The overwhelming impression one obtains from this review of the Greek Neolithic is that of a very static society, with change registered in limited places over some 4000 years of farming life. This is in the Annales long term, and could be associated with a similarly static worldview tied to a fixed economic and social pattern. The model of Halstead, where competition between households led to the emergence over the Neolithic as a whole of elite village/town families, is problematic when viewed at such a timescale. Why did this not occur faster and more generally? An even longer perspective, also a longue duree, is opened up if we consider the spread of mixed farming into Greece as the ultimate outgrowth of the diversification and specialization of the final phase of hunter-gatherer lifestyles, the Broad Spectrum Economy, stimulated by the unique combination at the end of the last Glacial of truly Modern Humans (Homo sapiens) adapting to dramatic ecological changes. Scope for the medium, and short term, and the individual, still focus around exceptional sites such as Sesklo, Dhimini, and Knossos, and here much still remains controversial about these potential “chieftain centers” or “town-like agglomerations.” Their “historical” trajectories are still to be unraveled. Since in any case the Thessalian complex tell sites do not appear to be central to the rise of the subsequent Early Bronze Age “High Cultures” of Southern Greece, only Knossos being arguably a locus for the elaboration of long-term political complexity, the rarity of complex settlements in the Greek Neolithic is reinforced. At the present, Perles’ emphasis on the overwhelming sense of stability, to the point of a static society, is attractive, where a sense of time might have been limited, centering around a mentality of peaceable agricultural preoccupations, and directly reminiscent of Ladurie’s concept of “motionless time” (1974; Bintliff1999b, 2004). But then Perles also persuasively argues for a remarkable degree of human mobility and economic complexity in the large-scale exchange systems for essential lithic materials. In comparison to Neolithic excavations in Northwest Europe, where in Germany and the Netherlands large-area settlement analysis and highly refined chronologies allow scholars to follow individual generations of early farming families as they abandon one house and build its successor (Luning 2005, cf. Bintliff 2003), opening up the possibility of the world of individuals and events, this perspective is not yet with us in Greece, but it surely will soon come. At that point some better understanding of the fluctuations in people’s lives over time and space should emerge, to confirm or challenge the current appearance of relative “immobility” for the Greek Neolithic.
World History
