This chapter considers the role of memory and archaizing traits at Mycenae during the LH IIIA2-IIIB period. Particular attention is paid to poros ashlar masonry, the monumentalization of Grave Circle A, and a visual tie between the Lion Gate relief and the carved shaft grave stelae.

The cultural discontinuities following the collapse of the Late Bronze Age Mycenaean kingdoms include the abandonment of major centers and smaller settlements accompanied by loss of social structures, literacy, quarried stone architecture, and figured representations. Archaeological evidence from four centuries later, in the eighth century BCE, shows that there were also important continuities, e.g., the Greek language, names of divinities, a warrior ethos, and communal feasting. Greek commerce both eastwards and westwards increased, and Greeks began to settle in the West Mediterranean and North Africa. This volume examines the Greek Iron Age, ca. 1200–700 BCE, between the Mycenaean collapse and the beginning of the Archaic period. The relative chronology of this period, based on carefully constructed sequences of pottery styles, provides a stable framework. However, recent radiocarbon dates have suggested that the absolute dating of the pottery styles should be revised upwards.

A brief introduction surveys current thinking on how to subdivide the period into phases of broadly similar durations spanning roughly a century and a half in absolute years. The remainder of the chapter focuses on three distinct topics: ceramic pictorialism in post-palatial Mycenaean art; an update on scholarship dealing with the dark-surfaced, handmade, and burnished ceramic classes that have been recognized as significant novelties in Aegean container assemblages from the end of the thirteenth through the eleventh centuries BCE, along with their spread eastward in some cases to Cyprus and southwestern Syria during the twelfth century; and the noteworthy spatial expansion of production centers of Mycenaeanizing decorated fine wares during the twelfth century to multiple locations on Cyprus, in Macedonia, and at various sites along the Levantine mainland from Cilicia in the north to Philistia in the south.

The Syro-Anatolian Culture Complex, or SACC, a collection of city-states that surrounded the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean Sea during the early first millennium BCE, is traditionally understudied by researchers interested in contacts between the Aegean and the Near East. In part this is due to the interest garnered by the Phoenicians and their far-flung colonies, but it is also because the complicated ethnolinguistic composition of the city-states themselves defies easy categorization. This chapter presents an overview of the material evidence for the robust exchange between the Aegean and SACC during the early first millennium BCE. Syro-Anatolian finds in the Aegean, especially luxury items including worked ivory and bronze objects, couple with Aegean ceramics in the Levant and southeastern Anatolia to index a surprisingly robust exchange between the two spheres. Although the mechanisms of this exchange remain unclear, it is now apparent that SACC was a major component of Iron Age eastern Mediterranean cultural and economic networks.

During the tenth through the seventh centuries BCE, the Cypriot Iron Age city-kingdoms were established and Cyprus gradually emerged on the international stage of the ancient Near East within the sphere of the Phoenicians, Assyrians, and Egyptians. According to later tradition, Greek heroes (e.g., Teucros of Salamis) founded most of the city-kingdoms, there was an indigenous stronghold at Amathus, and Phoenicians founded a colony at Kition. Inscriptions support this picture of three distinct population groups resident on Cyprus, each preserving its individual language. Archaeological evidence reveals very little of the Cypriot way of life during these centuries within the settlements; we are chiefly dependent on funerary remains and the evidence from religious sanctuaries; however, the material culture from these sites sheds some light upon the concerns of the inhabitants and how they expressed their diverse identities. The funerary record also reveals the emergence of an elite group who buried their dead in elaborate built tombs – most spectacular are the wealthy so-called Royal Tombs of Salamis. This chapter examines changes in the geopolitical organization and how Cyprus was incorporated within the East Mediterranean during the Early Iron Age, namely through emerging trade with the Aegean and political relationships with the Assyrians.

This broad survey of select Aegean islands and the Greek-speaking coast of western Anatolia reviews the revival of settlements in these areas, after the collapse of Bronze Age civilization. Opening and closing with the imagined vision of this world in Homeric epic, the survey traces the evolution of regional styles in art and architecture, linked to independent polities that developed patterns in self-government that became the Greek polis. Early Iron Age sites, tombs, and artifacts from Euboea, the Cyclades, East Greek islands, the Dodecanese and the mainland areas of Aeolis, Ionia, and Caria are examined against the mythological paradigms of migration and Greek colonization; these regions demonstrate widespread continuity behind the later legends of a wave of Hellenism, and enjoyed close and fertile contacts with neighboring Anatolian cultures such as Phrygia and Lydia. Such relationships fostered innovations in the Archaic period such as the first monumental temples and sculptures in marble, and the evolution of poetic genres, among island and coastal entrepreneurs in collaboration (as well as conflict) with a succession of inland empires, until the Ionian revolt against Achaemenid Persia.

Current thinking views the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean as highly interconnected. This contrasts with late twentieth-century ideas of either geographically separate regions or more developed centers that dominated less complex peripheral societies. A major inspiration for the present approach is a post-processual understanding of the complex dimensions of consumption. Elite burial goods at Lefkandi ca. 1100–825 BCE illustrate how imports were used in status strategies. In the eighth century BCE, there is a decrease in valuable grave goods as dedications of imported luxury items in public sanctuaries became the preferred means of elite display. Current views also reflect postcolonial understanding of non-indigenous settlements as sites of hybridity and inbetweenness, not the imposition of a colonizing ethnicity on local identities but new cultural syntheses. Examples include a large number of the early so-called Greek colonies. A recently excavated example is L’Amastuola in Apulia, an indigenous settlement of the late eighth century where Greeks came to live in the early seventh century.

This chapter starts from the premise that the Homeric epics are essentially products of the time in which they are conventionally supposed to have been created – very roughly sometime in the late eighth century BCE. The extent to which they might be recognizable as the Iliad and Odyssey we have inherited, having passed through processes like the Pisistratid "recension" and the hands of Alexandrian editors, is certainly debatable, but there is enough evidence of both a relatively direct and more circumstantial nature to suggest that cycles of epic song, including elements that we can associate with the specifically Homeric epics, were already in circulation in Greece in the decades around 700 BCE. The wider historical and ideological contexts in which this development took place are of particular interest for the questions of why it took place when it did and what its purpose might have been. The archaeological record of the later eighth century can shed light on other important developments in various parts of the Greek world, which together may have some bearing on these questions. At the same time, the epics themselves contain various elements which may provide clues to the ideological context which informed them.

This chapter provides a survey of iconographic themes found in the pottery, figurines, fibulas, terracotta, metalwork, jewelry, and seals produced across Greek-speaking communities. Rejecting a traditional assumption of close ties with the Homeric epics, the study combines two approaches to offer a more socially embedded understanding of image-making in early Greece. Examining the iconography within multiple contexts, from the types of objects on which imagery appears to their archaeological contexts and the material behavior associated with their use, reveals that not just politics but also social reproduction lay behind artistic development. Second, it demonstrates how expanding the discussion to the larger world of representations adds further dimensions to the ways in which the Greeks projected an imagined ideal society. Themes discussed include mourning, warriors and weapons, battle, hunting, horse culture, dance, abduction, divinities and religious iconography, animals, hybrid monsters, and mythic narrative. The developments of Geometric art can be understood as responses to the new complexities of social hierarchy and gender, access to the wider world, the growing integration of religious institutions into community life, and political alliances that constituted the experience of the city-state.

The beginning of iron technology in Greece represents the earliest known phase of iron production and use in Europe. Traditionally, scholars have attributed the emergence of iron technology in Greece to the diffusion of knowledge from the eastern Mediterranean. Over the past twenty years, numerous excavations have brought to light objects and industrial waste that allow us to reconsider how iron working started, how it developed, and its broader impact on the sociocultural changes in ancient Greece. This chapter proposes an alternative interpretation based on a novel interdisciplinary methodology that combines the archaeological examination of style and context with metallographic and chemical analysis to fingerprint the local characteristics of iron technology. The chapter concludes that iron technology appeared as a local, most probably accidental, innovation and was not the result of diffusion. It further argues that the localized technological traditions in both smelting and manufacturing that emerged in Iron Age Greece continued and solidified in the following periods.

The end of the Bronze Age and the beginning of the Early Iron Age (ca. 1200–1050 BCE) on Crete is known in ceramic terms as the Late Minoan (LM) IIIC period. The LM IIIC period is often considered to represent the start of the Early Iron Age as iron was present, though objects of that material were extremely rare on the island before the eleventh century. The period was characterized by a dramatic shift in settlement patterns and in many aspects of material culture, including settlement organization and architecture, burial and cult practices, and sociopolitical structures. Although these changes mark a clear break from the previous period of Mycenaean influence, there are also elements of continuity. In addition, the island was defined by a high degree of regionalism in LM IIIC (and throughout the EIA), perhaps most visible in variations in settlement patterns, cult activity, burial practices, and ceramic styles. This regionalism was probably influenced by geography, previous traditions, sociopolitical organization, population size, and cultural identity.