Revolutions: The Age of Metal and the Evolution of European Civilization

welcome everyone I'm James Brooks president of sa are delighted to have you all come out this evening and join us to hear the second in our lecture series on revolutions we're welcoming dr. William a Packard a Parkinson whose assistant curator of Eurasian anthropology at the Field Museum in Chicago dr. Parkinson is a specialist in European and eastern Mediterranean prehistory and is the American director of the Kouros regional archaeological project an international multidisciplinary research project aimed at understanding the social changes that occurred on the great Hungarian plain throughout the Holocene so let's welcome dr. Parkinson and hear about the age of metal and the evolution of European civilization thank you James that was very very kind introduction I want to thank everybody for coming out tonight I really am honored to be here it's a very big deal for me especially given the the blustery wind out there they've got me with this Britney Spears mic so I might break into song in the middle I'm just warning you okay so this is a basic layout of the talk just to give you a lay of the land a sense of where we're going to be going it's pretty far-reaching I'm covering about 6,000 years of European prehistory so I want everybody to hold on for the ride I'm going to start with just a general discussion of of the age of metal and the spread of civilization and a little bit of a look at how anthropologists and archaeologists have treated these two things developments in technology and developments and politics and economics there's always been a tethering between those two things ever since even even the the middle of the 19th century and then I'll talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts the archeology of early metallurgy how we actually study early metallurgy because it's tricky from several different different perspectives and then I want to talk about the the context of early metallurgy in Europe that is what kind of societies did it occur within what kind of implications did it have once metallurgy was first invented and then adopted by different societies in the region and then if anybody is still awake I want to talk a little bit about my own field work not only in Hungary but in a project I've recently started up with my my colleague Mike Galati in in southern Greece and talk about how I'm trying to make my own sort of modest contribution to to our understanding of early villages in the main point I'm going to I'm going to give you the the end of the talk first the main point I want you to walk away with is that metallurgy was one several social processes that all came together during this very sort of magical period of the Bronze Age in Europe that laid the foundation for the emergence of the earliest states in Europe the Minoan and Mycenaean States but it was only one aspect of many different processes a whole suite of different social innovations that laid that framework that's the end of the talk I'll come back there when I'm done this was published a couple years ago and and when I read this it really impacted my whole thinking about what I do that for the first time ever in 2008 half of the people on the face of the planet live in urban environments this is really an astonishing fact when you consider the history of humans on the planet because as several of you probably know we evolved not to live in big groups not to live on top of each other but to live in relatively small egalitarian societies where people are moving around a lot they're hunting and gathering they're not farming they're living off the land this is from a very famous book called man the hunter that came out in 1968 which really rewrote how anthropologists understand a hunting and gathering societies to exist on the planet and it basically says 10,000 BC about 10 million people on the plan 100% hunters and gatherers by 1972 3 billion people on the planet point zero zero one percent hunters gatherers so within this 10,000 year period we saw a dramatic reorganization and how humans live on the planet and that affected not only these issues about living in a basically egalitarian form of society which was that was our adaptive niche to live in small groups move around a lot share a lot of stuff and to to to exist in a way that's very different than we do now and this has happened relatively quickly in the human experience on the planet not only do we now live in these massive cities but we also have as we're reminded of every day dramatic inequalities political and economic inequalities between humans this this is a process this is the end result or the I guess middle result it's still ongoing of a process that began several thousand years ago and I think a lot of the the the nascent forms that elemental forms of the processes that lead us to the world that we live in today began during this period that I call the age of metal at least in Europe now the age of metal this issue of metal and innovations in technology and innovations in political organization house ellipse civilizations emerge with governments things that we call States these have always been tethered even from the end of the 19th century when an early American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan linked in what he called the upper status of barbarism directly the link between iron and civilization but it wasn't just people a hundred and thirty years ago who were doing it was also people eighty years ago who were linking the the development the emergence of these states in Bronze Age Europe in Greece to metals and to exchange of metals to the Near East to Egypt and eleventeen coast the eastern coast of the Mediterranean this is V Gordon child very famous European pre historian inexplicably with its head II bear uh I don't know where that came from but in in his very very famous book called the dawn of European civilization he's got a chapter where he explicitly links the emergence of States in Europe to Egypt and the Near East they're imported they're adopted hey they got them there why don't we do it here and it's linked to metals and the ability to create swords and to go in and beat on people even more recently we still see the legacy and this connection between technology and developments and civilization in Jared Diane Diamonds book which won the Pulitzer Prize Jared Diamond is a bio geographer he's trained as an ornithologist but he writes these very grandiose volumes that a lot of people pay attention to and it's not an accident that the title of the volume is Guns Germs and Steel because he sees steel is very central and very essential to the ability of Europeans to conquer the rest of the world there are more let's say subtle less geographically deterministic books out there that still make these same arguments recently two very famous European Prix historians Christian Christensen and Thomas Larsson published this book on the rise of Bronze Age society and right the very front of the book is the core model that has the development the reason that you get the Bronze Age in northern Europe is because oh if you go down the line far enough - where does it come from it comes from the Hittites Egypt and the Near East these are all diffusion is miles and this is a very basic instinct in Europe to understand everything as occurring earlier in the Near East and this can be traced to the medieval period and medieval notions of how the world works Bruce trigger in this book history of archaeological thought very very eloquently talks about how during the medieval period here he's talking about the 13th 14th centuries in Europe when the world was when history was interpreted through a very explicit literal interpretation of the of the Bible there were several basic tenets one was that the world is recent its notes a few thousand years old because if you follow the baguettes and the baguettes and the baguettes and bats that's where you end up right it's also natural for the world member this is you know post plague it's not a good time in Europe right uh it's natural that the world is in an advanced state of degradation it makes sense that things are falling apart that governments are falling apart that there are no social morals in Europe and that is because number three is in for here God created humanity in the Garden of Eden which is somewhere in the Near East somewhere over there on that eastern coast the Mediterranean and the further away you get from that coast both in time the longer time that's passed and the longer geographically the further geographically you get from it things should be worse we shouldn't be at that pinnacle that was perfect when God created the world in the Garden of Eden so is natural for standards of human conduct to degenerate over space and time this a basic concept still pervades much of European prehistory and several European pre historian's are still very reluctant to see processes like state development as being indigenous to Europe well had to come from many areas because that's the way everything works this has been called this that in Latin the ex Oriente looks framework the light from the east and I love the side because there's light coming from the east right and and it's this notion that uh everything begins earlier in that part and this is a legacy this is a vestige of that medieval perception of the world which was based on a literal interpretation of the Bible so the way that we can explain the emergence of these Mycenaean palaces these Minoan palaces in Greece and in Crete in the Bronze Age is because well they they got the idea from the Near East that came from there it was an imported idea okay so in order to really understand this all these very complex dynamics of how how early States emerge and how they related to developments in technology we need to talk a little bit about the nuts and bolts of the archeology of early metallurgy because a metal is a weird weird material it's a weird material and it's a difficult material to study because it is the first truly recyclable technology that was invented by people we have stone tools we have basketry we have pottery when pots break something's left behind when when you break a stone tool and you resharpen it something's left behind with metal especially early metals like copper that are very soft you can completely recycle it and what that means is you frequently can't find it so several people were very surprised when a couple years ago an Iceman eroded out of a glacier named it see between Austria and Italy and this was a Neolithic guy he was a Stone Age guy but he had with him a massive metal axe right and a copper axe even though he dated himself to the Neolithic period and this all has to do with the nature of metals being the first recyclable technology that has several implications the other problem this doesn't just relate to the study of early metals but also to just the nature of the archaeological record what happens with the archaeological record is we never ever no matter how many times people try to publish it in science or nature we never find the first of anything ever right we always have the earliest evidence of but never the first thing so we can usually assume like that copper axe with that Neolithic dude that it existed before we actually find it so what happens with the archaeological record is it grows backwards in time we always find that things get older we never go oh we thought that happened 5,000 years ago but it really was just invented a couple hundred that never happen what always happens is we go oh it existed 5000 now it's 6000 out so it pushes backwards this is exactly what happened with metallurgy in the years before we had any form of absolute dating when all dating was done in a relative format you were trying to take a sequence from one site link it up to a sequence in another site and eventually try to link it into hopefully the Egyptian of the Mesopotamian sequence where he had a deep history we end up back there uh in those years like when V Gordon Chow was writing it was understood that the Copper Age occurred during the second millennium BC but with the advent of absolute dating techniques like radiocarbon dating where we can say not just in a relative manner but in a more precise manner this piece of wheat died several thousand years ago we could put an absolute date on when that piece of wheat died and moved back about a thousand years to the third millennium BC then what happened as we learned when our radiocarbon wasn't quite wet quite correct and we can calibrate it using tree rings is the technology development develops well then we find well actually the copper age now begins sometime during the fifth the fifth millennium BC so we fully move back the Copper Age 3,000 years pushing the antiquity of the entire technology back several thousand years and we've inserted the Bronze Age which is now shifted back to the second millennium and the third and second millennium BC to take over the rest of that empty space so because we see and uh the other thing not only does the archaeological record get more get older it also gets more complicated you know hundred years ago you only have a couple sites everything's a nice neat little picture this happened then that happened then that had well then you dig more you go well it's actually more subtle than that so these these grand timeframes like the Bronze Age falling right after the knee little it doesn't actually work so in places like southeastern Europe we've got this weird called the copper Age which you don't have in the rest of Europe this very discrete cultural technology that only works in South Eastern Europe so this is the complicated picture as we understand it today 20 years from now somebody's going to be talking about Mies and Parkinson what an idiot you didn't know what he was doing but this is where the picture is today in the late Neolithic the earliest evidence that we have of use of metals is modification of native copper and native ores these are our pieces that you can find on the ground you can bang them around you can modify them you can take chunks of ORD drill holes in them and make beads here are some examples of armbands that are from securely dated late Neolithic contexts that are native then during the Copper Age during the 5th millennium BC we have very good evidence of an innovation in that technology where people could not only work with raw metals that they find on the surface of the ground but they could take rocks that contain metal and suck them at a lot of it that's a process called smelting and it requires very specific conditions and we can see this not only in the leftovers the rocks that have had the metals sucked out of it these things we call slags but also in actual mines where we can see in Serbia and Bulgaria mines where people are chasing the veins of this ore into mountains and using technology that they've developed previously for excavating Flint to excavate these ores and to produce tools that are now mold made and occur in far greater quantity than they did during the Neolithic the problem with copper is that it's soft these copper axes are great when you try to cut down a tree it's really frustrating because it's soft and it bends and so one of the big innovations that occurred at the end of the Copper Age was the mixing the alloying of copper with other metals that improve that that strength of that material initially arsenic and then eventually with tin now all of this has ramifications not only with regard to the production of these things and the specialization required to make these things but also with getting the stuff copper doesn't occur everywhere these ores don't occur everywhere copper occurs in these throughout South Eastern Europe in little pockets but ten are the closest evidence we have for the ancient use of tin comes from Cornwall in England and Afghanistan so you're talking about the development of massive massive trade networks to bring all of these materials in so that specialists could work them down and use them um this gentleman Lord Lord Colin Renfrew was was really the first one to put he didn't know much less than we know now even back 40 years ago and he published two real critical in addition to a whole slew of other things he told was two real critical arguments one was this article on the Copper Age where he said you know if we actually sit down and look at the information it turns out our Copper Age in southeastern Europe is just as early as it is in the Near East if not earlier and that has stood the test of time that we have an independent out european pre historian's hated that because ex Oriente looks everything comes from the Near East everything occurs earlier in Egypt doesn't make sense that we've got this just as early if not earlier here the other article or this was actually his dissertation was published as the emergence of civilization of prehistoric Aegean questioned this whole issue about whether we can actually attribute the emergence of States the Minoan and Mycenaean States in the Bronze Age of Greece to any kind of fluence from outside so he kind of brought all this together I don't want you to try to figure this out I can't figure it out I've been looking at it for 20 years um the main point that Renfrew was trying to demonstrate in this very complicated diagram is that nowhere here is there an adoption of states or the adoption of metallurgy renfrew understood very clearly that these were independent innovations and that they needed to be understood on their own terms and it was largely here's my shameless plug for the book it was largely the writing of Renfrew and the legacy of Colin Renfrew that led us a couple years ago to organize the session that produced this book and what we were trying to do in very basic terms would say okay Renfrew said this 40 years ago where are we now has anything changed and where we basically came to as a group of Near Eastern scholars and Egyptian scholars and Aegean scholars sat around the table was there's very little evidence of direct contact Renfrew was certainly right about that if anything needs aegean states were kind of out of the loop of what was going on we've had states at this point in South in the Near East in Anatolia the Hittites and in Egypt for over almost a thousand years at that point and these little fledgling guys in the Aegean these little fledgling States want to be a part of that hey guys can we play right and they're trying to work their way into that system but they're very marginal all of the contact is down the line and there's no way you can see these states as creating those states in any any meaningful way so this has resulted in and what I think we can think of as this new paradigm development of metallurgy occurred over several thousand years there's a long process with several different stages the these innovations associate with copper smelting and mining we're into and then so it took a long time it was independent we can't attribute the straights of the Aegean Bronze Age to be associated directly in any way to the innovation the movement the adoption of that technology and the real irony is that there's actually a heck of a lot more evidence for big scale interaction during the Copper Age in southeastern Europe then there is during the Bronze Age so that really throws these models like that Christensen and Larson model that links everything that happens all throughout Europe and the Bronze Age to interaction with the Aegean and to the Near East there's absolutely no evidence to support this model okay so so now that we've hammered on old arguments we've talked about where things stand now as I said at the beginning I think the real issue and where we need to go and move forward with research is to try to understand the context of early metallurgy and the social context of early villages generally and because people for so many years concentrated on one of our other famous revolutions the Neolithic Revolution the slide that I started with that talked about the transition from mobile hunting and gathering societies to sedentary agricultural societies this is that transition itself has really dominated research how mobile hunting and gathering societies that lived on the earth for tens of thousands of years became sedentary and I like this this is propaganda right it says how goes the hunt not so great house gathering well so-so look a village I wonder what they do over there and it goes along and it tells you all of the benefits your keys to a better life learn which species are slow and submissive right use food and fences to keep them around right and this it's really this this basic thinking that is dominated are under of early villages so on the one hand we've had this study of how hunters and gatherers become sedentary Agriculture's we've done that 30 years hammering away at it we know where it occurs how it occurs and then on the other hand we've got oh look big states appear over here but there's this whole range in-between of societies that have really dominated the earth for the last ten thousand years these agricultural village societies that oh they're kind of there in the middle we don't really study them all that much and the fact of the matter is at least in Europe there is a whole suite of very interesting processes that occur within those early village societies some that were pointed out by the late Andrew Sherratt who actually was invited to our SAR advance seminar but died before very unfortunately died before we could we could put it together talked about yet another famous revolution the secondary products revolution where uh which is a whole suite of different processes that occur then it entails not only the killing of animals for meat for bone for hide but also using animals by keeping them around using them for traction for plowing for for dairy for making cheese for pulling stuff and share it recognize that this doesn't happen right off the bat with the development of Neolithic agricultural villages this happens afterwards the end result of this is that it lets you get more bang for your buck out of an animal you can get a lot more out of them and that lets you pull more resources out of out of any given area another thing that isn't necessarily associated with these early villages with all early agricultural villages is real intensive what I think of as intensive sedentism yeah okay during the Neolithic all throughout Europe people started to live in the same place year round okay but there are certain points in Europe where people didn't just live in the same place year round they live there for generations or tens of generations or hundreds of generations which results in the emergence of sites like this which we call tells we use the Arabic word tel like tel aviv all of this is cultural deposit this all was deposited over a three thousand year period of people living on that chunk of land that doesn't happen everywhere within early agricultural villages and when it does it has serious repercussions um just very quickly uh this is from an article i i've just published if we look at what happens in Thessaly we get agriculturalists about about 6500 BC and they immediately start to live in the same spot right we see a gradual increase in the number of sites but they're living on the same spot right off the bat in Hungary we get agriculturalists they're within a couple hundred years after they're in Greece uh but they're moving around they're moving around they're moving around and it's not until a thousand years later that we see that kind of intensive sedentism and the development of those tells which then won't last a couple hundred years and then they fall apart and people start relocating their settlements all of these processes have ramifications and implications with regards to political organization we also see the emergence of territoriality people start defending territories when you settle down all of a sudden it becomes important to defend those different territories and what we see in the archaeological record is the emergence of these different groups though our archaeological groups on the landscape but people are starting to now do things differently to actively in for social boundaries that we don't see prior to that we also see the the very formal institutionalized construction of fortifications around sites when you live in one spot and you're defending a territory you're also defending your site when you get a lot of people living together that means it's a lot easier to get a bunch of people together to go and attack another village we also see through things like metallurgy the emergence craft specialization not where everybody's doing the same thing but we're now John over there well he's making metals and that's all John's doing these days is making metals and so so we start to see this variation in how people live within those settlements that they create one other thing that we see during the Copper Age in southeastern Europe is for the first time big formal cemeteries prior to this you bury grandpa you know outside the house you bury them next next to the wall of the settlement but during the Copper Age we see the emergence of these huge cemeteries with hundreds of very hundreds of burials within them that exist on their own in the landscape and it's within them that we see things like these wild boars tusks which are associated with men of a certain age and a certain stature in Hungarian burials during the Copper Age and what these cemeteries do is they provide another venue for people to show off right look at when when I buried my dad I had 10 boars tusks and all of this exotic material and this much copper and I've got enough going on that I can put it in the ground uh all of these different there's this whole suite of different processes that together with metallurgy which is only one small part of that suite laid the framework and created an environment for the emergence of those early States in southeastern Europe we need to understand metallurgy as just one piece of this much bigger puzzle but because we've had this focus on on the one hand the early Neolithic and we've also had a focus on on site-specific archaeology in Europe it's been difficult to build that picture and it's because all of these things need to make sense in different scales of time and over different distances over a different social space or different social geographies and so what we need to do is think about these processes that occur at the continental scale the movement of Agriculture which takes two thousand years to get across the European continent happens at this big scale over this big period of time and we need to make sense of those with what's going on in sites when I show you that tell site you're looking at the result of people building houses and building houses and burning houses and buildings we need to link all these things up but what has happened in Europe is on the one hand we have these grand synthesis and we've got these individual sites that are excavated and what's been missing in European prehistory is that regional scale of analysis and this is what I've been trying to do with my own research in two different parts of Europe in the Carpathian Basin this is these are the Transylvanian Mountains over here these the Carpathians this is Transylvania this is an area called the great Hungarian plain where I've been digging for a while and this is a our site in southern Greece and the mani Peninsula of southern Greece these are two areas that were very very distantly related in prehistory and what they let us do is is examine at that regional scale how we can make sense out of those broad processes like the Bronze Age and how they relate to specific sites on the ground my Hungarian project which I've been collaborating with my colleague attila juha one of the benefits of working in hungary is you get to work with a guy named attila we've been doing this for 15 years and it's a project that has really grown from my dissertation days in the 90s to a pretty big this is our last field season this spring and uh what I was trying to do when I first started working in Hungary was understand what happens when those tells fall apart my interest was only get these big sites we get these people living on top of each other and these big huge settlements then they stop that's unusual especially compared to Greece in Greece once people start living together they live together more and more and more and more more things continue to build in Hungary that doesn't work it falls apart and this is the critical part of anthropology not just understanding what works where States form but also understanding where they don't why doesn't it happen there that's just as critical to our understanding of how humans live as understanding the successes but we've tended to focus on the successes so my early work was focused on the breakup of the tells at the end of the Neolithic the beginning of the Copper Age of course one of my pet hypotheses was lay it's the Copper Age people are reorganizing themselves maybe to deal with the trade of those items people are moving out there trying to get those trade items because it's the Copper Age so we excavated two sites uh these two sites goodish that I'd be getting a vase to beginner which are both early Copper Age sites the first settlements to be excavated in this time period we spent six years excavate I'm thinking we're going to have copper evidence of copper production everything all over the place that nobody's seen before and this is what we got you can fit it in one hand the amount of copper no evidence for copper production on the site it was a non-issue which means that my pet hypothesis didn't work we have to kick that one out and it also means that we need to then find a more indigenous a local explanation for why those sites fell apart in more recent years we've moved from the the early copper Age back in time to now try and understand why those big sites form so okay we've got agricultural people living in hungry for a long time they're there for a thousand years and then for some reason they start to live together in these big huge sites what's up with that why do they live in those places in those Keeler's spot on the landscape and what we've been able to do is build having worked in this region for a long time we know it works we know it doesn't things like magnetometry where you basically carry a big magnet across the ground and you take readings and you look for changes in the readings of the Earth's magnetic field which lets you see buried features it's non-invasive which is good because archaeology is expensive when you start to dig you want to get as much information off the surface and we do that the old-fashioned way - by laying down 10 by 10 meter grid squares in muddy plowed agricultural fields and picking up all the ceramics to try and get a sense of how these sites emerge and how they change over time and the picture that we can build is really its surprised everyone so we started working in this region here's a nice little tell you know it's about a hundred meters by about 70 meters cute little tell that builds up over time and as we started working in the region we identified around that tell a mass of all of these these are long houses long houses the remnants of long houses massive settlement all the way around the tell that take that tiny little little two hectare tell and make it about 50 hectares spreads over this massive massive region these are these are proto urban centers and this is one that doesn't work it falls apart so by using the information that we get from magnetometry using using radar on top of the ground and our little grid squares that we get down on our hands and knees and pick up pottery we can actually build without putting a shovel in the ground a pretty good picture of how this site comes about this is a distribution of the ceramics here's the TEL and what you see is there's little densities of ceramics lots of ceramics down here lots of ceramics here and this is a distribution of burned wall rubble when you've got wattle and daub walls kind of like adobe walls and those houses burn you find little chunk to that of that clay on the ground and there's differences between these two patterns and by looking at them what we can see is that the only place that has earlie stuff and later stuff is on the towel so the towel is established first and then there's some sort of social gravity that pull people to this place where they live for a couple hundred years and then they fall apart and the only place that continues is on the tell my other project now that Hungarian projects been up and running for several years my other project in in southern Greece is just getting rolling and here we are wearing the monney peninsula of southern greece and we're working in this bay right here which is called de dos bay and this is a real interesting part of the Greek Peninsula this is as far as you can be as far south as you can be in Europe and still be in Europe it's a southern tip of Europe and at the southern end of this peninsula is the classical entrance to Hades that was the entrance to hell um it's a weird Peninsula in a lot of ways not just because it has the entrance to Hades uh but it's weird culturally because it's separated from the rest of the this is Greece this is southern Greece as far as you South use you can be in the European colony you have snow right uh this is a massive mountain range that's cuts off that peninsula from the whole rest of the Greek mainland and as a result you get several different cultural patterns down there that make it very distinct and very discrete from the rest of Greece it also has a very deep archeological history with a PV ma one of the earliest lower Paleolithic well dated lower Paleolithic hominid sites in Europe being located right north of our bay right on the edge of our bay so we've got lower Paleolithic we've got mezcla thick Neanderthal time period sites right up to the modern day this is the remnants of a tower town this was one of the places in Greece where you still had blood feuds into the middle of the 20th century people were building these massive towers and you have these towns that are all these stone this doesn't look like Greek architecture if the stone built towers and it's because they're beating up on their cousin who lives on the other side of town it's very culturally distinct and it's always been autonomous this is a church in the many Bay the next Bay North that is right next to the place where Mavro Macaulay's who led the Greeks against the Turks against the Ottomans during the Greek Revolution was born this place prides itself on being different it prides itself on being autonomous and it still doesn't like associating itself with the Greek nation state I've been very fortunate to work both with my colleague Michael Adi but also this gentleman your goes pop athanasopoulou and his lapdogs juju who goes everywhere with him and my other colleagues are taki scar ganas and anastacio papa thanasi who both work with the Greek Ministry of Culture to get this project off the ground and you can see it doesn't get much more different from the flat plain of Hungary here we've got mountains we've got a short little coastal plain and then boom the seat right down here and the reason that we focused on this particular Bay on the Monti peninsula is because of a cave that's located right up here and that cave is called ala poetry pot cave this is called foxhole cave and this is a cave that uh goes back about about half a kilometer into the hill and so we've got an entrance out here the Seas right over here we've got the entrance here there's a little opening then it goes back there's some chambers chambers explodes into this massive cavern and then in the back we've got a freshwater lake this is my bad attempt to try to take a picture of that big Cathedral room there's Mike right there I don't know if you can see him right there we get a sense of this his massive massive cave and the reason it's important this is the front end in here you can see some of the archaeological sections exposed is because there are over six and a half meters of deposit in the cave that are associated with archaeological sediment that are it's occupied at exactly the same time as the site that I'm working on in Hungary it starts in the middle Neolithic it ends in the Bronze Age and when you've got this much cultural deposition it's like having a tell inside the cave only here we know that it's used for much more than settlement here we've got massive cemeteries massive ossuaries and what makes it very special is not only that because it's a cave it's very well-preserved but also that at the very end of the occupation of the cave this is the surface this is what the surface of the cave these are all ceramics that's lined with ceramics and what's laying on top of the ceramics are several dead children that are covered up by the calcium carbonate the stalactites that drip off it looks like the entrance of the cave collapsed and people were trapped inside it's kind of got that Pompeii effect to it because most of the Greek caves the Romans came they messed them up the you know the Turks came they messed him up in World War two people put military Garrison's in him they're all messed up in this case it's very pristine it was occupied until the beginning of the Bronze Age it was sealed and wasn't open until 1958 caves located right over here and we know there are other several other Neolithic there's another Neil at that cave right there and so what we've been trying to do is put that cave into its regional context because again the only way we can make convincing arguments about what happened in the past to focus at that regional scale and here I've got a perfect comparison what's going on hungry same time period same issues same social environment but a very different environment a very different Nat chiral environment so what we did the cave is situated right here this is the topographic map of the the eastern end of the bay this last summer we got just a little bit of money and started to do some work and one of the first things that we identified was a massive site right outside the entrance to the cave that we did our Hungarian style collection we got down on all of our hands and knees and what we identified was a massive settlement right outside the entrance to the cave what's real interesting about this is that it looks like a very similar picture to what happened in Hungary the cave was inhabited first there was a fluorescence there was some sort of social gravity that were pulling people to those places lasted for a few hundred years and then it fell apart so we see several parallels at the same time periods in the coming together of all of these different processes that characterize these early these early villages and by my continued work in both of these regions as long as my wife will let me you know I hope to make some modest contribution to our understanding of of what happened so this is where we end up X oriented looks doesn't work we can't buy into that light from the east model metallurgy was a local innovation in southeastern Europe it was one of several innovations that occurred within these early village societies that together the coalescence that's sweet that magical sweet that coming together of all those different processes eventually created that environment for the emergence of those early civilizations the Minoan and Mycenaean States but in order to really understand what happened we need to look at those early villages and we need to study them at multiple scales we can't just continue to excavate single sites and build these fantastic models that talk about what happened at the continental scale and that's all I have today thank you

Channel: SAR School for Advanced Research

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Keywords: SAR, William Parkinson, Metal Age

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Length: 47min 45sec (2865 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2013