Chapter Six
The Early Iron Age of Greece

This chapter sets out to present a study in synthesis, as tentative and provisional as the attempt at analysis offered in the preceding chapter. One of the objectives of archaeology according to David Clarke—indeed perhaps its highest objective—is "the development of higher category knowledge or principles that synthesize and correlate the material in hand while possessing a high predictive value."^[1] In proposing a few hesitant steps towards that rather lofty aim, I choose for a field the Early Iron Age. I personally have done intermittent work on this period for some time, but I hope to show that it also has more objective qualifications to serve as the field for such an experiment.

As its name suggests, the period between about 1100 and 700 B.C. witnessed the introduction of a new industrial metal to take the place of bronze. But it is also distinguished from the Late Bronze Age by a whole series of other criteria. First, the greater part of it appears to have been an entirely illiterate age, whereas the Late Bronze Age had seen the development of at least two comprehensive writing systems in one or more centers of Aegean culture. Further, the secondary capacity for communication pro-

[1] D. L. Clarke, Analytical Archaeology (London, 1968; 2nd ed. 1978, ed. R. Chapman), 20.

vided by representational art was also temporarily lost at the transition from Late Bronze to Early Iron. Next, the marginally historical quality that the Late Bronze Age acquires from the fact that there are probable references to the Aegean world in surviving Hittite and Egyptian documents is also missing from the ensuing age. Fourth, the core of Late Bronze Age historical reality that has been argued—one might say demonstrated—to lie behind later Greek heroic legend has no counterpart in the Early Iron Age: insofar as any legends can be argued to have their origins in these centuries, they are (like the foundation traditions of the Ionian migration) utterly impoverished in content compared with the great sagas that have maintained their grip on the ensuing three millennia. Turning to strictly archaeological evidence, the record of military disturbance, and provision against it, that makes the Late Bronze Age such a convincing setting for the heroic legends is not continued into the Early Iron Age: destructions of settlements are hardly attested until the eighth century, and even fortifications seem entirely confined to Ionia and the islands of the Aegean. Indeed, the use of monumental masonry, for any purpose, disappears for some centuries after the end of the Bronze Age. Finally, we may in effect sum up several of the preceding observations by saying that the later Greeks seem neither to have remembered, nor to have wished to invent, many events or personalities that could be attributed to the Early Iron Age. The very few exceptions are, among the personalities, suspect either as to their very existence, or at least in terms of their chronological placing in some Greek sources: I am thinking of such cases as Herodotus's ninth-century date for Hesiod and Homer, or the galaxy of early dates offered for Lykourgos of Sparta. As for the "events," most of them are (like the Ionian migration) really only prolongations of the long-drawn-out processes of migration that had characterized the end of the Bronze Age.

Yet the Early Iron Age, while so clearly set off from what had

preceded it, cannot be regarded simply as the beginning of the new era of historical Greek civilization either: it is too sharply divided from the Archaic period that followed it. One category of this division was considered in chapter 5: the transformation in the whole attitude to the heroic past that came about with the westward spread of Ionian epic. Prior to this, it seems that on the Greek mainland (and at least some offshore islands) the idea of the "hero" was linked to ancestor worship, and was not tied to one specific past era; afterwards, these attitudes had to be merged with the notion of an eternally receding "Heroic Age," set already in the distant past, and a prime heritage of the whole Greek world.

Beside this division of an intellectual and spiritual kind, we can set several others that are on a more mundane level. There is, first, a remarkable discontinuity in occupation between what appear to be some of the most prominent settlement sites of the Early Iron Age and those of the ensuing period. There is an obvious commonsense objection here: that it is the very fact that these sites were deserted after the Early Iron Age that has made them fruitful sources of knowledge for the excavators interested in this early period. There is some force in this claim: undoubtedly there are also sites famous from later ages, such as Athens and Argos, that would be prime sources of information about the Early Iron Age were it not for the disturbance and contamination of their earlier levels brought about by their later florescence. But there remains a core of reality that cannot be entirely eroded by this argument. There is a long list of important Early Iron Age settlement and cemetery sites that simply disappeared from recorded history after this period ended: the telltale sign here is that they are known to us, and will always have to be known, by their modern Greek place-names. But it would be difficult to claim that all, or even most, of the places on this list are important only in the sense that they convey important knowledge to the archaeologist. Among them are Karphi, Kavousi, Vrokastro,

and Kommos in Crete; in the Cyclades, Zagora on Andros, Xobourgo on Tenos, Agios Andreas on Siphnos, Koukounaries on Paros, Grotta on Naxos, and the site called Vathy Limenari on tiny Donoussa; further east, Emborio on Chios and Vroulia on Rhodes (even though both survived into the earlier Archaic period); Lefkandi in Euboea; and on the mainland, Nichoria in Messenia and Kalapodi in Phokis (see Figures 56–58, pp. 186 and 191). Some of these had at least a genuine regional importance: Zagora for example was surely for a time the leading settlement on Andros; Koukounaries has in the past two years of excavation shown itself to have been a much larger site than had previously been apparent; Kommos has remarkable architectural features for its period; Kalapodi was clearly an important sanctuary for its region; and as for Lefkandi, on present showing it had features unmatched in the whole of the then Greek world.

Yet these places were eventually abandoned, in most cases totally and permanently, and then forgotten. Whatever our explanation of this fact, it is likely to include an acknowledgment that the nature and needs of a major regional settlement site were no longer commensurate with some of the sites of the preceding era. This circumstance thus provides a major distinction between the Early Iron Age and succeeding periods. It is not the only such feature. At approximately the same date as that of the abandonment of many of these places—that is, about the end of the eighth century—other changes are visible in the sites where occupation does continue, whether we choose to treat them as the culmination of the Early Iron Age or as signs of the advent of something new. Some are merely the positive counterparts of the features listed earlier, in their negative form, for the end of the Bronze Age: the recovery of writing, for example, the return of representational art in a variety of media, and the resurgence of some kind of continuous historical, or pseudo-historical, record. In the archaeological field, we now have independent evidence that organized internal warfare was once again becoming the normative

state of affairs in mainland Greece; this was also the time when burial with arms, that symbol of private, free-lance militarism, was discontinued in the more advanced regions of Greece.

These two balancing sets of contrasts would appear, from the viewpoint of the traditional historian or archaeologist, to show the Early Iron Age at a disadvantage at every turn. The reconstruction of a narrative history, which is a temptation for the archaeologist of the Aegean Bronze Age and a duty for the traditional classicist, is simply an impossibility for the Early Iron Age archaeologist. Even for an analysis of the society of the period, in default of the kind of secondary aid that can elsewhere be acquired from Linear B texts or Archaic inscriptions and vase-paintings, one must depend on various archaeological approaches that are, as yet, in an early stage of their development; for recent analyses have suggested that the Homeric poems, that other potential resource, are as debatable in their application to these questions as are, say, the Geometric vase-paintings. Yet, negative though they mostly are, my reason for drawing up this list of characteristic features of the Early Iron Age is in fact an optimistic one.

I want to suggest that these very features give us the freedom to apply certain approaches most commonly adopted in much earlier periods of prehistory, and generally associated with the new archaeology. Such approaches proceed by first posing a clearly defined problem, rather than simply confronting a period or subject; by then developing a model that embraces specific assumptions that bear on that problem, rather than letting the evidence "speak for itself"; by then deducing certain testable propositions that should follow from the model, rather than merely looking for suggestive features in the evidence previously considered; and, finally, by actually testing those propositions. I do not promise to follow this procedure every step of the way; but I do think that we could make a beginning by choosing a problem that is so central to the Early Iron Age of Greece that our pro-

Figure 51.
Distribution map of sites in Mycenaean Greece, fourteenth to thirteenth centuries B.C. 
(after G. Phylaktopoulos and C. Bastias).

posed solution to it will constitute a synthesis of some of the most important evidence available from that period.

This, of course, involves an act of choice. I have pondered and rejected a series of possible problems because, although real enough, they do not quite possess the quality of centrality that we are looking for. There is, for example, the well-worn question

of what brought about the fall of the Late Bronze Age civilizations of the Aegean, reducing the populous and clearly stratified settlement pattern that we see in the map of Mycenaean Greece in the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. (Figure 51) to the fragmented remnant that appears in the map of sites known to be occupied in the later eleventh century, at the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age (Figure 52). It is relevant that this is such a well-worn question, that so many variant solutions to it have been proposed that, collectively, they may already comprise a substantial element of the truth; relevant, but not decisive. A more important consideration is that, even if an entirely convincing account of this episode could be achieved, it would not constitute more than the first chapter in any synthesis of the nature of the Early Iron Age.

Next, and in some ways more attractive, there is the problem of the change in metal use itself: what were the causes and effects of the replacement of bronze by iron (Figure 53) as the staple material for a range—actually quite a narrow range, but a vital one—of industrial and other activities? Is it possible that the impact of this change was so deep that it shaped, to some considerable extent, the developments of the next few centuries? This approach would have the great advantage that, since virtually every part of Europe and Asia was in due course to go through much the same change, comparative evidence can be drawn from almost half the globe. This and other attractions have exercised a special appeal in Marxist circles, and Gordon Childe was probably the first to give an affirmative answer to the question that I asked just now: yes, the impact of the change affected every society that underwent it, to its foundations; the cheapness and wide availability of iron, by comparison with copper and tin, would have had an egalitarian and democratizing effect. Since just such an effect is, in some non-Marxist opinions, detectable in the material record of Early Iron Age Greece, the argument is by no means to be dismissed as mere dogma. The issue as a whole, too, must surely lie near to the heart of the matter. Yet as

Figure 52.
Distribution map of occupied sites in Greece, c. 1050–1000 B.C.

Figure 53.
A typical range of iron objects from Early Iron Age tombs (Lefkandi, Euboea).

an explanatory model for the Early Iron Age, it has one defect that appears insurmountable: as it stands, it may explain some of the striking contrasts with the Late Bronze Age, but not those with the ensuing Archaic and classical periods, in which Greek industry and economy remained essentially based on iron, yet took radically different forms.

I turn therefore to a third possible approach: that which is based on the political systems of the Early Iron Age. Is it possible to reconstruct them, through a combination of inferences from the breakdown of the Late Bronze Age systems (of which we know a little), from the contemporary archaeological evidence, and from possible survivals of the Early Iron Age systems into later periods? To a limited extent, I think that it may be; but I do not think that this approach can generate enough explanatory power. Even if we succeeded in establishing, say, that Greece in the Early Iron Age was peopled by a network of acephalous tribal societies with few distinctions of rank and wealth—and I doubt that we can—then this would still remain for the most part a result, not a cause, of more fundamental processes that would remain obscure.

I therefore suggest that we formulate our problem in none of the aforementioned ways. The weakness of the approach through the fall of the Bronze Age civilizations is that it can throw light only on the beginning of the Early Iron Age, and not on its duration. The approach through the change in metals might explain why some features of the period took the form that they did, but not why there was such a long delay before they developed into something quite different. The approach through political systems could hardly have a temporal dimension at all, given the paucity and imprecision of direct evidence. In other words, all three approaches fail in respect of the length of the period that possessed the features we are trying to explain. Might we therefore instead directly address the issue of duration? The problem could then be posed as follows: why did it come about that some

four centuries elapsed during which Greek material culture appears to have changed so little? Why did it take so long for literacy, representational art, monumental architecture, and other attributes to appear, or reappear, in the form in which they eventually did? Why were the later Greeks apparently content to accept so long an interruption in their recorded past?

I have tried to avoid phrasing these questions in a prejudicial way, by stressing the appearance rather than the actuality of the material record. Another of the lessons that we should be learning from the new archaeology is the urgent need for developing what Lewis Binford calls "Middle Range Theory": a theory, that is, for relating the apparent features of the archaeological record to the realities that caused them to appear in that form. He writes: "We need . . . to get answers to questions such as 'What does it mean?' and 'What was it like?' Only if reliable answers to these questions can be obtained might work on the question 'Why did it happen?' be profitable."^[2] Since this last is indeed the form of question that we are posing ourselves, it will be as well to pay heed. We cannot naively assume that the material record of our period means what it appears to mean; nor can we evade the problems by simply posing all our questions in terms of the appearance of the evidence today, for the answers, whether they proved trivial or interesting, would not advance the main argument. Somehow, we have to take the intervening step from the record as it appears in the 1980s to the material realities of the time.

As often, we who work in Greece are relatively lucky, by the standards of world archaeology, in the range of external, nonarchaeological evidence to which we can appeal. In the present

[2] L. R. Binford, In Pursuit of the Past (London, 1983), 194. Also important is his argument (e.g., at 213) that the use of evidence from nonarchaeological contexts is vitally necessary to the development of archaeological "Middle Range Theory," rather than being merely a passing fashion among new archaeologists as some of their critics believe.

quandary, too, we can make use of this circumstance. Thanks to the Linear B texts, we know that speakers of the Greek language were living at least in the central and southern Greek mainland and Crete in the Late Bronze Age. We know that in these and many other regions they also comprised at least the overwhelming majority of the population in the eighth and seventh centuries B.C. We are thus entitled to infer that, to a considerable degree, it was one and the same people that generated the material record from the earlier to the later period, passing through the Early Iron Age on the way. If it was essentially the same people who apparently lost the art of writing and then rediscovered it in a different form; gave up producing representational art in several media and then resumed doing so, partly in these same media; abandoned monumental building in dressed masonry and then adopted it again—if this is so, then it would seem reasonable to infer that there was some profound change of circumstances that led to the suspension of practices that, earlier and later, were found appropriate to life in Greek lands.

Let us suppose, however, that some or all of these "interruptions" are apparent and not real; that the changes in the record were brought about merely by changes in what David Clarke called "depositional behaviour."^[3] In this case, there may have continued to be writing and representational art, but executed only in perishable materials; monumental masonry may have been used, but in entirely new contexts, where excavation has not yet detected it, or at least recognized it as belonging to this period. One might, perhaps, even then maintain that the inference of a "profound change in circumstances" could still stand: after all, could anything less induce people to alter their habits so radically? As a matter of fact, however, I think that we can go some way towards showing that our picture of the Early Iron Age is not so illusory.

[3] D. L. Clarke, "Archaeology: The Loss of Innocence," Antiquity 47 (1973): 16.

With writing, for instance, it is not just the fact that for over four hundred years no trace of writing in durable materials survives. There is also the observation that the Linear B script, as seen in the late thirteenth century B.C., and the early alphabetic writing of the mid eighth century B.C. have absolutely no point of contact between them. Yet there was scope for such interaction: for Linear B, although a syllabic script, did have five signs for the five simple vowels a, e, i, o and u when used in an initial position. The devisers of the early Greek alphabets found that signs for these vowels were deficient in the Semitic models that they were otherwise using, and had therefore to designate signs for them. Had the Linear B script given way directly to these Greek alphabets, we might have expected there to be some vestigial relationship between the signs chosen, for essentially the same purpose, by the two writing systems; but there is no trace of any such thing. So although we must concede the possibility that the interval of illiteracy lasted considerably less than its apparent four hundred years, it is hard to believe that it will ever prove to have been nonexistent.

With monumental architecture one can argue along similar lines. We can be virtually certain, at any rate, that it did not continue in use for fortification, the context where it had previously been at perhaps its most impressive: not least because of the interesting cases where surviving Late Bronze Age fortifications were later brought back into use to protect Iron Age settlements. As for domestic buildings, we can point to at least one instance where the scale of the building would, in the eyes of a Mycenaean architect, have cried out for the use of a rectangular plan, timber reinforcement, and perhaps dressed masonry footings. It is the building identified by its excavators as a heroön at Lefkandi, which was mentioned in the previous chapter (Figure 54).^[4] It was well over 30 feet wide and at least 150 feet long—bigger than the

[4] See M. R. Popham, E. Touloupa, and L. H. Sackett, "The Hero of Lefkandi," Antiquity 56 (1982): 169–74.

Figure 54.
Plan of the probable heroön at Lefkandi, Euboea.

central building of a Mycenaean palace—yet its walls were constructed of a socle, or plinth, of roughly shaped stones with a mud-brick superstructure, and are only about two feet thick. It is not clear whether these features have anything to do with the extreme brevity of the building's life, estimated at a single generation.

If these are cases where there was a genuine interruption of traditional practice, we can add to them others where the argument from silence does not enter into the matter. It is a fact, for example, that at the close of the Bronze Age, large areas of the Greek mainland gave up multiple burial in collective tombs in favor of single burial, whether by interment (Figure 55) or with cremation; the record is continuous from one period into the next. Likewise, when we consider building plans rather than building materials, there is clear evidence from many sites that the apsidal plan (Figure 56) began to replace the rectangular one in the selfsame regions of the central and southern Greek mainland, sometimes directly overlying the rectilinear structures of the Late Bronze Age. In such instances, we surely have no need to devote time to the problem of whether these apparent changes really took place: we can instead address ourselves directly to the question of the meaning of the changes. Much the same could be said of the change in metal use that was referred to earlier: iron takes over directly from bronze for the same range of objects (primarily offensive weapons and edge-tools) found in the same kinds of context (primarily burials).

It is otherwise with the apparent depopulation of Greece in this period, also referred to earlier by implication (see p. 176 above). Here there are many potential factors that could have distorted the archaeological record: the fall in the number of occupied sites could be explained by greater nucleation, or by mass recourse to new sites in unexpected locations that have yet to be discovered; alternatively, there could be something seriously wrong with our chronological scheme, based on the sequence of

Figure 55.
A typical cist grave of the Early Iron Age (Kerameikos SM grave 46, Athens).

Figure 56.
Reconstructed view of Early Iron Age apsidal house at Nichorira, Messenia (after W. A. McDonald and others).

styles of painted pottery. The fall in the number and frequency of burials could likewise be explained if some form of selectivity in burial was introduced at the close of the Bronze Age. These and other arguments have indeed been used by those who find the ostensible pattern, as presented for example in Figure 52, impossible to accept. It will be wiser, therefore, to confine ourselves to speaking of an apparent rather than a proven phenomenon here. But fortunately this may not in any case bear directly on our present enquiry: if, as most authorities now maintain, population level is an accompaniment, rather than a determinant, of major historical processes, then it follows that it cannot explain those processes, but can merely illustrate them.

We must return to the formulation of the chosen problem that faces us. What was the change of circumstance that caused Greek society, having lost literacy, abandoned many forms of representational art, and discontinued the use of monumental architecture and rectangular building plans, to endure these apparent de-

privations for a period of centuries? What was it that, at the same period, led to the permanent substitution of iron for bronze, and the almost equally permanent change, in many areas, from collective tombs to single burial? What caused the apparent desertion, again for some centuries in most cases, of a large number of long-lived settlements? What, finally, prevented the inhabitants of Greece, during these same centuries, from achieving almost anything that was found worthy of commemoration by their descendants? Can we find Clarke's "principles that synthesize and correlate the material in hand while possessing a high predictive value"?

One starting assumption may perhaps be taken from recent work in nonclassical archaeology. Most modern explanations of change in cultures stress the adaptive element: innovation is seen, in many cases, as the result of a collective response, either to new needs or to changed conditions; whereas traditionally the same phenomena would have been attributed to conquest or immigration, or explained by assumptions about peculiar racial characteristics or even about the insights of outstanding individuals. It will be apparent that, for our problem in the form in which we have chosen to pose it, the new approach offers more than the traditional one: when it is the persistence of certain conditions that is in question, particularly if they are apparently unfavorable ones, greater explanatory power is obviously generated by a model of positive, adaptive accommodation to these conditions than by a single, once-for-all hypothesis about how the conditions came into being. To give two specific examples: it may be that the switch from rectangular to apsidal building plans reflects merely a loss of technical competence; or, perhaps better, the loss of a standard, centrally determined size of brick that had hitherto dictated building methods to some degree, and a consequent reversion to improvised practices, involving the substitution of pisé (rammed earth or mud) for individual bricks—as has recently

been suggested.^[5] Yet some further factor must be invoked to explain the prolonged delay in the resumption of former practices. Again, it could be that the advent of single burial reflects the arrival of new people for whom this was standard practice; but we must then still ask why the innovation commended itself to the Greeks, not only of the immediately ensuing generations in many parts of the country, but for much of the duration of classical civilization. Here, especially, the "adaptive" model is attractive: if the adoption of single burial is instead explained as a free choice on the part of people who no longer felt it appropriate for a family group to commit itself, by creating a collective tomb, to residence in one place for several generations, then one can see why the choice could have retained its appeal for later Greeks.

In the case of Early Iron Age Greece, I feel that past research (including my own—indeed perhaps especially my own) has placed too much stress on the negative aspects of the changes that took place near the beginning of this period. It now seems to me that the long duration of the responses and allegedly negative innovations demand that we look at the period in a different light. They must, in some important respects, have appeared to constitute a satisfactory solution to the conditions of life in Greece at the time. They must have composed a system that seemed to work reasonably well, even if that system had no features of interest to posterity, as was evidently the case.

What was that system like? Several kinds of evidence suggest that it was characterized by physical mobility. There are, first of all, the literary traditions of migration in at least the early phases of the period; but even those who embrace these traditions in all their detail as warmly as Nicholas Hammond does in the second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History ,^[6] for example, can only bring them to bear on the period down to about 1000 B.C.

[5] G. Gullini, discussion intervention in Annuario 59 (1981): 344.

[6] "The Literary Tradition of the Migrations," CAH , 2nd ed. (1975), vol. 2, pt. 2, 678-712.

There is also much archaeological evidence, again covering the twelfth and eleventh centuries B.C., to support the idea of a generally unsettled population: in the main, this indicates no more than local, short-range movements of people—but movements none the less. After this time, however, in the tenth, ninth, and eighth centuries, the orthodox view is that this unrest had come to an end, and that peaceful continuity of settlement, in the same locations, prevailed. But the time has perhaps come to question this view.

The prevalent picture of a settled country has, I think, arisen because movement of population is, in many minds, inseparable from war, invasion, and aggression generally. Since the evidence for these latter features—destruction levels, fortifications, and tangible innovations in material culture such as the advent of single burial—becomes very scarce in the years after about 1000 B.C., it has been tacitly inferred that population movements also came to an end. It must be conceded that there is a nucleus of major sites where the evidence does suggest more or less unbroken continuity from this time on: Athens, Argos, and Asine on the mainland and Knossos in Crete, for example; more questionably, Nichoria in Messenia and even more doubtfully Lefkandi in Euboea, where there are two mysterious gaps in the established sequence. When we look beyond these places, we find again and again that the evidence for occupation seems to begin or end, or both, with some abruptness at a point within the Early Iron Age.

Ideally, inferences of this kind should be based on excavated settlements; but the problem of necessarily incomplete excavation of sites, which was illustrated by the example of Lefkandi in chapter 2, makes this a hazardous undertaking. Still, we may point to a series of cases where the settlement is either relatively small and thoroughly excavated or, because of its later historical importance, has been fairly well scrutinized for signs of its earliest occupation. Of the places listed on pages 172–73 above, for

example, we find that the ninth century witnessed the first occupation of Zagora, Koukounaries, Vathy Limenari, and probably Xobourgo; by the same date or earlier, the first occupation of the site of the city of Sparta seems to have taken place; later, perhaps around 800, settlement began at another major classical city, Eretria; the eighth century saw the occupation of Agios Andreas and Emborio (Figure 57) in the islands, and of a wide scatter of rural sites in Attica; now or earlier, the site of Messene was occupied for the first time; latest of all, the site of Vroulia on Rhodes (Figure 58) was settled around 700 B.C., just at the time when the abandonment of some of the other island sites (Lefkandi, Zagora, Vathy Limenari) was beginning to happen.

We can reinforce this list of changes in settlement location by referring to a number of cemetery sites with apparently limited duration of use. Here, we must admit the possibility of other explanations of the interruptions besides the factor of incomplete exploration: if, for example, it was a single lineage group that made use of one grave plot, then the discontinuation of burial may mean no more than the dissolution of that family group. Even then, however, a shift of residence, if only at the individual level, could well have resulted. At all events, it is a fact that many of the most fully studied Early Iron Age cemeteries had a strictly limited "life." In east-central Crete, the tholos cemetery at Panagia and the cremations at Olous—both of them sites where the burial evidence began only at the close of Minoan times—seem to have gone out of use during the tenth century; a similar chronology applies to a series of cemeteries on the island of Kefallinía; a burial tumulus at Vranesi (Agios Spyridon) in Boeotia was used from the tenth to the early eighth centuries; in Thessaly, there are substantial groups of graves at Halos, Marmariani, and Homolion that likewise began in the tenth century, and were discontinued in the ninth or eighth.^[7]

[7] On these sites, see A.M. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (Edinburgh, 1971), chap. 4, with references there.

Figure 57.
Reconstructed view of settlement at Emborio, Chios (after W.D. Heilmeyer).

Figure 58.
Reconstructed view of settlement at Vroulia, Rhodes (after W.D. Heilmeyer).

This is an admittedly small sample of Iron Age sites—chosen, as I say, on the grounds of having been relatively thoroughly investigated—but it does tell a unified tale of relatively short-term occupation, preceded and/or terminated by an apparent movement of people, on however small a scale. If we except the sites of historical importance where settlement was to be permanent—Sparta, Eretria, Messene—the average "life" of this list of sites, settlements, and cemeteries, works out at some 150 years. This would be no fleeting period of time in contemporary eyes; yet it is significantly shorter than the average lifetime of a settlement in the preceding Bronze Age and, even more clearly, in the ensuing classical period. Whatever its ultimate significance, it is, I suggest, another of the distinctive features that help to set off the Early Iron Age as an interruption in the long-term development of Greek culture.

This finding may perhaps be brought into association with another, much more familiar aspect of Early Iron Age settlement: the relative rarity of sites of any kind. This is a feature that, far from being modified or diminished, has been greatly reinforced by the progress of Greek archaeology in the past decade. There are almost no new names, for example, to be added to the map shown in Figure 52, which was first published in 1971. The mainly negative results obtained by the time-honored method of excavation have been fully replicated by the more recent experience of surface survey, both extensive and intensive; some figures for Boeotia, to be considered presently, demonstrate this forcefully. As we have already acknowledged, this feature is not self-explanatory: other causes besides simple depopulation could lie behind the apparent lack of sites. In particular, now that we have the added finding that some of the sites that were occupied had limited lives, it begins to seem more likely that their mobility may also be partly responsible for the elusiveness of the inhabitants of Early Iron Age Greece; that this was at least a contributory cause. If people were readier to change their places of residence than at

other periods, then their occupation of sites may have often been too fleeting for traces to be recoverable by excavation, let alone by surface survey.

What lay behind this disinclination to put down permanent roots, which apparently persisted for at least the two centuries between about 1100 and 900 B.C., when sites are so few, and in some areas even longer? Is it possible that the whole regime of sedentary occupation of more or less permanent sites that had characterized the Aegean world since Neolithic times—"sedentism," to give it a succinct, though hardly euphonious, label—was partially suspended during the Early Iron Age? Such a regime is, for obvious reasons, the normal accompaniment of an economy based on the plow; as has often been observed, it takes a lot to persuade peasants to desert their land. It may seem drastic to suggest that this tradition may have been interrupted, but in fact that view is very far from being original. It has regularly been asserted over the past fifty years of classical scholarship, though in most cases on purely a priori grounds, that Greek society in the period after the Mycenaean era reverted to some form of pastoralism.

Now a pastoralist community may take many forms. As a first step, we should acknowledge that the notion of pure pastoralism, for any period in later Mediterranean prehistory, and even on a local scale, is a highly improbable one. Most forms of animal husbandry are only effective within a context of wider farming: the availability of stubble for grazing in the later part of the year is only one of the reasons for this. As a strategy for subsistence, pastoralism is less reliable than cultivation, and of course it makes much greater territorial demands. Further, a pastoral community may be fundamentally as sedentary as one of cultivators; the difference is that, in the long term, pastoral use of the landscape tends gradually to exhaust it, and thus to encourage periodic changes of residence. The other alternatives are seasonal transhumance and a purely nomadic way of life; but I see no

strong case for invoking either of these practices for the Greek Early Iron Age as a whole. Transhumant communities exist to this day in some of the lands round the Mediterranean, but only by positive and detailed arguments, of a kind requiring evidence that is simply not available for this period, could they be shown to have been a widespread phenomenon in past ages; while fully fledged nomadism is especially ill-suited to the fragmented landscape of the Aegean world, with its numerous mountain barriers, inlets, and islands. Let us then concentrate on the minimal hypothesis: that the Early Iron Age communities diverted a greater part of their resources to the pastoral sector than either their predecessors or their successors, and that this explains some of the distinctive features in the material record of this period.

We should deal at once with two objections of principle. First, this hypothesis posits a partial reversion from a more advanced to a more primitive method of exploiting the environment; and human communities who have once enjoyed the benefits of an agricultural economy do not lightly turn their backs on them. This line of reasoning has been strongly urged on me by those prehistorians to whom I have ventured to advance this idea in the past. For a time I was dismayed by this reaction: there could be no hope of convincing those who thought that the whole suggestion was to be excluded on principle. Yet what precisely is the principle that excludes it? In part, it rests on the disadvantageous features of pastoralism that have been sketched already; yet in the case of one at least of these disadvantages, the fact that a pastoral economy makes excessive demands on space, one can at once respond that all the evidence suggests that territorial space was more widely available in the Early Iron Age than at any period for many centuries on either side of it. In part, too, I think that the grounds for objection are part of a wider assumption that "sedentism" is a desired condition, and that movement of residence is to be avoided whenever possible. I was glad to find that, in his latest work, no less a figure than Lewis Binford has

attacked this assumption in print: he cites his own experience with Australian Aborigines, Alaskan Eskimos, !Kung Bushmen, and mobile horticulturalists in Mexico, all of whom would (and did) strongly disagree with this proposition.^[8] If it is objected that none of these peoples were pastoralists who had abandoned an earlier agricultural regime, then let us turn instead to historical evidence from Central Asia. Owen Lattimore has referred to well-attested cases of sedentary agricultural populations choosing to revert to a pastoral regime, often of a more thoroughgoing kind than what I am positing for Greece, in that it usually involved at least seasonal mobility of habitation.^[9]

A second, and to me more substantial, line of objection is that the model of a resurgence of pastoralism is extremely hard to test from the archaeological evidence—particularly that available from the Greek Early Iron Age; that it lacks the elementary qualities of verifiability or falsifiability, let alone the predictive power that we had hoped for. I do not think that this is quite true, as I hope to show; and in general, if archaeology has not yet devised effective criteria for distinguishing the material remains of a pastoralist culture from an agricultural one, it is high time that it did so. As a matter of fact, one of the few recent achievements of the new archaeology which even Paul Courbin, in his very critical account of it, accepts is the development of the hypothesis of seasonal occupation of sites, an idea that could be of relevance to our inquiry.^[10] But this potential line of criticism must nevertheless be taken seriously.

The Early Iron Age of Greece seems to me a possible field in which to advance and test this model because, for all the shortcomings of the archaeological record, there is as usual some non-archaeological evidence that can be called on for independent

[8] Binford (cited above, n. 2), 204.

[9] O. Lattimore, Studies in Frontier History (London, 1962), 246, with references.

[10] P. Courbin, Qu'est-ce que l'archéologie? (Paris, 1982), 215; cf. 111–113.

support. One cannot include, under this latter heading, the many a priori assertions that the Dorians, with other alleged immigrants to central and southern Greece at the close of the Bronze Age, had a pastoral or even a nomadic background that they transplanted to their new homes. Such claims, however often repeated, simply beg all the questions. I would trace back the scientific attempt to substantiate such propositions to an influential article by the Swiss ethnologist Karl Meuli on the origins of the Olympic Games, published in 1941.^[11] Meuli found significant correspondences between the early form of the Olympic festival and the funerary rites practiced by pastoralist tribes in Asia. From this he deduced a similar organization for the Dorian Greek society of the region of Elis, surrounding Olympia, in the early eighth century B.C. One does not need to follow Meuli all the way in his acceptance of the then universal view that these Dorians were fairly recent nomadic immigrants from further north to think that there is some validity in the correlations he observed. In particular, his linkage of the festival with funerary practice gains some support from the early cases of hero-cult and ancestor worship that we considered in chapter 5. We now know from direct archaeological evidence, as Meuli could not, that this type of commemorative cult was being practiced in Greece at approximately the right period: the building at Lefkandi (Figure 54), if correctly interpreted as a heroön , is the earliest and most impressive case. This gives force to his claim that the games began their history as a funerary cult at the tumulus identified with the grave of the hero Pelops (Figure 59): it has since been argued in more detail that this tumulus may have been a genuine (if anonymous) prehistoric burial mound.^[12] This inclines me to treat with greater respect Meuli's separate claim that the particular form of

[11] K. Meuli, "Der Ursprung der Olympischen Spiele," Die Antike 17 (1941): 189–208.

[12] H.-V. Herrmann, "Zur ältesten Geschichte von Olympia," AM 77 (1962): 3–34, especially 18–19.

Figure 59.
Plan of the sanctuary at Olympia in prehistoric times (after H.-V. Herrmann).

the Olympic celebration is characteristic of pastoral herdsmen—especially since, as we shall shortly find, the western Peloponnese is one of the areas that can offer independent evidence.

A quite different line of approach was used some years later by Thalia P. Howe, who worked from the documentary evidence of the Linear B tablets on the one hand and the Works and Days of Hesiod on the other.^[13] In the didactic nature of Hesiod's poem,

[13] T.P. Howe, "Linear B and Hesiod's Breadwinners," TAPA 89 (1958): 44–65.

she saw a tract designed to inculcate the first principles of cultivation in an audience unfamiliar with them and cited the Mycenaean documents as evidence for the earlier prevalence of a stock-rearing economy. It has to be conceded that this literal reading of the instructional passages in the Works and Days ignores the force of the didactic genre itself, which habitually adopts such a rudimentary tone; just as some of the supporting evidence from Homer, in addition to the problem of dating its origins, may also be no more than a product of the heroic genre, this time presenting a meat-based diet as the norm, but once again out of pure convention. Further, there is much force in the objection recently made by Paul Millett, that the Works and Days contains much other material besides agricultural exhortations.^[14] In my book on this period in 1971, I made use of Howe's argument,^[15] including the certainly mistaken corollary that the supposed pastoral regime extended right back into Mycenaean times. It is today clear that the Mycenaean economy, at any rate, was a mixed one, in which cultivation played an important part; so that the pastoralist phase, if real, would have to be seen in the form in which I am now proposing it: as an interlude that began in the post-Mycenaean age.

This revised view can still draw support from the evidence, advanced in my book, of the appearance in the ninth and eighth centuries, for the first time since the Bronze Age, of buildings interpreted as granaries, and of small clay models of the same (Figure 60). Such evidence for the practice of intensive cultivation is still absent from the preceding phases. But for the hypothesis to be properly tested, fresh evidence is needed that will not merely be compatible with the theory of an extension of pastoralism, but positively support it. Such evidence, in my view, exists; I shall rehearse it in the chronological order of the appearance of pub-

[14] P.C. Millett, "Hesiod and His World," PCPS 210 (1984): 103.

[15] Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (cited above, n. 7), 378–80.

Figure 60.
Restored drawing of clay model granaries from ninthcentury
 grave in the Agora, Athens (after E.L. Smithson).

lication, taking my first espousal of the theory in 1971 as a basedate.

In 1973 Klaus Kilian published a paper arguing that the dedications of small bronzes at a sanctuary of Artemis at Pherai in Thessaly could be best explained by seasonal visits of transhumant shepherds, since the typological origin of the bronzes lay in Macedonia and further north (Figure 61).^[16] This explanation at least involves a credible route of transhumance, attested in more recent times down the line of the Pindus chain and its foothills, but it is not suggested that the same factors could have operated all over the southern part of the peninsula at this time (the bronzes are primarily of eighth-century date). It would not be difficult, however, to test the interpretation at other sanctuary sites: a coherent picture of the geographical scope of this possible transhumance pattern might then emerge, strengthening the case for its reality.

In the course of a general survey of the Early Iron Age in 1975,

[16] K. Kilian, "Zur eisenzeitlichen Transhumanz in Nordgriechenland," Archäologisches Korrespondenzblatt 3 (1973): 431–35.

Figure 61.
Distribution map of Early Iron Age ring pendants in the Balkan peninsula (after K. Kilian).

the Hungarian scholar J. Sarkady introduced a new argument.^[17] He observed that of the hundreds of Mycenaean sites that were evidently deserted in at least the earlier part of the Iron Age, many were reoccupied in later times, and in some of these cases the names given to the new settlements were ancient ones: that is to say, they were the names the places had borne in Greek heroic legend, which presumably meant the historical names of the Mycenaean era. Even if oral tradition had kept alive the names as names, something more practical was needed to explain how

[17] J. Sarkady, "Outlines of the Development of Greek Society in the Period Between the 12th and 8th Centuries B.C.," Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 23 (1975): 121.

the memory of the locations had been preserved during the centuries in which the actual sites had lain empty. Sarkady argued that intermittent visits by pastoralists would provide the necessary explanation. It may clarify his hypothesis if I give some figures, taken again from the area of Boeotia that has provided a background for our argument before. Richard Hope Simpson and Oliver Dickinson have catalogued fifty-eight Bronze Age sites from this region, of which fifty-five were occupied in Mycenaean times.^[18] Just three of these can be shown to have been inhabited in the earlier part of the Iron Age, though the number rose somewhat in the ninth and eighth centuries. Later still, however, a long list of former Mycenaean sites was reoccupied, including Erythrai, Kreusis, Anthedon, Thespiai, Eutresis, Siphai, Thisbe, Chorsiai, Medeon, Koroneia, and Chaironeia. We may be able to give these places their proper ancient names today, but how do we know they already bore them in the Mycenaean period? Philological arguments could be applied in some cases, but a more general argument is that several of these places are mentioned in Greek legend, and M.P. Nilsson's work has taught us to respect the Mycenaean pedigree of "heroic geography."^[19] It is also very much to the point that a number of these place-names occur in the Catalogue of Ships in the second book of the Iliad , which in many opinions reinforces their claim to have kept their names from at least the end of the Mycenaean period. Yet in the interval nearly all of them underwent a period of three centuries or more of apparent desertion (sometimes, as at Eutresis, even longer).

Next, there is some evidence of a strictly archaeological kind.

[18] R. Hope Simpson and O. Dickinson, A Gazetteer of Aegean Civilisation in the Bronze Age (Göteborg, 1979), 221–24 (nos. F59–F66, including F64A) and 235–54 (nos. G1–7, G9–31, G33–47, including G40A). These were all occupied in Mycenaean times, but only G10, G23, and perhaps G22 have produced Submycenaean or earlier Protogeometric pottery.

[19] See, especially, M. P. Nilsson, The Mycenaean Origin of Greek Mythology (Berkeley, 1932), 100–136 on Boeotia.

In 1978, for the first and, so far, the only time, a collection of animal bones from an excavated Early Iron Age site was published; predictably, the site was Nichoria.^[20] It was possible to make a comparison between this faunal evidence and the comparable material from the earlier, Mycenaean levels at the same site. In the opinion of the experts who published it, the evidence allowed of a clear conclusion: the use of domesticated species at Nichoria showed first an upsurge in the proportion of cattle in the Early Iron Age; and second, a concomitant change in the ages at which cattle, sheep, and goats were slaughtered. These changes are to be explained by a major shift to stock-rearing, with the ranching of beef cattle as its chief component.

It might well be asked at this point whether direct structural evidence of short-term occupation should not be forthcoming if a stock-rearing population was in existence and was intermittently changing its places of residence as I have suggested. In 1981 evidence of this kind was discovered in the course of the Greco-Swiss excavation of the earliest levels at Eretria, belonging perhaps to the very beginning of the eighth century.^[21] Here, underlying the apsidal houses of the later Geometric period, there emerged a series of outlines of circular huts, founded on a simple bedding of mixed sand and clay, and embedded in the virgin sand of the foreshore; the walls, of which fragments survived, had been of pisé (Figure 62). These were clearly ephemeral structures, and their position underneath the earliest permanent houses precludes an explanation of them as temporary builders' quarters. The excavators interpret them as seasonal huts, occupied by

[20] R. E. Sloan and M. A. Duncan, "Zooarchaeology of Nichoria," in Excavations at Nichoria in Southwest Greece , vol. 1, ed. G. Rapp and S. E. Aschenbrenner (Minneapolis, 1978), 60–77.

[21] L. Kahil, "Erétrie à l'époque géometrique," Annuario 59 (1981): 165–73, especially 167–68 (with discussion, 345–46); and more briefly "Quartier des maisons géometriques," Ant. K. 24 (1981): 55–56, comparing M. R. Popham, L. H. Sackett, and P. G. Themelis, Lefkandi , vol. 1, The Iron Age (London, 1979–80), 16, pl. 8b.

Figure 62.
Part of the 1981 excavation area at Eretria, Euboea (after L. Kahil).

short-term visitors before the decision to found a permanent settlement had been taken; they also point to a parallel, of comparable date, in the curvilinear structures underlying the Geometric houses at nearby Lefkandi. The degree of short-term commitment to a site is compatible with, and perhaps best explained by, seasonal visits for pasturage. In the same vein, an entire settlement of this period, but of a very different kind and in a contrasting location, has now been interpreted by its excavator as a seasonal base for a community of transhumant pastoralists: this is Vitsa Zagoriou, in the mountains of Epirus.^[22] The evidence consists not only in the high altitude of the site above sea level, making winter occupation barely tolerable, but also in the prevalence of bones of cattle, sheep, and goats all over the site. Once again, the proximity to the known transhumance route of the Pindus chain makes this a persuasive interpretation, though its implications need not extend very far geographically.

[22] J. P. Vokotopoulou, "E Epeiros ston 8° kai 7° aiona p. Chr.," Annuario 60 (1982): 89.

A quite different kind of claim, a priori in nature but none the less testable, was advanced by Michel Sakellariou in a 1980 book, and then extended in its scope at a later conference.^[23] We have noted several times the prevalence of the apsidal plan of house on the Greek mainland in the Early Iron Age: Sakellariou suggests that this house shape can be more generally associated with mobile pastoralists; if the claim can be substantiated, it would of course have very far-reaching implications. In a similar spirit of generalization, the veteran historian and geographer Ernst Kirsten has put forward the suggestion that another feature of the material culture of this period, which we have not yet mentioned, the increasing incidence of handmade pottery of fairly high quality, might be explained as the product of mobile pastoral communities who did not enjoy regular access to a potter's wheel.^[24] This again could easily be dismissed as an unsubstantiated conjecture, but the phenomenon that it seeks to interpret is nevertheless a real one, which has found no other satisfactory explanation.

We have seen that the only body of evidence from animal bones of this period has proved to give positive support to our hypothesis. Another class of organic material that could be expected to be of help in this context is that of seeds; and in 1982 Glynis Jones published the first analysis of well-dated seed remains of this period, from the Early Iron Age settlement levels at Iolkos in Thessaly.^[25] Once again, the results are coherent and,

[23] M. B. Sakellariou, Les Proto-Grecs (Athens, 1980), 118–26, with his discussion intervention in Annuario 59 (1981): 345.

[24] E. Kirsten, "Gebirghirtentum und Sesshaftigkeit," in Griechenland, die Ägäis und die Levante während die "Dark Ages" , Symposion Zwettl, ed. S. Deger-Jalkotzy (Vienna, 1983), 437 n. 64.

[25] G. Jones, "Cereal and Pulse Remains from Protogeometric and Geometric Iolkos, Thessaly," Anthropologika 3 (1982): 75–78. Nichoria too had previously produced seed evidence—see I. M. and C. T. Shay, "Modern Vegetation and Fossil Plant Remains," in Excavations at Nichoria , vol. 1 (cited above, n. 20), 41–59—but it is very sparsely distributed among the chronological periods there.

from our point of view, arguably positive. From the floor levels of a building of Protogeometric (eleventh to tenth centuries B.C.) date, a deposit consisting almost entirely of pulse seeds was recovered; from a later floor, of Geometric date, the remains consisted largely of carbonized grain seeds. There is thus a clear contrast between the two periods and, inasmuch as the pulse could most plausibly be explained as animal fodder, the apparent sequence conforms to the picture of an initial concentration on stock-rearing and a later resurgence of cultivation that is posited by our hypothesis.

I should like to end by adding a particle of new evidence of my own. Since sanctuary deposits are, for the later part of the Greek Early Iron Age, so clearly the richest archaeological source, it occurred to me to try to exploit their evidence in some way, and the dedications of animal figurines at Olympia seemed to offer an opportunity.^[26] Olympia is perhaps the richest site in this sphere, and as the Early Iron Age approached its end, the sanctuary began to attract offerings from a wide area of the Peloponnese, and even beyond; during the Archaic period, however, the animal dedications die out. Between the tenth and the eighth centuries B.C., the proportion of oxen and sheep among these figurines, initially very high, shows a steady decline, although the ox figurines in particular (Figure 63) remain very numerous. If we isolate dedications believed to come from beyond the immediate region of Olympia (in most cases, they are in the style of the northeastern Peloponnese), then the proportion of oxen and sheep shows a steeper decline, until they vanish altogether (Figure 64). The interpretation of these figures is not free of problems: the residue of the dedications, which shows a corresponding increase over the years, is primarily made up of horse figurines, a type that is probably without relevance to farming practice. But the change

[26] The figures that follow are based on the catalogues in W.-D. Heilmeyer, Frübe Olympische Tonfiguren and Frübe Olympische Bronzefiguren , Olympische Forschungen, nos. 7 and 12 (Berlin, 1972 and 1979).

Figure 63.
Typical ox figurines dedicated at Olympia.

Figure 64.
Ox and sheep figurines as a percentage of all animal figurine dedications at Olympia.

over time is at least compatible with the idea that from the tenth century B.C. to the seventh, oxen and sheep had a role of diminishing importance in the life of the communities making the dedications; and that this diminution was more rapid in an area outside the immediate vicinity of Olympia, the northeastern Peloponnese. That the ox figurines reflect a concern with herding, rather than with the use of this animal for plough traction, is admittedly an assumption; but in the light of their large numbers, their close association with sheep and rams, and their general appearance of being beef cattle, it does seem the likeliest one. At any rate, there is nothing to contradict our hypothesis that the peak in livestock farming occurred in the earlier part of the Iron Age, and that a falling-off occurred with the approach of the historical period.

This survey of the findings of the past twelve years has not been a selective one: I have included all the evidence known to me that has a clear bearing on the issue. However one judges it in other respects, the new evidence unquestionably has the quality of independence of the initial hypothesis, since it was unknown at the time when that was formed. It includes at least six instances of entirely fresh material—the Thessalian bronzes, the Nichoria bones, the hut foundations at Eretria and Lefkandi, the evidence from Vitsa, the Iolkos seeds, and the Olympia animal figurines—that at the least are compatible with the original hypothesis, and in some cases may be thought positively to support it. Nothing that is directly contradictory has, to my knowledge, come to light during this same period.

All of this, however, makes only a fragmentary beginning to the task of validating the initial hypothesis. Now that they have already emerged, it is too late to put forward this list of findings as being predictable or deducible from the original "pastoralist model." Yet they do suggest that that model is, up to a certain point, a testable one; and it can now be predicted that further replications of them will give similar results. This may appear to

fall far short of David Clarke's prescription for archaeological synthesis, from which we started out; but I would still claim that the model of increased pastoralism in the Early Iron Age of Greece possesses a certain explanatory force.

Let us recall the problem that we originally posed ourselves: that of explaining the long duration of the material conditions of the Early Iron Age, as attested in the archaeological record. If, as I have suggested, Greek communities at this period were collectively devoting more of their resources to stock-rearing than before or afterwards, then this would be a clear case of adaptation to changed conditions. The breakdown of the Mycenaean palace system must have thrown the pattern of landownership into turmoil; the apparent desertion of many sites is likely to have brought with it the neglect of the agricultural land surrounding them; the experience of internal migrations over a period of several generations probably discouraged everybody from too close an attachment to the land. To practice large-scale stock-rearing from a few fixed bases could have seemed a perfectly reasonable response to such circumstances; and it would also go some way towards explaining the archaeological record of this time.

That record is characterized by an apparent absence of centralized control and of signs of major collective action; and later, after about the mid eleventh century B.C., by a prolonged lack of significant innovation of any kind. The relative lack of urgency of the pastoral way of life, and the readiness to move one's place of residence rather than struggle to consolidate, would conform to that picture; it would account for the otherwise surprising persistence of the elements that compose the picture; and, what is more, it would explain the most remarkable feature of the historical evidence for this period—its virtual nonexistence. What may have seemed to contemporaries an acceptable solution to their problems may well have held little or no interest for later generations of Greeks, who were by then otherwise occupied.

I shall end with a more precise restatement of the hypothesis

of Early Iron Age pastoralism, refined to some degree by the findings of recent years that have been discussed. I suggest that over much of central and southern Greece, widely spaced, sedentary communities supported themselves in part by cultivation of the adjacent land, but also, to a far greater extent than earlier or later, by pastoral use of the more or less empty spaces that had opened up in the map of Greece. In some restricted areas to the north, as is suggested by the evidence from Pherai and Vitsa, some of them may have practiced actual seasonal transhumance.^[27] In the western Peloponnese, there are signs—from the Nichoria bones and the Olympia dedications—that cattle ranching may have been the most prominent form of pastoral activity. When the drive to reassert the supremacy of cultivation brought its inevitable tensions, some of its supporters probably used the larger settlements as bases from which to extend plowing. Others, also preferring a nonpastoral way of life, may have formed the settlers for the new island communities that feature so prominently in the archaeological record between about 900 and 700 B.C. Gradually, this new order came to prevail, and found its fulfillment in the remarkable explosion of Greek culture that took place in the later eighth century and afterwards, bringing with it the territorially based city-state of historical Greece.

A plea for greater attention to be paid by the archaeologist of Greece to the approaches and insights of nonclassical archaeology, and conversely for the nonclassical archaeologist to become more aware of the potential the Greek field offers; a warning of the incommensurate nature of true archaeology and traditional,

[27] For a partial parallel to the case argued here, but based on the distribution of a pottery ware of a very much earlier period in Greece, see T.W. Jacobsen, "Seasonal Pastoralism in Southern Greece: A Consideration of the Ecology of Neolithic Urfirnis Pottery," in Pots and Potters , ed. P.M. Rice (Los Angeles, 1984), 27–43.

event-oriented history; an urgent summons to attend to the archaeology of the Greek landscape, despite or even because of the relative neglect of this sector by the ancient sources; a suggestion for exploiting the opportunities for integrating historical studies of ancient art with archaeological and other evidence; an attempt to apply different interpretative methods to a notoriously problematic episode in the development of Greek civilization—what do these efforts add up to? They are, I think, something more than the airing of a series of personal prejudices. They have in common the purpose of advocating a modest degree of change, whereby a perhaps uniquely conservative discipline could modify and extend its field without sacrificing the true strengths that have kept it alive hitherto.