"Breaking Down" the Aegean Final Neolithic (Mid-Fifth - Fourth Millennium B.C.E.) with the Use of Absolute, Radiocarbon Dates: Phases, Pottery Sequences and Regional Differentiation (20 min)

Presenters

Aikaterini Psimogiannou, University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract

The Aegean Final Neolithic covers the latter half of the fifth and most of the fourth milleniums B.C.E. It is described as a time of tremendous social and technological transformations in the whole of southeastern Europe, including Greece. Scholarship has highlighted questions of depopulation, migration, occupation gaps, and environmental changes that might characterize the fourth millennium in the Balkan peninsula. Archaeological research in northern Greece and Thessaly in the past few years has sought to address many of the above phenomena with the use of absolute chronologies. In contrast, in the southern parts of the peninsula the archaeological picture remains obscure. The Final Neolithic keeps being treated as a long prelude to the Bronze Age, albeit a critical one for understanding the root causes of the Early Bronze Age incipient complexity. Nevertheless, due to the absence of a fine chronological resolution of the Final Neolithic period, we still lack an understanding of the temporal pattern of sociopolitical change, that is, the steps that led to the Bronze Age developments. This paper presents the preliminary results of a recent study that compiles and interprets absolute dates from Final Neolithic contexts, collected over time and supplemented with new radiocarbon dates, recently acquired. Hence, this work clarifies the internal phases of the Final Neolithic, combining absolute dates with stratigraphic and pottery sequences from several sites on the southern Greek mainland (e.g., Alepotrypa, Franchthi, Mitrou Locris, Lerna). These results are compared to the picture in northern Greece and Thessaly, as well as the Cycladic islands, providing a better understanding of the regional differentiation in the way that societies and landscape use evolved at the end of the Neolithic period and, possibly, shedding more light on the diversity evident in later periods of the Bronze Age Aegean.