Greece Before History

An Archaeological Companion and Guide

Curtis Runnels, Priscilla M. Murray

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9780804764506
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Archäologie

This book, a guide and companion to the prehistoric archaeology of Greece, is designed for students, travelers, and all general readers interested in archaeology. Greece has perhaps the longest and richest archaeological record in Europe, and this book reviews what is known of Greece from the earliest inhabitants in the Stone Age to the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of the Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.

The book describes the prehistoric cultures of Greece in chronological order, and illustrates with 98 detailed drawings each culture's typical artifacts, architecture, burial customs, and art. Written in an informal and accessible style free of scientific jargon, the book can be used in the classroom or as a guide for the traveler, or read simply for pleasure by anyone with a curiosity about the earliest ages of this fascinating region.

Although intended for a wide audience, the book has a solid scientific foundation. The authors are professional archaeologists with more than 25 years of experience in the field and with a first-hand knowledge of the methods and results of contemporary research. There is no other book today that covers the same range of periods and subjects, making it essential reading for anyone interested in the early civilizations that shaped the Greek landscape, laid the foundations for Classical Greek civilization, and contributed in many ways to the formation of the modern Greek world.

The authors have been careful to address the many questions concerning prehistoric Greece that have been asked them by students and visitors to Greece through the years. The illustrations were created especially for this book, showing familiar artifacts and sites from a new perspective, and selecting others for illustration that rarely, if ever, appear in popular publications.

CHAPTER ONE

AN INTRODUCTION TO THE PREHISTORY OF GREECE

There are many books about the archaeology of Greece that provide historical and literary background information, along with detailed descriptions of archaeological sites and museums accompanied by plans and illustrations of artifacts. Some are written for the student or general reader; others are aimed at travelers and supply information on restaurants, hotels, and local customs. As contemporary readers have developed more specialized tastes and interests, new books have addressed these trends. Many readers go to Greece only in their dreams, and they read books on archaeology and travel in order to satisfy their curiosity; others prefer to do their reading after they have visited the country in order to gain additional insights or refresh their memories. And others, perhaps the majority, wish a book to serve as a useful companion in their travels, one that will be on hand to answer questions that arise during visits to archaeological sites and museums. Perhaps ambitiously, we hope to satisfy all of these readers with this book. It is intended as a guide and a companion for all visitors, whether they travel to Greece on an airplane or a ship, in a classroom, or in a favorite reading chair.

In reviewing the books on Greek archaeology written over the past 25 years we found that most of them concentrate on the classical Greco-Roman past, and to a lesser extent on Byzantine Greece. Far fewer attempt to interest readers in the long, rich, prehistoric past of Greece, a country with one of the oldest archaeological records of all the European nations.

The first human beings to leave Africa and migrate to Europe passed through Greece. It was on the fertile plains of central and northern Greece that early farmers established their villages and created the first civilization on European soil. Later still, the legendary civilizations of Minoan Crete and Mycenae were established in southern Greece and the islands of the Aegean Sea. These civilizations made many important contributions to later Western civilization, particularly in the area of myth and legend. In our own day, poets, artists, writers, and even Hollywood producers tell the stories of gods, kings, and heroes from the Mycenaean and Minoan world: Agamemnon, Achilles, Odysseus, and Helen belong to the great cycle of the Trojan War. Minos, the Labyrinth, the Minotaur, the great hero Theseus, and the great legends that surround them are woven into the tapestry of our entire culture. Even the mysteriously popular legend of Atlantis has its roots firmly grounded in the deep prehistory of the Greek world.

Books devoted to Greek prehistory for the general reader and traveler are exceedingly rare. There are notable exceptions, particularly the well-written but sadly out-of-date work by Emily Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age, and some short guides to specific prehistoric sites, such as George Mylonas’s Mycenae: A Guide. We hope to fill this gap in the literature and have written this book for students, travelers, and the simply curious who wish to know something about Greece before history. We often meet people who want to know about the oddly shaped mounds (“tells” to an archaeologist) that dot the countryside; about the uses of the curious Stone Age flints seen in museum cases; or about the brightly colored pots and mysterious anthropomorphic figurines from prehistoric times in museums around the world. This book is also for those who want to know more about the foundations of later, historical, Greece. Finally, this book is for students of all ages and levels who simply want to know more about the marvelous accomplishments of Europe’s first great civilization.

The approach we take in this book is not one widely used in scientific writing, even for general audiences. The chronological outlines of prehistoric cultures, as well as descriptions of artifacts, architecture, burial customs, and the like, will be familiar. But our more personal observations and attempts to interpret these facts are not “objective” in the usual scientific sense. Although we make every effort to ground our interpretations on the available evidence, we occasionally go beyond the strict limits of the evidence to offer our own views on the past, which are sometimes based as much on intuition and experience as on logical deduction from theory. Some of our conclusions are the result of long reflection on a group of related problems; sometimes these conclusions are hard to put into words, and even harder to justify with the scattered bits of evidence that we have in hand. Given the lack of books on this subject, we believe this approach is justified, even necessary. We hope to stimulate dialogue by inviting readers to consider the evidence and reach their own conclusions.

Part of the novelty of this book resides in its dual use, as indicated by the subtitle: “An Archaeological Companion and Guide.” In this guide we present our evidence and conclusions in an orderly manner on the page, which allows all readers access; but we also want this to be a guide in the sense of a traveler’s “companion.” We know the frustrating experience of the traveler with limited time who finds himself or herself standing before a museum case crowded with artifacts but no labels, or looking out over a jumble of ruins with no means of distinguishing what is important from what is mere rubbish. Because we have sympathy for serious travelers and tourists, we have included a chapter (Chapter 7) and an appendix (Appendix C) that will help to make sense of what they see in Greece. For readers and travelers alike, the drawings herein have been carefully selected to provide a visual inventory of the scenery, typical artifacts, and the most important monuments and sites that the traveler will encounter. For example, Figure 1.1 shows the typical vegetation, architecture, and terrain of a seaside village. Thus this guide is both a reference for home or classroom use and a traveler’s vade mecum.

Now let us go on an imaginary journey into the prehistoric past of Greece. Traveling back in time, we quickly pass through the Ottoman and Byzantine periods with their light-filled mosques and churches encrusted with frescoes and smoking with incense (see Figure 1.2). Further back in time we encounter the Greco-Roman world of classical antiquity with its marble-strewn cities and temple precincts sprouting forests of columns. Processions of people wind their way up to the Parthenon, and the dark gray-blue Aegean is filled with the sails of ships.

1.1 The Greek countryside.

We soon leave these behind us, for the historical record is not very deep—a mere two and a half millennia. And we travel on, finding before us a broad vista of prehistoric cultures, still only imperfectly known from archaeological research. In the foreground is the barbarous splendor of the tombs and palaces of the Minoan and later Mycenaean civilizations and farther away a long stretch of earlier Bronze Age civilizations with bronze weapons, long oared ships, and startling, yet diminutive, marble sculptures of men and gods. And even more distant on the horizon we see the sunlit villages of the first farmers in Europe, pioneers from Asia Minor who colonized Greece more than 9,000 years ago in one of the greatest adventures of humankind’s early history.

Smoke rises from brightly painted adobe brick houses, and in the fields harvesters wield stone knives. As we come closer, we see others working in the open spaces of the village, fashioning figures of humans in clay and stone and painting pots with brilliant patterns of red and black. Although simple, these villages with their agriculture and industrial arts are still familiar. At the end of our journey, at the edge of our vision, we begin to see the very different people of the Old Stone Age. Villages of clay give way to caves and tented campsites, and instead of farmers we see small groups of people hunting wild oxen, bison, elephant, and rhinoceros on windswept, treeless plains. In a landscape where people are strangely rare, small groups at the farthest edges gather nuts and fruits along the banks of streams and lakes. This dreamlike, even fantastic, picture has no certain limits: it extends as far as we can see.

1.2 The landscape is dotted with ancient Byzantine churches.

At the extreme limit of our vision we perceive the oldest inhabitants of the land we know as Greece; shadowy figures who are not fully human, but something other. When we consider that the earliest inhabitants of this land may have lived more than 400,000 years ago, the 2,000 or 3,000 years allotted to all of the recorded history of Greece seems like thin, light-catching froth on the surface of a deep ocean of human existence. This book is about the long record of prehistoric Greece, the record of human actions and achievements before the beginning of recorded history.

FIRST THINGS

Let us begin by clarifying what we mean by “prehistoric.” Technically, prehistoric means “before history,” which begins when populations began keeping written records of the names of individual people and some account of the actions and events that took place in the past. Prehistoric cultures, by definition, are not known from such records; they are eternally anonymous and silent, known only from the work of archaeologists who have excavated buildings and burials, classified tools and weapons, and described and catalogued pottery, jewelry, and idols of now nameless and forgotten gods.

According to long-standing and ancient tradition, Greek history begins with the first Olympic games in 776 B.C. The rich accounts of ancient, medieval, and modern Greek history after this time are themselves the invention of the Greeks, who created the discipline of historical writing. All historians of the West trace their discipline back to, among others, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon, the first historians known to the world. With such a tradition, not surprisingly, scholars have paid less attention to the long record of human achievement that took place before history began.

The greatest of the ancient historians, Thucydides (ca. 460–400 B.C.), began his account of the Peloponnesian War with twelve chapters in a book that outlined the social and political conditions of Greece before his own time. He traced the peopling of Greece from the first migrating bands to the founding of walled towns, and to the first great event in the history of Greece: the Trojan War. As interesting and perceptive as it is, the “archaeology” of Thucydides was entirely speculative. Although Thucydides uses ethnographic “evidence” to describe the arms of the “barbarians” (that is, non-Greek peoples) and the fashions of Greek tribes, he uses archaeological evidence only once. In his account of the Athenian ritual of purification of the Cycladic island of Delos, Thucydides cites the non-Greek nature of the funerary remains that were removed from the island after burial was prohibited there. The weapons and the method of burial were regarded as evidence that the earlier inhabitants of the Cycladic islands were Carians from Asia Minor. Otherwise his “evidence” seems to be based almost exclusively on careful study of Homer and oral traditions. The interest of these chapters lies mainly in his sober, rational, and believable reconstruction of early Greek life that does not appeal to the mythical or the fantastic for explanation. But it is merely an imaginary narrative, however credible, composed by lamplight and unsupported by scientific evidence.

Thucydides is nevertheless an important guide and mentor for the prehistorian as well as the historian. In addition to providing sober, careful analysis, he contributed the vital insight that human nature is constant, and he believed that a thorough analysis of the wars and events that gripped his own time would help future historians understand the events of their own eras. “It will be enough for me,” he tells us, “if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future.” Although his assessment of human nature was essentially negative (“human nature, always ready to offend even where laws exist, showed itself proudly in its true colours, as something incapable of controlling passion”), Thucydides nevertheless underscores the value of the assumption of a constant nature for historians. Astronomers have found that they must assume that the laws of nature in distant galaxies are the same as the laws of our own solar system if they are to infer anything about what they cannot see; the same is true for paleontologists and archaeologists. The same constancy of human nature assumed by Thucydides allows us to judge and interpret the actions and even the motives of long-dead peoples in distant and extinct cultures. Without this assumption, archaeological inference would be impossible.

On the basis of a century of prehistoric archaeological research, prehistorians of Greece have divided the hundreds of thousands of years of prehistoric life into carefully defined periods with technical names—the Palaeolithic and Mesolithic periods (together, the Old Stone Age in popular writing), the Neolithic period (the New Stone Age), the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age, which was initially prehistoric (the Early Iron Age) but in the end encompasses all of the historic cultures of classical antiquity. This classification system was invented by nineteenth-century European antiquarians in Denmark and Sweden and goes back, by way of the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, to the ancient Greek philosophers, in particular the Boeotian poet Hesiod, one of the first to order the human past in a series of “ages.” The three-age system is somewhat too simple and general for use in contemporary scientific archaeology, but it is useful for conceiving of the enormous scope of the human past. In this book, we are concerned with the first two ages, the Stone Age, which comprises the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic subdivisions, and the Bronze Age, a much shorter period known chiefly for the glamorous Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations.

THE PLAN OF THIS WORK

This book organizes archaeological information by period, starting with the Palaeolithic, continuing through the Neolithic, and concluding with the end of the Bronze Age. Each period is illustrated with line drawings of typical artifacts and architecture rather than photographs, which usually accompany books written for the general reader. This rather old-fashioned approach perhaps requires some explanation. Line drawings are commonly used by archaeologists to communicate their findings to each other, and drawings, though less precise than photographs, can capture the essential features of a site or artifact, highlighting what the archaeologist thinks is important about them. Not incidentally, they are an attractive visual accompaniment to the text while at the same time helping the reader to recognize the essential characteristics of the material culture of prehistoric Greece. We have tried to include artifacts and views that are not commonly found in other publications.

Another feature of this book that is not found in the usual archaeological treatise is some practical information for travelers, whether students or seasoned professionals. Chapter 7 and Appendix C contain additional suggestions for an archaeological tour.

We have dispensed with footnotes in order to allow the text to flow freely, without interruption. The Bibliographic Essay at the end guides the reader to the sources of facts and theories mentioned in the text and suggests further reading.

Finally, let us say a word about ourselves. Because this is su...