From the 1960s, extensive survey and inferences from the palace archives demonstrated that Mycenaean civilization was organized around a settlement hierarchy. Below the palaces were lesser fortified centers of population and power, then unfortified villages, followed by hamlets and farmsteads. There were also strategic forts on high places, such as around Lake Copais in Central Greece. Palatial centers were few, each dominating large territories. The late construction of the palaces and even later great walling programs around the acropoleis (upper towns) of their associated communities indicated a long period of gradual centralization of power. As discussed earlier, the early to middle Middle Helladic period offers a picture of numerous villages (with a few small towns), providing the political base for one or several leading families (marked by tumuli). This is succeeded in late MH/early LH by an Early Mycenaean era in which larger territorial states vied for power (marked by tholos tombs or Shaft Graves), thence leading into the consolidation of even larger major states ruled from walled palatial centers. The archival evidence from the kingdom of Pylos for some twelve regions, split between two halves of the state, plausibly reflects earlier independent districts, progressively absorbed by the expanding state (Chadwick 1976, Bintliff 1977b-c). In the Plain of
Figure 7.3 A first attempt to model the settlement hierarchy for the Mycenaean Plain of Argos: primary, secondary, and tertiary settlements are shown as triangles then larger and smaller circles.
J. L. Bintliff, Natural Environment and Human Settlement in Prehistoric Greece. Oxford 1977, Appendix A, Figure 1a.
Argos, settlement analysis (Figure 7.3) also suggests that a mosaic of statelets may have become fused over time into a unitary Mycenaean state emerging from Mycenae itself in the northernmost corner (No. 1). Mycenae could have become the paramount center in a four-tier settlement hierarchy, or alternatively remained the “first amongst equals” with possible rivals at Tiryns (No. 10) and Midea (No. 6). Marzolff (2004) has recently updated the map of major and minor centers for this region.
Intensive surveys in Mycenae’s hinterland (the Nemea and BerbatiValleys) (Wells and Runnels 1996, Cherry and Davis 2001) show a late infill of their Mycenaean landscapes, argued to be a response to political and economic intervention from the expanding Mycenae state. This raises the potential to detect the hand of History behind our use of rather general models of the rise of civilization as resulting from population growth and the rise of a settlement hierarchy.
On Crete, accepting the mainstream theory of a Mycenaean domination based in Knossos for the LH2—3 era, despite the razing of the other palaces at the start of this period, the new state seems to have taken the inevitable decision to use traditional regional centers (but usually not their former palaces) as secondary bases for its administration. The vast scale of crops and animals documented by Knossos scribes, and place-names, seem to indicate that the state was involved with a major degree of control across some two-thirds of Crete (Killen in Rethinking 2007).
Recently much debate has rightly tested the strength of evidence for our understanding of Mycenaean politics and economy (see Rethinking 2007). One revisionist school is unsure if the major centers were really state capitals, preferring multiple competing centers (chiefly for the crowded Argos Plain), or alternatively envisages palaces as having a small role in their regions, with most economic activity under the “private” control of local elites, sanctuaries, and village communities (the “damos” or people). Others take a completely opposite stance, and view references from the Anatolian Hittite Empire archives to negotiating with the Great King of the Ahhiyawa (Achaeans or Mycenaeans) as evidence for an empire in which the separate palaces owed allegiance to a super-king, although dispute revolves around Mycenae or Thebes as his base. For the first scenario, the Plain of Argos has little to help us reconstruct its politics from the Linear B archives, but at least a high status for Tiryns compared with Mycenae seems necessary from the archaeology. Where the texts are richer a much clearer situation emerges, supporting the traditional view. The organization of the states of Pylos and Knossos appears to depict very large realms under a high degree of control and exploitation, whilst the recent Thebes records and the role of its rival Orchomenos in the drainage of Lake Copais and the construction of a giant satellite administrative center within it, appear to indicate the same for Central Greece. The archaeology of these centers would suit their preeminence in their supposed state-territories. As for a super-king, in the absence of Mycenaean diplomatic records we can add little regarding this scenario, but an alternative solution is the model presented in the poems of Homer, where King Agamemnon of Mycenae is the “first among equals” in the legendary coalition of Greeks against Troy. This might encourage foreign states to assume a single ruler.
Intensive and extensive archaeological surveys are now plentiful enough to allow a provisional estimate of the scale of population and land use in Mycenaean
Greece. This has not been attempted, although it would shed light on the theory that palatial demands on crop surpluses could have threatened economic and social stability and assisted the fall of the Mycenaean states. In the Argos Plain the density of major centers does seem to be accompanied by very high population density, based on burial evidence (Bintliff 1989), but other provinces seem not to be densely settled in the countryside, for example Boeotia (Bintliff et al. 2007). There is growing evidence for an out-of-phase rise of human settlement by region, responding to varied local and external stimuli (Bintliff 2005), and this does challenge any idea of a general ecological collapse or economic revolt against palatial extortion leading to the fall of the civilization. Nonetheless, it is clear that the hierarchy of Mycenaean settlements required a solid body of regular secondary sites in each state-territory, something confirmed by the Linear B records where most economic activities were dispersed in the latter. Such lesser settlements will have been local foci from later MH times, and under the influence of flourishing conditions assumed for the mature Mycenaean period they should have grown in size and prosperity. We know too little of such sites, but Tsoungiza in the Nemea district, which climaxes in LH3B at some 7,5 ha, provides a precious insight into neglected lower levels of the settlement system (Shelmerdine 1997). The apparent lack of villas, a form of local administration on Second Palace era Crete (Bennet 1988), could indicate a more embedded economy focused on existing nucleated settlements.
Beyond the Mycenaean heartlands of the Southern Aegean, developments in Northern Greece are a useful counter to explanations coined purely from the southern civilizational perspective (Andreou et al. 1996, Andreou 2001, Bommelje 2005). During the later Bronze Age there is evidence for both population rise and wider use of many landscapes in Aetolia, Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace, during which networks of larger villages or even small urban sites emerged as likely “central-places” with economic, social, and arguably political influence on limited zones of satellite settlements in their districts.
But even within the Southern Mainland there are regions whose Mycenaean settlement patterns are very unclear, leaving open whether these were districts where less complex networks of fortified sites and villages prevailed, or alternatively where minor states await discovery.
World History
