Citadel to City-State: The Transformation of Greece, 1200-700 B. C. E (original) (raw)

2000, American Journal of Archaeology

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