Introduction

In the days of the Travelers and topographers, until the late nineteenth century AD Greece’s past was confined to Classical (Greek and Roman) antiquities and the monuments of Byzantium. But subsequently, the establishment of a long prehistory for Europe (Greene 2002) encouraged archaeologists working in Greece to search for its prehistoric record. Rapidly the standard subdivisions were recognized: Palaeolithic and

Mesolithic (early and later hunter-gatherers), Neolithic (first farmer and herder societies), Bronze Age (mature farmer-herder societies with copper then bronze metallurgy), and Early and Later Iron Age (most recent prehistoric then protohistoric societies, iron-using, on the edge of and then in the first period of historical records). The Aegean was immediately envisaged as promising for prehistoric research, firstly because it bordered the Middle East, considered a major source of European cultural development from the Neolithic onwards, and secondly because ancient

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.

Greek mythology suggested a rich pre-Classical society, with layers of legendary events stretching into a remote past.

Alongside the discovery at this time of Bronze Age palace civilizations on the Mainland (the Mycenaean), Crete (the Minoan), and the small towns of the Cyclades (Cycladic), the most numerous prehistoric earthworks attracting late nineteenth and early twentieth-century fieldworkers were the habitation mounds (“tells,” “magoulas,” or “toumbas”) which dotted the great, fertile plains and low hill lands of Northeast Greece. Those in Macedonia and Thrace were still in the Ottoman Empire till 1913 and 1920, respectively, so at first research by Greek and foreign archaeologists focused on the Plains of Thessaly. The former regions opened up to serious investigation only when they became part of the Greek state. Thus it was that the great Greek pioneer Tsountas, and the British team ofWace and Thompson, in Thessaly, subsequently the British scholar Heurtley in Macedonia, revealed that the dominant period when these tell-villages were occupied was that of a spectacular Greek Neolithic, with rich architecture, decorated ceramics, and figurines.

The culture-history sequence

Neolithic society represents a remarkable rupture in human occupation of the Aegean. In contrast to the highly localized but scanty remains of mobile hunter-gatherer bands which characterize the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic eras, Neolithic communities seem from the first to have lived (at least for the most part) in permanent villages, with an economy of domestic plants and animals. The roots of that economy and the accompanying material culture lie within older Neolithic communities of the Near East, and it is generally, but not universally, accepted that this whole way of life was introduced to Greece by human colonization out of Anatolia (Asian Turkey) and the Levant (the Eastern Mediterranean coastal countries) (Perles 2001, Efstratiou 2007; opposed by Kotsakis 2001, 2006a).

The early excavators were already interested in tracing social and economic developments across the Neolithic. Signs of increasing political complexity and technological progress have always been central to archaeologists seeking the origins of modern society through a series of critical developmental stages, beginning in the remote past (Bintliff 1984). The “Neolithic Revolution” in the Aegean showed one such critical discontinuity compared to preceding foraging peoples. Then, excavated Neolithic tell sites generated evidence for subsequent social evolution, since the sites of Middle Neolithic (MN) Sesklo and Late Neolithic (LN) Dhimini appeared to demonstrate the rise of social stratification and intercommunity warfare, together with the production of elaborate, and traded, fine pottery products. These aspects were highlighted in the 1970s by Theochares, an authority on Thessalian prehistory (1973).

Contemporaneously, John Evans’ (1971) exploratory trenches beneath the Minoan Bronze Age palace at Knossos on Crete, revealed a very early colonizing village of farmers at the site. More importantly, this village grew progressively across the long Neolithic era, until, on the threshold of the Early Bronze Age, its size could justify the term “town” (several thousand inhabitants). Might all these unfolding developments of prehistoric Greek society offer insights into the creation of Europe’s first civilizations, the Minoan and Mycenaean, within the subsequent Bronze Age period in the Aegean?