The Aegean Bronze Age

Abstract

This chapter explores economic activity in the Aegean Bronze Age (circa 3000-1000 BC), focuses on the palatial societies of Late Bronze Age Crete and mainland Greece, and provides an outline of prior developments, on which they were based. It concentrates on what might be termed as the core of the Mycenaean world (mainland Greece from southern Thessaly to the southern Peloponnese, the islands of the Aegean, including Crete, plus much of coastal southwest Anatolia). There are two ways of conceiving the relationship between the Aegean Bronze Age and later periods of Greek history. The first suggests a radical discontinuity, and the second imagines a seamless continuity. Neither of them is likely to be accurate, but it is certainly incorrect to isolate the Bronze Age with artificial barriers between the modern disciplines of history and prehistory. Life continued, however much it had changed, in most areas of the Aegean from the Late Bronze to the Early Iron Age.