which the slightly younger, represented in A, eclipses the dynasty of B by later LH times. Thus it is only A which would eventually become a showpiece of multi-generational dynastic power beside the main entrance gate to the citadel (the famous Lion Gate) as one enters it. It was already argued by Schliemann that the Mycenaean creation of a special enclosure for Shaft Graves A was to make a theater for public ceremonies of a dynastic character (Cavanagh 2001).
Recent analysis of the dress codes and gifts with the dead of both circles has also brought valuable insights. Kilian-Dirlmeier (1986) makes an excellent case for the gradual elaboration over time of a distinct prestigious dress code for the elite from the oldest to youngest graves, notably the warrior males (Figure 6.7), but also the highly ornamented
Figure 6.7 From left to right, development over time of male dress and gifts in the Shaft Graves. Areas shaded black are in gold.
I. Kilian-Dirlmeier, “Beobachtungen zu den Schachtgrabern von Mykenai.” Jahrbuch des Romisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz 33 (1986), 159—198, Figures 14—16. Courtesy of Romisch-Germanischen Zentralmuseums Mainz.
And richly gifted females. The increasing symbolic pretensions shown by the elaboration of tombs and of the dress worn by the elite burials are reasonably seen as representing the growing pretensions of this novel center of wealth. Its leading families, in what had been hitherto a minor MH settlement, now appear to aspire to the status of major players in the politics, not only of the immediate Argos Plain, but in a wider sphere, including relations
With the Minoan palaces. Nonetheless, Shaft Graves have been found elsewhere, also with wealth and status objects, although not in such remarkable quantities. Although Mycenae remains outstanding at this moment in time, competition in the display of elite status will spread to numerous other Mainland centers in early LH, when tholos tombs become the standard means of advertising who are the families in power in most regions.
Confirmation for the new political status of the settlement at Mycenae comes later, when over LH2—3 an unparalleled series of tholos tombs at the site is eventually accompanied by the construction of a fortified palace center with a large extramural community. At that stage it is reasonable to link these observed developments with the legendary status of
Mycenae as the center of the most powerful Mycenaean state. Such a position naturally took some time to achieve, and the Shaft Graves (pretentious burials but for a non-palatial settlement), would suit our expectation of a prolonged developmental phase in Mycenae’s rise to preeminence, or at least to a “first among equals” status with the other great
Mainland Mycenaean centers such as Pylos and Thebes which were emerging at the same time.
Recent survey in the inland valley of Nemea, lying to the north between the Plain of Argos and the Corinth coastal region, has offered further insight. Cherry and Davis (2001) note the surprisingly low population evidenced here in MH and early LH times, then a sharp rise in the mature to late LH period. They pick up on a point I made many years ago (Bintliff 1977b) that so far the rich hill land of Corinth lacks a major Mycenaean center, perhaps indicating that Mycenae’s state territory may have first expanded northwards toward the Gulf ofCorinth, before absorbing rival centers in its own Plain of Argos, such as Argos, Dendra-Midea, and Tiryns.
The large quantities of weaponry, coupled with the warrior iconography which the Shaft Graves as well as later art of the Mycenaean states provide, offer a plausible explanation for the increasing role of the Mycenaean elite — aggressive and successful warfare. But how did this work? Did the hypothesized enlargement of the Mycenaean state, first north and then south, occur through attacks and threats? Possibly. But how did the Shaft Grave elites gain their wealth and warrior concept? Till recently it seemed difficult to derive this from Minoan culture, despite the well-attested Minoan influence in the technology and raw materials of the grave goods. Yet the recent evidence of rich warrior-graves at Second Palace period Poros near Knossos could provide wider evidence for increasing militarism in all parts of the Aegean (Kilian-Dirlmeier 1986, Driessen and Langohr 2007). Maybe we are seeking explanations which the archaeological timescale cannot yet accommodate. Earlier, we touched on the idea that ambitious warlike males from Mycenae, a backwater village in the earlier MH period, traveled abroad (especially in the quarreling world of the East Mediterranean), and served as mercenaries, gaining unparalleled military skills and much wealth. In the light of recent evidence from the Anatolian Hittite imperial archives (Korfmann et al. 2001), Mycenaean expeditions into Western Anatolian native states are more than a possibility. Could the Mycenaean warrior elite, like the Normans of the early Medieval world in the Atlantic coasts and the Mediterranean, have set themselves up as lords of small and later larger “conquest states”? Such events could be rapid and difficult to trace in our sources, historical or archaeological. The world of Braudel’s short term, or evenements, has always to be allowed for, even if the longer-term impact of unique historical events tends to involve social and economic constraints and possibilities which operate in a more measurable framework for the archaeologist.
We have already discussed the rise of Mycenae to become the apparently richest and most monumental center in the Plain of Argos by the LH3 period. But how sure are we that Mycenae ultimately controlled the contemporary rival Mycenaean centers of the Argive Plain? Legend can of course be misleading, and we require objective support. The Linear B archive finds are rare in the region, and the palace at Mycenae is poorly preserved. The case is not so secure for total control of the Plain: was the great fortified palatial center of Tiryns in its south and on the coast an autonomous state, or merely the maritime face of the Mycenaean kingdom, where a relative of the king held control?
Can the tholos tombs enlighten us? Voutsaki (1995, 1998) identifies a cycle of pretentious burials at Mycenae itself, and a response from neighboring centers in the region. Whilst in late MH/early LH the Shaft Graves have no parallel in their wealth and warrior symbolism in the Plain of Argos, suggesting a statement of intent by the elite of Mycenae to be preeminent, by LH2 when the Argos Plain elite adopt the Messenian form of prestigious burial — the tholos — Mycenae’s tholos tombs are matched by several elsewhere in the region, perhaps signaling competition for power and status. In LH3, however, Mycenae continues to build multiple tholoi, including the grandest in the region (Figure 6.8), and most if not all other centers cease their construction or use. It could be argued that Mycenae had by now achieved regional dominance, allowing it to restrict such burial to the aristocracy within its own state apparatus. It is also conceivable that the leaders of the other major centers of the Plain were now secondary figures below the king of Mycenae, and were required to signify this through construction of their tombs at Mycenae itself.
Comparable developments are occurring elsewhere, such as at the later Mycenaean palace-center of
Triangular space to relieve weighty on lintel
A-1
Artificial
Mound
Entrance elevation
Cr
-D
' Blocking wall
Blocks
______,
JAC
Tholos tomb, section and plan (after Wace and Stubbings)
Figure 6.8 Plan of the late “Treasury of Atreus” tholos at Mycenae.
W. Taylour, The Myceneans. London 1966, Figure 43.
Thebes in Central Greece (Dakouri-Hild 2010). In the MH era its size expands to 20 ha, although like other large settlements such as Argos, it appears to be constituted of mixed clusters of domestic and burial deposits, perhaps on a dispersed plan. During the transitional MH-LH era there are several large stone-built or rock-hewn tombs resembling Shaft Graves, and the giant cist grave on the Ampheion hill may have contained precious gifts. Elite tombs at Thebes include weapons, horse remains, and boars’ tusk helmet-fittings. Likewise the important cluster of Mycenaean centers in coastal Thessaly, eventually crystallizing into the palace-state based at Iolkos-Dimini, seems to develop out of a rich MH settlement background (Adrimi-Sismani 2007).
So far we have sought to comprehend the spectacular rise of Mycenae in terms of regional competition, relations with all-powerful Minoan Crete on the Aegean level, and perhaps some extra-Aegean (particularly West Anatolian) military adventures. But recently another, unexpected focus has appeared on the scene, much closer to home, the settlement of Kolonna on the island of Aegina between Attica and the Northeast Peloponnese. The EBA township here was highly unusual, in that although it shared in the general destructions of EB2—3, it was rapidly reconstructed, becoming an even more substantial planned community with massive fortifications, even to rival its contemporary Troy City VI in Northwest Anatolia in the MBA and early LBA (Walter and Weisshaar 1993). Excavations evidence craft specialization and exchange on a significant scale, whilst the community’s characteristic ceramics (“Gold mica ware”) are found over a wide area of the Mainland and islands (Rutter 1993). In the late MH phase a rich Shaft Grave was deposited and to the same period may belong a very large, monumental building in the center ofthe settlement (Felten et al. 2004). Intriguingly there are even scenes on Aeginetan pottery of shiploads of warriors. It would not be unreasonable to suppose that Aegina was a significant player in the politics, warfare, and trade of these dynamic final MH and early LH centuries between 1700 and 1400 BC.
However, a cautionary note is required: Kolonna, like the similar off-Mainland waked settlement of Aghia Irini on Kea island, is remarkably small: both are estimated to be less than 1 ha (Dickinson 1994). Compared to the 10—20 ha estimated for LC Akrotiri town on Thera, and the much larger major towns of Second Palace Crete, how much economic, political, and military power can we imagine emanating from communities of say a couple of hundred people (of whom a mere fifth were likely to be adult males)? In neither case is there evidence for a large rural population to add to these small island foci. On present evidence we might only imagine these small centers as part of a mosaic of very small polities, who would require mutual alliances and probably association with Minoan initiatives to achieve much on a South Aegean scale (a case reasonably made for Akrotiri). On a lesser scale, the closeness of the developing Mainland to a flourishing Cycladic culture cannot be ignored: local MH ceramic traditions and the whole tradition of Matt-Painted wares within that culture are substantially influenced by MC pottery, alongside the better-known role that Minoan styles played in the birth of Mycenaean ceramics at a later point in early LH.
Frustratingly, little evidence survives of the building complexes of early Mycenaean times which underlay the later LH3 palaces. It was thus generally assumed that emergent elites invested chiefly in display burials rather than prestige residences, until the Mycenaean takeover of Crete in LH2 inspired Mainland imitations of Minoan palaces. Claims for earlier LH mansions at Tiryns and Mycenae are based on disputed architectural evidence (Fitzsimons 2007), although the rather stronger recent evidence for an LH1—2 mansion at Pylos makes them more plausible. In Laconia however the two sequent mansions at the Menelaion site of LH2 and LH3A date do seem like small-scale precursors of the later palaces in plan, but lack the fine decoration (Rutter 2005). The design of these early mansions appears to form an elaboration of normal house architecture of MH, notably the megaron plan, a building with a set of rooms in succession. This brings into stark contrast the fact that the oldest so far reconstructed Mycenaean palace, that of LH3A Pylos, nonetheless incorporates a clearly Minoan design.
Greece beyond the Mycenaean heartlands
The growing evidence from Northeastern Greece has been summarized and interpreted by Andreou et al. (1996) and Andreou (2001). The Bronze Age in Macedonia and Thrace is not static stagnation whilst the South takes off into complexity, yet society till the end of the era follows an alternative model, one of small-scale settlement networks, as if resisting the palatial urbanization and hierarchy of the Mycenaean world. The focus is the large or small village, yet their numbers rise steadily over this period, and by the early Late Bronze Age some of these may form foci for surrounding smaller communities (such as Assiros with its intriguing centralized storage complex). In the late LBA-Early Iron Age there is evidence for the increasing elaboration of these district central places, perhaps forming the core of small regional polities with defense walls and prestige artifacts for their elites. Thessaloniki-Toumba is a giant example (Figure 6.9).
Yet although contacts to MH and LH societies in the South are clear, imports are small-scale and seem to be used to enhance internal processes of increasing social differentiation. In keeping with this, the plans of these settlements, although suggesting co-residential groups larger than nuclear families, have not revealed mansion-like residences for a controlling family. If there really were small statelets, such political power seems to rest more in the domination by widely spaced larger centers in fertile locations, over smaller satellite communities in less favored sectors of the landscape, a model we have already explored for the contemporary Southern Mainland in this chapter.
Middle Helladic and Early Late Helladic art
The lack of figurative art till the end of MH seems to reflect a society with limited social competition, where kinship was the basis for social differences. In the final phase (MH3) this all seems to change toward an emphasis on personal and family status rising above the mass of the population. This is symbolically
Figure 6.9 The great settlement mound or Toumba at Thessaloniki. Author.
Expressed in the spread of much more elaborate graves which exhibit prestigious gifts and elite dress codes for a minority (Voutsaki 1998). Art is also deployed to signal this transformation. The stone grave-pillars above some of the Mycenae Shaft Graves may look very primitive compared to Minoan-Cycladic art, lacking landscape elements in favor of outline figures in heroic postures, but Betancourt (2007) considers it more likely they were originally covered with plaster and/or painted. The heroic emphasis is also found in the special gifts in the tombs themselves. An inlaid dagger represents warriors hunting a lion with spears and shields, rather than at a safer distance with chariots and arrows. The gold face-masks of some Shaft Grave males might well be portraits, telling us how important individual elite members were to the rise of Mycenae (Preziosi and Hitchcock 1999). Laffineur (2007), essentially having to rely on tomb finds, summarizes early Mycenaean art at Mycenae and elsewhere as dominated by an imagery of male aggression: hunting and fighting, expressing the superiority of a military upper class. Even the widespread imagery on early Mycenaean ceramics, that seems instead to deal with concepts of regeneration and rebirth, may not be unconnected to concepts of dynastic power succession as well as personal ideas of the afterlife.
World History
