Jan. 27: The Stone Age 
Reading:
  • Vermeule, Greece in the Bronze Age, 1-21
  • Hood, Arts in Prehistoric Greece, 17-30, 89, 187-188
  • Higgins, Minoan and Mycenaean Art, 7-15 

    • To start us off, we'll consider the Stone Ages of Greece, especially the final period, or Neolithic ("new stone age"). A particularly important site is the Franchthi Cave, located in southern Greece. 

    The Stone Age is divided into three basic phases:
     
  • Paleolithic ("old stone age", subdivided into Upper, Middle, and Lower)
  • Mesolithic ("middle stone age")
  • Neolithic ("new stone age", subdivided into the Aceramic + Final phases)

    • Further distinctions are based on particular characteristic cultures or sites

    Within this basic system, there is much regional variation over Greece.

    Earliest remains so far come from Petralona Cave, in the Chalkidike (northern Greece): date is Lower Paleolithic, 200,000 yrs. before present.

    The only good evidence for a continuous sequence of habitation in the Stone Age is at Franchthi Cave, in the Argolid
    The earliest evidence is possibly 35,000 B.C. (Upper Paleolithic); better evidence begins ca. 20,000 B.C.E.(Middle Paleolithic)


    The Neolithic is particularly important for the introduction of farming. Humans had become increasingly better at controlling the natural environment, creating more and more specialized tools, for example, and taking advantage of seasonal supplies of different foods, and better understanding of animal habits. They were,  however,  to this point still basically moving to chase food around, though they might be resident at a particular place for a season or more.

    A shift from specialization to control & manipulation of plants and animals (i.e. domestication) is the next step; it occurs in the Neolithic all over the Old World, from ca. 12000 to as late as 4000 B.C. It happens differently in different places, depending on their environment and resources; for example, common pattern is for the capture of animals and their selective breeding, to emphasize desirable traits; also plants. However, not every environment is the right one for all plants/animals. In South America, for example, squash, beans, peppers and maize are domesticated; these not part of the European old world revolution. In Greece it is not clear whether or not domestication is a local, independent development, or whether it was introduced from Asia where it started ca. 9000/8000 B.C.E. (with the cultivation of barley, wheat, sheep, goats).

    Earliest farming evidence so far comes from Crete and Thessaly (ca. 60000 B.C.E.). It is possible that sheep and goats¹ wild ancestor was not native to the Aegean.


    One issue for this phase: is this the period of the ³coming of the Greeks²? How far back to push "Greekness"? We¹ll see that this issue is tied up with language and technology. There are non-Greek, pre-Greek place names and vocabularly in the Aegean that some people associate with a people that occupied the Aegean until the Middle Bronze Age (2200 BCE). The idea, then, is that the people speaking an early form of Greek, related to other languages spoken in the east (central Turkey and India) emigrated to Greece and drove out Stone Age people. Colin Renfrew, however, thinks that the language family to which Greek is related and which is spread all over Europe from Asia to England spread with farming technology, and that would mean that the earliest Greeks were the earliest farmers. 

    The art of the Neolithic consists of small stone and terracotta ("baked clay") figurines, as well as various types of pottery and stone tools. We will examine this in class.