Early Iron Age Greece Research Articles

Exploring connectivity in Late Bronze Age/Early Iron Age Greece and the Balkans using cranial non-metric analysis

The present study aims to explore connectivity and networking in Late Bronze Age (LBA)/Early Iron Age (EIA) Greece and the Balkans using morphological biodistance analysis and test the potentiality of newly introduced statistical tests, which were designed for challenging datasets, in this particular cultural area. Cranial non-metric traits were recorded in ten skeletal collections, spanning from East Crete to Romania. We followed an experimental statistical approach encompassing two different measures of divergence, the conventional and well-tested mean measure of divergence (MMD) and the newly introduced untransformed measure of divergence (UMD). Though different, results based on these two measures are mutually supporting and show that biodistances in our regional case studies mainly follow the isolation by distance model. This cautiously confirms our main hypothesis that during the LBA and EIA periods in Greece and the Balkans, personal mobility was a slow process characterized by integration, rather than displacement or transformation. The current study is the first one to infer biological affinities using cranial non-metric analysis combined with artifactual evidence, in LBA/EIA Greece and the Balkans. Building a larger dataset through future non-metric analyses will better enable exploring networking and mobility to further complement ongoing bioarchaeological, genetic, and material culture studies.

Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece ed. by Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock

Reviewed by: Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece ed. by Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock Naomi T. Campa Defining Citizenship in Archaic Greece. Edited by Alain Duplouy and Roger Brock. Oxford, UK and New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xiii + 370. Hardback, $120.00. ISBN: 978-0-1988-1719-2. The edited volume under review began as two conferences in 2009 and 2010.1 The contributors are all respected scholars in the field who represent an array of methodological approaches to citizenship. The uniting factor is the recognition of the archaic period as a valuable era of study in its own right, rather than solely a precursor to the classical age, and an overt rejection of the traditional view of citizenship based on Aristotle's standard of holding office and administering justice.2 Looking beyond an institutional definition of citizenship that privileges political office, the volume showcases what it meant for the Greeks of the archaic period to be citizens from the standpoint of descent and participation. An examination of the table of contents reveals the impressive range of contributions. The chapters explore the role of military obligations, commensality, religion, athletics, associations, luxury and other community delimiting activities. The volume serves both as a compilation of the current state of scholarship on archaic Greek citizenship and as a call to action, with some chapters laying the groundwork for future developments in the field. Rather than produce the most cursory summaries of all the chapters within the constraints of this review, I will instead highlight representative chapters, in particular those that gesture towards new directions for the field. Thus, exclusion by no means indicates a lack of quality or appeal. The book opens with Duplouy's wide-ranging survey that lays out traditional approaches to citizenship and the general response to them of the past couple of decades. Announcing from the outset that his survey will not be comprehensive, he manages to dip into controversies without getting bogged down. Despite his caveat, the chapter is a useful outline of the main currents of scholarship for those wishing to situate the chapters that follow. In "State Formation in Early Iron Age Greece: The Operative Forces," Davies [End Page 366] presents a model of six forces that lead to the development of the polis and so citizenship (namely, the exceptional individual, population, the environment, the supernatural, convertible resources and the combination of memory, imagination and identity). His self-proclaimed experimental approach is intended to lessen the gap between Classics and the social sciences and between the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. Davies suggests that his chapter is preparatory to future analysis since the work is incomplete without an account of the interaction of those forces. Blok's following chapter, "Retracing Steps: Finding Ways into Archaic Greek Citizenship," develops what a citizenship that decenters office holding was like in practice. She brings a keen eye to the study of terminology for "citizens" and participation in the polis in order to present a view of citizenship rooted in cult activity that is capacious enough to include women. While less detailed than her monograph, Blok's methodology reveals what careful philology coupled with historical method can accomplish.3 In line with the revisionist stance of the book, in "Citizenship and Civic Subdivisions: The Case of Sparta," Lupi makes the novel argument that obai were not in fact the five villages that predated Laconia's synoikism, but that they were the Spartan-variety of phratry (a subdivision of phylai). The contemporary evidence for archaic Sparta, including an inscription and fragments of Tyrtaeus, makes it a good case study for demonstrating the link between civic subdivisions and archaic citizenship. Whitley's chapter "Citizenship and Commensality in Archaic Crete: Searching for the Andreion" combines literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence, which are at times at odds with each other, to show the role of dining groups in citizenship. He frames the activity in these groups as "diacritical feasting" that delineated citizens from non-citizens in Crete. Whitely does not attempt to answer every question he raises, but encourages greater incorporation of archaeology in historical argument. Duplouy puts his introductory comments into action...

Production Sites of Early Iron Age Greek Bronze Tripod Cauldrons: First Evidence from Neutron Activation Analysis of Casting Ceramics

Bronze tripod cauldrons were one of the most prestigious types of objects in Greece during the Early Iron Age (EIA). Because of its character as an exchange object with a value easy to assess, the tripod became an attribute used in the communication of personal status. Consequently, the distribution of archaeologically recovered tripods can be used to identify hotspots of elitist interaction. Fortunately, quite a lot of the extant tripod fragments have a clay core and/or show preserved residues of the casting molds on their surface. In our pilot study with 61 samples from Olympia and five samples from Kalapodi, it is shown that neutron activation analysis (NAA) allows a coherent internal chemical grouping of the clay pastes used in the ancient casting workshops. Furthermore, comparative material from workshop debris and also geological samples allow a geographical localization of many of the chemical groups. In general terms, NAA therefore seems to be an effective method to define production sites of artifacts cast in the lost wax technique. In the case of EIA tripods, sites and travel routes of workshops can be traced as well as travel routes of clients. This provides new hard data for modeling both the political and the economic structures of EIA Greece.

Book Review of Le sanctuaire d'Apollon Daphnéphoros à l'époque géométrique, by Samuel Verdan

While Eretria is widely known for its “Daphnephoreion,” this book offers a long-awaited presentation of the archaeological evidence for the Sanctuary of Apollo in the Geometric period (ca. 900–700 B.C.E.). The introduction documents the history of excavation, interpretation of the site, and its place in the study of Early Iron Age Greece. The first three chapters provide a detailed discussion of the stratigraphy and architecture, followed by three chapters focusing on the sanctuary pottery, its context/date, and its qualitative and quantitative analysis.

Processes of Integration and Disintegration in Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece (1300 a 800 BC.)

O presente trabalho se propõe a pensar os processos de integração e desintegração na Grécia no final da Idade do Bronze e no início da Idade do Ferro. Assim sendo, pretendemos analisar a unidade cultural estruturada durante o período micênico e suas relações comerciais bem como a desintegração de ambas no final do segundo milênio e a configuração de um novo modelo baseado na distinção regional.

Poetry’s Politics in Archaic Greek Epic and Lyric

Poetry’s Politics in Archaic Greek Epic and Lyric David F. Elmer (bio) In memoriam John Miles Foley1 The Iliad’s Politics of Consensus In a recent book (Elmer 2013) examining the representation of collective decision making in the Iliad, I have advanced two related claims: first, that the Iliad projects consensus as the ideal outcome of collective deliberation; and second, that the privileging of consensus can be meaningfully correlated with the nature of the poem as the product of an oral tradition.2 The Iliad’s politics, I argue, are best understood as a reflection of the dynamics of the tradition out of which the poem as we know it developed. In the course of the present essay, I intend to apply this approach to some of the other texts and traditions that made up the poetic ecology of archaic Greece, in order to illustrate the diversity of this ecology and the contrast between two of its most important “habitats,” or contexts for performance: Panhellenic festivals and the symposium. I will examine representative examples from the lyric and elegiac traditions associated with the poets Alcaeus of Mytilene and Theognis of Megara, respectively, and I will cast a concluding glance over the Odyssey, which sketches an illuminating contrast between festival and symposium. I begin, however, by distilling some of the most important claims from my earlier work in order to establish a framework for my discussion. Scholars have been interested in the politics of the Homeric poems since antiquity. Ancient critics tended to draw from the poems lessons about proper political conduct, in accordance with a general tendency to view Homer as the great primordial educator of the Greeks. Thus Philodemus, in the first century BCE, wrote a treatise called On the Good King according to Homer, extracting lessons from both poems about the appropriate exercise of power; Dio of Prusa has Alexander of Macedon expounding to his father, Philip, Homer’s preeminent virtue as an instructor of princes (Oration 2).3 Modern scholars have tended instead to treat the poems as documents for early Greek history—or rather, prehistory. In the wake of Milman Parry’s demonstration of the thoroughly traditional character of Homeric poetry, it has come to seem plausible that the poems, by preserving a tradition that antedates our earliest written texts in alphabetic Greek, may offer a precious glimpse into the prehistory of Greek politics. Historians are thus able to offer the poems as evidence for the political forms and structures of late Bronze Age and early Iron Age Greece. Still the best-known example of this kind of argument is Moses Finley’s The World of Odysseus (1978 [1954]), which founds a number of claims about the society of the so-called Dark Age (roughly 1100–800 BCE) on nothing more than the testimony of these two literary texts.4 The appeal of such an approach is readily apparent—it holds the promise of providing access to a period for which textual sources are otherwise lacking—but so are the perils. One must always exercise caution when seeking to correlate a literary text with historical realia.5 This is particularly true when no external documentary evidence is available as a control. In the case of Homeric poetry, an additional problem arises from the very same circumstance that seemed to open up the possibility of a prehistory of Greek politics in the first place, namely, the indebtedness of the Homeric poems to a very lengthy oral tradition, as demonstrated by Milman Parry and Albert Lord. It is in the nature of such a tradition to preserve within its inherited and formulaic diction traces of chronologically diverse periods, so that the “Homeric World” described by Finley is really an amalgam of elements from very different eras.6 For example, within the world of the Iliad, the boar’s tusk helmet worn by Odysseus in Book 10—a Bronze Age piece of equipment that would not have been seen in Greece after, say, the fifteenth century BCE—can happily coexist with Iron Age weapons and implements that first came into use centuries later. A similar kind of synthesis can be observed with regard to marriage customs, burial...

Visible writing: questions of script and identity in Early Iron Age Greece and Cyprus

Summary. A number of seemingly intractable problems still surround the introduction of the Greek alphabet some time around the middle of the eighth century BC, after more than four centuries of Greek illiteracy. The question of when this happened, though debated, seems still more or less a matter of consensus on the basis of the date of the earliest extant Greek alphabetic inscriptions, but the questions of where, how and why it did remain largely unresolved. Of these problems, perhaps one of the most intractable is that of why it happened when it did, given that the old idea of an isolated ‘Dark Age’ Greece, cut off from the literate east during the centuries before 800 BC, is no longer sustainable. On Cyprus, too, there is something of a literacy ‘gap’ between the early tenth and late eighth centuries, though there is every reason to suppose that an indigenous syllabic script continued in use on the island over this period, and the problem therefore is one of visibility rather than existence. This paper considers the contexts in which alphabetic literacy was introduced to Greece and in which syllabic literacy became visible once more on Cyprus at around the same time, in order to see if these are entirely coincidental or whether some link may be found between them. In particular, it raises some general questions concerning the relationships between script and language and between language and identity in different parts of the ancient world in the later second and early first millennia, and the implications these may have for the role of script in constructing and defining identities in eighth century Greece and Cyprus (both incidentally inhabited by Greek‐speakers). It concludes that what we see are analogous, but quite separate, developments, both of them focused on Phoenician activity, but manifesting themselves in different circumstances through parallel but different phenomena.

Objects with Attitude: Biographical Facts and Fallacies in the Study of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Warrior Graves

Aegean prehistory still has to deal with the legacy of ‘Homeric archaeology’. One of these legacies is the ‘warrior grave’, or practice of burying individuals (men?) with weapons which we find both in the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in the Aegean. This article suggests that the differences between the ‘weapon burial rituals’ in these two periods can tell us much about the kind of social and cultural changes that took place across the Bronze Age/Iron Age ‘divide’ of c. 1100 BC. In neither period, however, can items deposited in ‘warrior graves’ be seen as straightforward biographical facts that tell us what the individual did and suffered in life. Rather, the pattern of grave goods should be seen as a metaphor for a particular kind of identity and ideal. It is only in the Early Iron Age that this identity begins to correspond to the concept of the ‘hero’ as described in the Iliad. One means towards our better understanding of this new identity is to follow up work in anthropology on the biography of objects. It is argued that the ‘life cycle’ of ‘entangled objects’, a cycle which ends in deposition in a grave, provides us with indispensable clues about the nature of new social identities in Early Iron Age Greece.

From Rulers' Dwellings to Temples: Architecture, Religion and Society in Early Iron Age Greece (1100-700 B. C.). By Alexander Mazarakis Ainian.

<i>From Rulers' Dwellings to Temples: Architecture, Religion and Society in Early Iron Age Greece (1100-700 B. C.)</i>. By Alexander Mazarakis Ainian.

Significant Others: The Male-Female Pair in Greek Geometric Art

After a century of scholarship, Greek Geometric figural art continues to pose fundamental problems of identification and interpretation. The intractable nature of basic iconographic questions is in part the result of the historiographic circumstances that formed the present canon of major and minor Geometric works. This study focuses on the specific iconographic theme of the male-female couple and traces its disappearance from histories of Geometric art as a result of academic and cultural biases operating in the early 20th century. Two examples, a pair of terracotta heads from Amyklai and a group of misidentified female figurines from Geometric bronze tripods, illustrate the progressive marginalization of the theme from the art historical mainstream. An inquiry into the origins of scholarship on Geometric sculpture demonstrates how crucial contextual information could be lost and what its restoration can offer in terms of a richer corpus of Geometric iconography with which to approach the challenges of interpretation. Emphasizing the iconographic flexibility of Geometric style, this study suggests that the image of a warrior with female companion was newly introduced in the mid-eighth century by elite patronage and found widespread social utility in the changing world of early Iron Age Greece.

JAN PAUL CRIELAARD, The Euboeans Overseas. Long-distance Contacts and Colonization as Status Activities in Early Iron Age Greece. University of Amsterdam, 19 June 1996. Supervisors: J.H. Crouwel, H.A.G. Brijder. Publication in preparation.

JAN PAUL CRIELAARD, The Euboeans Overseas. Long-distance Contacts and Colonization as Status Activities in Early Iron Age Greece. University of Amsterdam, 19 June 1996. Supervisors: J.H. Crouwel, H.A.G. Brijder. Publication in preparation.

Bronze to iron: agricultural systems and political structures in late bronze age and early iron age Greece

This paper surveys farming practices and their associated administrative structures in Mycenaean Greece, and outlines the kinds of changes which might have occurred in regional farming systems during the dark ages. It is postulated that the underlying subsistence basis of Greek agriculture remained substantially the same, although the structural position of élites in regional agrarian economies (as well as the constitution of élite groups) may have changed considerably. The type and degree of changes that occurred during the dark ages in any particular region seem to correlate with their earlier relationships to Mycenaean palace centres.

The Social Groups of Dark Age Greece

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe Social Groups of Dark Age GreeceWalter DonlanWalter Donlan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Classical Philology Volume 80, Number 4Oct., 1985 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/366938 Views: 30Total views on this site Citations: 28Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1985 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Bruce Macfarlane, Alison Elizabeth Jefferson The closed academy? Guild power and academic social class, Higher Education Quarterly 76, no.11 (Jan 2021): 36–47.https://doi.org/10.1111/hequ.12305Michael Loy, Anja Slawisch Shedding Light on the Matter: Evaluating Changing Patterns of Object Dedication in Ionian Sanctuaries (7th/6th – 5th/4th centuries BC) with Lexicometrical Analysis, Journal of Greek Archaeology 6 (Dec 2021): 166–200.https://doi.org/10.32028/9781789698886-9Kyle A. Jazwa, Christopher S. Jazwa Architecture and storage in Mediterranean environments: Case studies from the Aegean and southern California, Quaternary International 597 (Sep 2021): 87–102.https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2020.09.007Hans van Wees Heroic Benefactors?, (Jan 2021): 15–43.https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108895859.002Corinne Ondine Pache, Casey Dué, Susan Lupack, Robert Lamberton The Cambridge Guide to Homer, 46 (Feb 2020).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139225649Alexander Mazarakis-Ainian Early Iron Age Greece (c. 1150–700 BCE), (Oct 2020): 3412–3429.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_1449David B. Small Ancient Greece, 1 (Mar 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139034388Emily Varto The Idea of Descent in Early Greek Kinship, (Sep 2016): 44–64.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119143734.ch3Fiona McHardy The Role of the Extended Family in Exacting Blood Revenge in Classical Athens, (Sep 2016): 65–78.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781119143734.ch4Mait Kõiv Basileus, tyrannos and polis. The Dynamics of Monarchy in Early Greece, Klio 98, no.11 (Jun 2016): 1–89.https://doi.org/10.1515/klio-2016-0001Rodney D. Fitzsimons Urbanization and the Emergence of the Greek Polis : The Case of Azoria, Crete, (Apr 2014): 220–256.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107110274.008 Notes, (Dec 2012): 388–434.https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047654.009 Bibliography, (Nov 2011): 256–348.https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444342369.biblioWalter Scheidel, Ian Morris, Richard P. Saller The Cambridge Economic History of the Greco-Roman World, (Mar 2008).https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521780537Ian Morris Early Iron Age Greece, (Nov 2007): 211–241.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521780537.009 Shawn A. Ross Barbarophonos: Language and Panhellenism in the Iliad Ross, Classical Philology 100, no.44 (Jul 2015): 299–316.https://doi.org/10.1086/500434Ian Peter Morris The Eighth-Century Revolution, SSRN Electronic Journal (Jan 2005).https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1426851Christopher Rowe, Malcolm Schofield, Simon Harrison, Melissa Lane The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Political Thought, (Mar 2008).https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366Paul Cartledge Greek political thought: the historical context, (May 2000): 7–22.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.003Kurt A. Raaflaub Poets, lawgivers, and the beginnings of political reflection in archaic Greece, (May 2000): 23–59.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.004Simon Goldhill Greek drama and political theory, (May 2000): 60–88.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.005Richard Winton Herodotus, Thucydides and the sophists, (May 2000): 89–121.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.006C. C. W. Taylor Democritus, (May 2000): 122–129.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.007Josiah Ober The Orators, (May 2000): 130–141.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.008V. J. Gray Xenophon and Isocrates, (May 2000): 142–154.https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521481366.009Moshe Berent Anthropology and the classics: war, violence, and the stateless polis, The Classical Quarterly 50, no.11 (Feb 2009): 257–289.https://doi.org/10.1093/cq/50.1.257Catherine Morgan Ethnicity and early Greek states: historical and material perspectives, Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society 37 (Feb 2013): 131–163.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0068673500001565T.O. Beidelman Agonistic Exchange: Homeric Reciprocity and the Heritage of Simmel and Mauss, Cultural Anthropology 4, no.33 (Aug 1989): 227–259.https://doi.org/10.1525/can.1989.4.3.02a00010

Barbarian Europe and Early Iron Age Greece

This paper is concerned with the nature of the relationship that existed between Central Europe and the Aegean area in the early 1st millennium B.C. Interest in Aegean-continental connections has been strong for a considerable time, but has been intensified, particularly from the continental standpoint, in the past fifteen years. Although some of these studies have been concerned with the contacts between 2nd millennium (Late Bronze Age) Greece and the north, others have examined in detail the evidence for the links between the Urnfield culture and Greece during the 10th, 9th and 8th centuries. For Greece, this is an utterly different period from the preceding one; the evidence for foreign contacts suddenly becomes scarce and that for military disasters is virtually non-existent. Yet some scholars have reached very similar conclusions, involving the transmission of objects and of the people who carried them from Central Europe into Greece, for this period as for the preceding Late Bronze Age. Such arguments have a recent exponent in Professor W. Kimmig, whose paper Seevölkerbewegung und Urnenfelderkultur ranges over the whole period from about 1200 to 700. His list of objects and practices in this period, which he considers to have been donated by the Danube-Balkan peoples to the Mediterranean world, is comprehensive indeed: it would include bronze shields and body armour, the equipment of Goliath, the knobbed ware of Troy VII B, the practice of cremation in the Iron Age, the ritual spoliation of weapons in graves, iron swords, spears, knives, bits, lugged axes, spits, fire-dogs, bronze personal objects generally, clay idols, the maeander pattern and the swans of Apollo.