EBA Mainland

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EBA Mainland

• CNE 354
• 1/26/06

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General Features of Early Helladic Towns

• Development of proto-urban communities,
  increasing complexity
• Highly organized social structure
• Farming was the most important activity intense
  exploitation of olive vine
• Towns located on low hills near the sea
  (Neolithic sites inland near fresh water)

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General Features, continued

• Greater settlement density
• Houses with 2 rooms, organized in blocks with
  cobbled streets
• Fortified site surrounded by defensive wall
• Storage pits all over for agricultural products

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General Features, continued

• House walls mudbrick
• Pottery monochrome and burnished, first, then
  later glazed with dark paint.
• Characteristic pottery shape the sauceboat.
• Active overseas trade, imports
• Absence of the figurines of the earlier period
• Increasing use of copper and silver quantities
  of valuable material being taken out of
  circulation by placement in burials.

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Burial Practices

• Most common type - cist graves
• Examples found every coastal mainland site
  including Lerna.
• Each grave normally contained one burial with
  occasional grave goods such as pottery, jewelry,
  other items.

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Social Order

• Complex Chiefdoms?

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Important Site Lerna

• In the Argolid, settled in EH II.
• Old Neolithic village on the site showed 20
  levels of activity, but ended centuries before
  new people came and founded EBA Lerna.
• One of the most important excavated sites for
  this period.

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History of the Site

• It is one of several EBA mainland sites that
  shows a more sophisticated social structure - but
  it was arrested c. 2200 BCE.
• Only a portion of the site has been excavated, so
  we are generalizing about the entire site.

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New Inhabitants

• Tidied up/leveled off the central mound and built
  houses on the enlarged crown.
• Thick stone foundations with crude brick upper
  walls, strong sense of organization.
• Square rooms strung together, perhaps facing an
  open court or graveled street.
• Center monumental structure, building BG.

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Building BG

• Lies under the later House of the Tiles and is
  similar to it.
• Thick mudbrick walls formed corridors running the
  length of the building framing large central
  rooms.
• Roof schist plaques.
• Smaller houses cluster around.
• Fortification walls around southern side
  palace and fort both burned down violently.

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EH II Labrys Hearth BG
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Pot Marks

• Begin at the site in the late Neolithic.
• Signs are scratched into clay before or after
  firing.
• These are a shorthand declaration of production
  or property.
• Indicates the beginning of the redistribution of
  goods patronage exchanges by chief?

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Rebuilding

• The inhabitants erected an even greater building
  in the town center, which we call the House of
  the Tiles, over the ruin of BG (82 x 39 feet,
  almost rectangular).
• Had entrances on all sides, with access to
  corridors corridor house style other major
  house style is that of the megaron.
• Staircases at north and south ends led to at
  least one upper floor.

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Architecture

• Stone foundation
• Hard clay floor
• Mudbrick walls (over 1 meter thick)
• Terracotta and schist tiles on roof (implies a
  gabled roofing system) no other example of this
  for 1500 more years.
• Most walls were stuccoed
• Construction was labor-intensive

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Similarities around EBA Aegean

• The House of the Tiles is one of an increasing
  number of complex structures that are similar,
  often in fortified settlements compare with EM
  II Vasiliki.
• These begin to appear in EBA II these fortified
  settlements with megaron or corridor houses are a
  constant from the end of the Neolithic to the end
  of the LBA (2000 years).

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Overview of site hearth
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Fortifications

• Fortification walls went out of use by the last
  phase of the House of the Tiles.
• Maybe the threat was no longer present
• Maybe the wall hadnt been built for defense,
  but for some other purpose.

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Destruction of the Site

• Shortly after, a huge fire left a black and
  orange deposit over the central part of the site.
• Significant finds seals (hunks of clay, stamped
  with seal, baked by fire). The backs have
  impressions of baskets, sacks, boxes. 60 were
  found, suggesting a method of sealing goods.

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Seal Impressions
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Interpretation

• Was the House a focus for the control of
  commodities recording, processing, and
  redistributing them?
• The ruined site was left alone for several
  generations.
• End of EH II shows a number of destructions,
  after which life changed.

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New Culture

• A new culture took possession of Lerna (Lerna IV
  in EH III).
• Debris from the House of the Tiles was heaped
  over the center and graded down into a
  shield-shaped tumulus marked off by a perimeter
  of stones domed 4 meters above street level. A
  monument in the center of site.
• New EH III people felt some strong emotion
  connected to this destroyed building, whose
  architecture they themselves never matched.

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EH III Lerna IV

• Small, irregular buildings.
• Houses 1-2 rooms, some with apsidal ends.
• No seals, little evidence of foreign contact
  (trade goods).
• Pottery linear patterns, dark on buff.
• Characteristic shape 2 handled drinking goblets.
  No more sauceboats.

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Lerna EH III Tankard
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Another Tankard
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Apsidal House
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Early Helladic Period

• A relatively rich and important phase with walled
  towns, increasing use of metals, foreign trade
  connections and developing wealth.
• THEN new peoples arrived. The first Greeks,
  leading to destructions in the Middle Bronze Age
  mainland.

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Religion

• By the end of the EBA, peak sanctuaries appear at
  Iuktas, Zakro, etc (Crete). Evidence for a
  communal religion.
• Large numbers of figurines were offered to
  deities (of unknown identity) whole figurines,
  body parts, domestic animal figures, especially
  of clay, bronze, or stone.
• Rituals involved the use of fire (carbon
  remains).

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Knossos

• Begins to show evidence of organizational shift
  to a palatial civilization
• Big jump in population
• Large integrated complexes of buildings include
  monumental features and storage facilities
• Organizational shift must have occurred before
  the building of the palaces.

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Social Storage

• Beginning of large-scale social storage (exchange
  system based on social reciprocity).
• Example hypogeum (granary).
• But still small-scale compared to Uruk in the
  Near East.

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EBA Achievements

• Professional understanding of metals and an
  increase in their distribution and quality.
• Organized into settled towns.
• Collective storing and defense (involves
  agreement on a political system).
• 1st tentative concept of how conventional symbols
  may carry messages (carved seals, pot marks).
• Unfrightened trade over long distances,
  especially by sea exposure to new languages and
  response to alien cultures.