Situated at the disciplinary boundary between prehistory and history, this book presents a new synthesis of Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age Greece, from the rise and fall of Mycenaean civilization, through the "Dark Age," and up to the emergence of city-states in the Archaic period. This period saw the growth and decline of varied political systems and the development of networks that would eventually expand to nearly all shores of the Middle Sea. Alex R. Knodell argues that in order to understand how ancient Greece changed over time, one must analyze how Greek societies constituted and reconstituted themselves across multiple scales, from the local to the regional to the Mediterranean. Knodell employs innovative network and spatial analyses to understand the regional diversity and connectivity that drove the growth of early Greek polities. As a groundbreaking study of landscape, interaction, and sociopolitical change, Societies in Transition in Early Greece systematically bridges the divide between the Mycenaean period and the Archaic Greek world to shed new light on an often-overlooked period of world history.

Tübinger Archäologische Forschungen, 2022

Recent excavations at the Mycenaean town of Dimini in the Bay of Volos in Thessaly have led to the interpretation of this site by its excavator as the regional "palatial" administrative center. This article discusses the available archaeological evidence from all three known Mycenaean settlements in the Bay of Volos (Dimini, Kastro, and Pefkakia) and considers aspects of settlement pattern, architecture, artifact distribution, burial practices, and craft specialization in those settlements. In the analysis of the data, notions of different theoretical approaches are employed, such as heterarchy, power-sharing strategies, and factionalism, in addition to the traditional neoevolutionary approach. The varied analytical perspectives of these interpretative models allow for a more complete understanding of the political organization and social change in the Bay of Volos during the Late Bronze Age and can expose regional variability in the Mycenaean world. It is argued that, based on present data, there is not sufficient archaeological evidence to suggest a centralplace hierarchy in the Bay of Volos. Ideological, economic, and political power at both settlement and regional level was not concentrated in one source, as the conventional palatial model proposes, but was shared across different groups and sectors of society.*

Introducing themes from social psychology and complexity science, this paper explores the contribution of localized prosocial networks to cultural change in the Final Neolithic Peloponnese. Although the dearth of well-published, stratified Final Neolithic contexts continues to present considerable difficulties, it suggests that a series of burials on the Argolic Gulf may offer evidence for the construction and maintenance of local networks and the conscious curation of shared identity through repeated episodes of prosocial interaction. This behavior, it is suggested, would have helped to structure other forms of activity and may offer an explanatory model for emergent sociocultural phenomena (including monumental architecture and the foundation of discrete, formalized extramural cemetery space) previously considered typical of the Early Helladic, but now visible during the Final Neolithic.

This chapter confronts the systemic divide in modern scholarship that separates Aegean prehistory from Classical archaeology and considers its ramii cations. In so doing, the problems of periodization, absolute chronology, and regionality are tackled. It advocates an approach that follows an historical continuum, allowing social and political experiments in the Bronze Age their inl uence on the early Iron Age. It also advocates looking at Greece holistically, not just from predetermined cores, whether Mycenaean palaces or Archaic city-state s , and sug ests that some of the most important developments in political structure occurred in the tribal, clan-based areas of the Greek world, often regarded as the fringes. The core of the chapter focuses on several critical developments in Iron Age Greece that were to have an impact on the Mediterranean. Among these were overseas travel and settlement, as well as the quest for metals. The latter is not seen simply against the backdrop of technological innovations or the vicissitudes of supply, but rather involves a real search for structuring commodities of value that ultimately led to an economic system of exchange not limited to elites. The culmination is the invention of coinage . The other great innovation represents no less of a revolution: literacy . It is not just the adoption of the Phoenician alphabet or of a technology of writing that is important, but the introduction of alphabetic writing to the unique cultural context of Iron Age Greece. For the i rst time in world history, writing was not limited to a scribal class serving a ruling elite, but instead served as a tool that could be exploited by anyone.

In: P. F. Biehl and E. Rosenstock (ed.), 6000 BC: Transformation and Change in the Near East and Europe., 2022

In the Near East, the primary Neolithization zone, the “Neolithic Bauplan” (Zeder 2009), was pieced together over several millennia. In the Aegean, the secondary Neolithization zone, we similarly cannot speak of a singular moment when the Neolithic way of life was established, but compared to the more than 10,000 years of its finalization in the Fertile Crescent (Zeder 2009:18), its implementation in southeast Europe lasted “only” some 500 years. During this half millennium of transformations, we can observe a transfer of innovations from one region to its neighbors – thus a far-reaching net of exchange and communication was established. Its basis was already formed during the Mesolithic as can be demonstrated by the exchange networks and the occurrence of obsidian from Melos in most of the Aegean.

2011

It is our intention, in this work to investigate the connections and disconnections in Greece in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age through an analysis of the cultural unity and commercial relationships built during the Mycenaean period, the collapse of both by the end of second millennium, and the emergence of a new model based on regional traits.

Wiley eBooks, 2019

The Greek Landscape Setting Although we are accustomed to envisage Greece from the Mediterranean climate zone around its long coastlines and on the Aegean islands, the landscape is far more varied if we travel both up into the mountains of the south and into the more temperate climates of the north. It remains still true, as Colin Renfrew illustrated in his still invaluable synthesis of later Greek prehistory (1972), that the high cultures of the Early Bronze Age (EBA), Minoan-Mycenaean civilization and the Geometric (G) to high Classical cultures of Greece have their essential distributional focus in the south and the lowlands, but inversely, till recently, archaeological research was far less interested in the development of societies in upland Greece and in the northern provinces. Even today we are mostly best informed about Macedonia, due to the innovative regional work of university and state archaeologists in that region (cf. Andreou, Fotiadis, and Kotsakis 1996), and need to know much more about Thrace and northwest Greece. We already are aware that Neolithic Greece in contrast is most flourishing in the northern plains, while from late Classical times into the Ottoman era northern Greece has also been as significant for urbanism and rural settlement as the south. Various explanations have been proposed for the apparent precocity of the lowland south in the Bronze Age (BA) to high Classical eras:

Shifting exchange networks can affect and reflect socio-political changes of the areas which they connect. Using the Late Helladic/Late Minoan III Aegean as a case study, this work will argue that aspatial and temporal analysis of finds, an understanding of the ideological framework governing exchanges and a comprehensive view of the shifting exchange networks can be used to comprehend socio-political changes. This will involve the analysis of the exchange networks connecting the Late Helladic/Late Minoan Aegean to better understand them, before applying various models proposed as solutions to debates regarding Aegean socio-political changes and structures. This will affect the views regarding palatial control of trade, show how the understanding of the Aegean as a single, albeit loose, political unity is plausible, and even add information to the debates surrounding the collapsing Aegean world of the Late Helladic/ Late Minoan IIIC. A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the Bachelor of Arts degree in Classical and Archaeological Studies at the University of Kent

European Journal of Archaeology, 2021

AJA on line review

This book treats the long-term history and social structure of ancient Greece from the Neolithic period to the second century CE using complexity theory as an explanatory framework. It is published as part of a Cambridge University Press series (Case Studies in Early Societies), the stated aim of which is to introduce early societies with a long history of archaeological research to students and scholars in adjacent fields, certainly an admirable objective. Accordingly, I assess the value of the book as an introduction to the archaeology of Greece for a reader without much preexisting knowledge of the field.

BMCR, 2025

Review of Michael Loy's "Connecting communities in archaic Greece: exploring economic and political networks through data modelling"

American Journal of Archaeology, 2000

The study of Dark Age Greece has undergone a revolutionary transformation in the past three decades with the acceptance of new approaches to the material culture of early Greece (cf. I. Morris, "Inventing a Dark Age," in his Archaeology as Cultural History [Oxford: Blackwell, 2000], 77-106). Accompanying radical shifts in methodology has also been a flood of new data from a host of excavations-among which Lefkandi and Nichoria are published examples-and surveys such as in Messenia, south Argolid, Pylos, Methana, Berbati-Limnes, Kea, and Boeotia, to name but a few in mainland Greece. The volume and complexity of these new data, and the real methodological problems that abound in bridging a conceptual divide between the archaeological evidence itself, on the one hand, and the process of interpretation, on the other, might preclude at this point in time the effective use of such data toward broad historical generalizations-reconstructing a history of Dark Age Greece. Citadel to City-State does this very thing. In many ways reminiscent of early groundbreaking achievements such as Finley's World of Odysseus (New York: Meridian, 1959) or Starr's The Origins of Greek Civilization (New York: Norton, 1961), the authors' framework is unabashedly historical; their aim is to weave a narrative, a "Plutarch's Lives of Places, not individuals, as it were" (xii). This novel approach leads them to choose six places-Mycenae, Nichoria, Athens, Lefkandi, Corinth, and Ascra-which in six chapters become representative of stages of a developmental process, an evolution of culture leading the reader through the decline of the Mycenaean state-structure to the emergence of the Greek city-state. In each chapter they provide a detailed survey of the archaeological evidence for each site, which they integrate into a broader discussion of developmental stages of early Greek society. Even though they make the surprising statement that the book is meant to be an introduction to the subject, complementing the comprehensive syntheses of Desborough, Coldstream, and Snodgrass (xi), they necessarily draw on material published since the 1960s and 1970s. The glossary and bibliography might make the book useful as an undergraduate textbook. Without apology or explanation the authors avoid discussion of Crete almost entirely, which seems strange, given the recent final publication of the Knossos North Cemetery and a flood of reports of both excavation and survey from

This book examines the rise and fall of Mycenaean palatial society in central Greece, with a particular focus on the area of the Euboean Gulf. It employs a dual theoretical approach that draws on aspects of network theory to explain large-scale societal transitions and agency theory to investigate the role of individual actors in such processes, chiefly through iconographic analysis. The goal is to deliver a historical and explanatory account of social change in this part of Greece during the Late Bronze Age.

The Urban Mind: …, 2010

Classical Review, 2013

competitions, common religious practices, etc. -that connected the network of Greek (and non-Greek) cities. These cultural practices could have been presented through a more elaborate discussion of the pan-Hellenic sanctuaries.

This dissertation employs aspects of network theory to study social complexity in the Euboean Gulf from the Mycenaean Palatial period through the Protohistoric Iron Age (c. 1400-700 BCE). The Euboean Gulf and its surrounding lands were unique in the Mediterranean during this time span with respect to their social and geographical context, connectivity with the wider world, and changes in societal organization. In particular, this study focuses on the inter-relationship of conceptual, social, and technological networks on multiple scales (local, regional, and trans-Mediterranean). The first part of the dissertation (Chapters 1-4) introduces the project and discusses current disciplinary issues, its theoretical framework, and its geographical context. The second part (Chapters 5-9) provides a diachronic explication of network dynamics in the Euboean Gulf, ranging across local, regional, and trans-Mediterranean scales. These chapters provide synthesis, analysis, and interpretation of a variety of related, though seemingly divergent, social phenomena, including the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces and the eighth-century political revolution, the disappearance of Linear B and adaptation of the Greek alphabet from the Phoenician script, the technological transition from bronze to iron as the dominant utilitarian metal, and a major shift in the nature of maritime interactions – from being predominantly eastern Mediterranean phenomena to encompassing nearly all the shores of the Middle Sea. In sum, I argue first that human interactions across multiple scales feed into one another to shape the major social, political, and technological changes seen throughout the period in question, and second that networks provide a strong means of modeling and explaining these changes. In particular, the networks in which the Euboean Gulf operated increasingly exhibit characteristics of “small worlds” and “the strength of weak ties,” where the addition of even a single connection into a wider system can result in the relatively rapid diffusion of political, cultural, and technological ideas. At the same time, these networks go through phases of higher and lower degrees of centrality and stability, resulting in occasional societal upheaval and restructuring in explainable (though not necessarily predictable) patterns in the dynamics of social complexity.

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