The Cycladic and Mainland Middle Bronze Ages offer a classic laboratory for an Annaliste approach, and we have already begun to draw out the parallel processes operating at different timescales, as well as the importance of reconstructing ways of life and thinking, modes de vie and mentalites. In the short term, the world of events (evenements), the impact of the Thera eruption seems potentially cataclysmic, with long-term consequences for Minoan civilization. But why not also for the adjacent coastlands of the Mainland? Catastrophes and other less dramatic events are correctly envisaged, in Annaliste Structural History, as dependent for their power on their context, and this includes the long-term trajectory of the society on which they impinge. Indeed in the case of Crete, Driessen and colleagues suggest that the underpinning of Minoan palatial culture by religious conviction may have opened up internal chaos when “the gods” struck their “chosen people,” or at the least their likely proteges the Theran polity, even if physical disaster on Crete may have been grossly exaggerated. Another short-term element is the rapid appearance of spectacular elite graves at Mainland Mycenae, and here we have argued that unique historical personalities and events are required to account for this phenomenon occurring at a hitherto unimportant settlement on the margins of the fertile Argos Plain. Again emphasizing the importance of the short term, the hard-to-trace regional politics in which this seemingly upstart power competed successfully with older centers such as Argos, and rivals at Tiryns or nearby Midea, cannot have been a foregone conclusion. On the other hand, this can also serve to remind us that the potential of short-lived events and individual ambitions for changing the course of history depends on suitable conditions, and these can only be understood through studying a wider context in time and space.
This brings us to the medium term. Archaeologists, like art historians, recognize cyclical eras of a few hundred years, characterized by a style or way of life, and here we can also find in the MBA a certain middle-term (moyenne duree) structure: the flourishing nucleated foci of the Cyclades, some we suggest evolving into city-state form in this era, on the one hand, and then the very different village-based networks we have reconstructed on the Mainland on the other, with their petty chiefs and occasional protostates constituted of village and chieftain clusters.
For the long term, one cannot deny the possibility that the “emergent complexity” which corporate communities of 500—600 people give rise to, has an inbuilt tendency toward city-state formation. In turn, intercommunity interaction and competition between such nucleations (what Renfrew (Renfrew and Cherry 1986) has dubbed “peer-polity interaction”) can open up strong tendencies toward territorial (multi-center) states. That Knossos could well have been on this trajectory by the end of the Neolithic, whilst becoming the most lasting and spectacular of the Minoan palatial foci, suits this scenario. On the Mainland, Paul Halstead (2006) has argued that family competition in village societies may likewise contain the recurrent potential for the rise of dominant lineages, whose intercommunity political, military, and economic networking creates a certain opportunity for the emergence of settlements with regional preeminence. This is certainly relevant to the creation of a suitable background in MH for the development of a small number of district centers during its duration, out of which rather swiftly, at the end of that era, expanding political systems begin to carve the landscape into a mosaic of mini-states, the foundation of the LH Mycenaean palatial system.
World History
