This long and eventful phase of Greek Prehistory offers suitable evidence for processes at all three of the classic “Braudelian” timescales. On the one hand, in the long-term evolution of Greek society, the Early Bronze Age appears to be a pivotal era in which the creation of political classes and regional foci of economic and social power occurs in many, but perhaps just a minority, of the regions of Southern Greece (Kilian-Dirlmeier 2005). Despite critique of Renfrew’s arguments for this view, the evidence in total seems to me more in harmony with this scenario, than that of purely egalitarian villages. The apparent lack of such developments in Northern Greece remains enigmatic, especially as further north in the Balkans there are also increasing signs of complex regional changes focusing on major settlements during the EBA (Harding 2000). According to Renfrew, the chief stimuli for the Aegean “high cultures” of EH, EM, and EC were a combination of the economic boost provided by the cultivation and storage of olive oil and wine, and the drive to increased trade promoted by the spread of bronze metallurgy (also associated with increased warfare). We have also noted the increasing effect of the likely widespread adoption of plough traction and the use of secondary products from domestic animals. All these elements involved diffusion into Greece of economic practices out of adjacent lands.
In the latter context, we should not underestimate the influence of more complex societies on Aegean developments (Anatolian, Levantine (Syro-Palestine), and Egyptian), attested by the Aegean adoption of seals and sealing, new forms of ceramics and by the end of the EBA new ceramic technologies, and other craft skills in stone and metalworking. The exact significance of the Aegean’s “periphery” relations to these societies remains to be further elucidated, but this is an important issue if we accept that the EBA is in many respects a more elaborate world than that of the Neolithic. However, the fact that throughout Europe this period witnesses the clear appearance of individual male status linked with symbols of war, whether in burial or in public art (Shennan 1993), demonstrates that the novelties of Aegean polyculture and limited Near Eastern contacts can only be a partial explanation. Perhaps greater weight should be sought in more indirect but wider ranging economic changes, notably the diffusion of the plough, secondary products, and metallurgy.
On the medium term of one or more centuries, a greater abundance of data and refined chronologies allow us to obtain an increasingly nuanced picture of variety between each major phase of the EBA, with now sub-phases being highlighted as historically significant (for example the Kastri phase of late EC2). Nonetheless, a cyclical pattern dominates all three major regions in focus, EH, EM, and EC, with signs of a developmental rise, climax, and decline associated with the three subsequent phases of EB1, 2, and 3 in each area. This suggests that below the “big picture” of the long term, the era has its own internal dynamic of increasing then decreasing complexity. As this pattern is very common in archaeological sequences, and we shall indeed see such a cyclicity repeated throughout the later periods of Greek prehistory and history, some comment now seems appropriate (see Bintliff 1997a for a wider discussion).
If we observe the development of rural or urban settlements in any part of the Mediterranean world, and at any period since the Neolithic commenced locally, comparable phenomena appear: the rise and fall of rural settlement numbers, and of the size and number of nucleated settlements. This can be associated with pre-state, as well as state and imperial political organizations. Explanations have included overpopulation and land degradation, climate fluctuations, the instability of complex social and political systems, a collapse due to internal warfare or invasion/ migration from beyond the region, and the ebb and flow of long-distance commercial networks. Sometimes combinations of these factors have been invoked, and indeed current thinking would argue that human societies are complex and adaptive enough to require more than monocausal (single factor) explanations to account for major regressions in demography and social and economic complexity.
In the specific case of the EBA Aegean, the signs are there, in later EB2 and more clearly in EB3, of several of the above elements — warfare, climate, landscape change. Some would add migration, and long-distance commerce (core—periphery dependency effects
Involving the Near East as a dominant economy impacting on a less developed Aegean periphery). Closer resolution awaits future research results, which I suspect will not be long in coming.
Finally the short term in the Annaliste’s analytical framework. At a site such as Lerna, one feels very close to specific historical individuals and events, as one assumes that particular group-leaders are instituting a district-wide system of economic control and supervising the construction of impressive focal buildings.
At Knossos, the suggestion of communal feasts in EM, giving the future palace site the role of a regional ceremonial-center, and even the first elaborate buildings at this and other later “palace” sites, provide a similar impression. Meanwhile Broodbank’s evocation of longboat crews sailing adventurously between the Cyclades in EC, to trade, raid, establish marriage ties, and share in inter-island rituals, brings individual events and people into a sharp focus, a process now harmonizing with the new more personalized reading of contemporary figurines.
World History
