Bailey’s reflections on the Palaeolithic of Epirus have already raised the central issues when we try to portray and unravel that interplay of lives and eras, homes and entire landscapes, which lies at the heart of the project of the Annales School of French historians. That was to capture analytically as well as empathetically (involving our emotional engagement), how the past was created and yet experienced by contemporaries. Our time resolution for this chapter is coarse, which allows us an extremely long-term perspective (the longue duree) during which various species of hominid spread and perhaps retreated from Greece, and over which traditions of tool-making persisted for unimaginable periods of time with minimal change, whilst their replacement by more complex assemblages was equally spread over eras encompassing untold human generations. Our insight into ways of life (the Annalistes’ modes de vie) has even less sense of time about it: based on ethnography, hunter-gatherers are believed to have followed seasonal rounds over larger or smaller annual territories, responding to shorter and longer-term changes to local ecology, notably the drastic alternations caused by the Ice Age cycles. Even when, in the final phases of hunter-gatherer lifestyles in Greece, symbolic representations might be expected from evidence in other parts of Europe, the Aegean offers little beyond some hints of body ornament. This artistic poverty has been explained through the harsher conditions of subsistence in the region and low absolute population densities.
One ray of light occurs to illuminate life at shorter timescales, the rare finds of deliberate burials, especially the cemetery at the Franchthi Cave. With modern techniques to study diet and disease, and the movements of individuals, it becomes possible to see one human life, at least in its cumulative imprint on that person’s physical body (Bintliff 1989). Already some intriguing insights are emerging, and we can expect more as science increases the range and sophistication of its applications to “the biography of the body.” The discovery of Middle Palaeolithic human footprints in the Theopetra Cave (Karkanas et al. 1999) is another tantalizing if unique contact with moments in time and specific individuals. Isotope analysis will also reveal the long-term movements of individuals. But otherwise the Aegean era of hunter-gatherer life, more than 99 percent of human occupation, suits those like Bailey with a Darwinian, ecological perspective, but frustrates anyone who would wish to see, if not the experience of life in the short term of a human life (the world of evenements), yet at least the fluctuations of human behavior in the medium term of a few hundreds of years (the moyenne duree). Is it really the case that landscape exploitation did not experience less continuity within a given ecology, and witness more experimentation by human groups? Is our model of effectively static lifestyles and an invisible, and by implication, non-existent symbolic life correct, or merely the product of the sparseness of the evidence? In other parts of Europe, extremely detailed study of our chief data, stone-tool assemblages, has attempted to use these products of human skill to access individuality and diversity, as well as a sense of aesthetics, and perhaps such approaches in the future will take us further into the world of lived experience amongst Greek foragers.
World History
