Idols have been found along with stone tools and weapons (slingshots.) The dead were buried in pits outside houses. Pottery was used here by 6200 houses had hearths. The oldest village is Nea Nikomedia in Macedonia. Human beings slowly penetrated south: hunters, then farmers appeared in central Greece and the plains areas of the Peloponnese. This area had forests as well as grazing land, though winters were cold. The first attempts to live in Greece occurred on the relatively open, watered territory in the northeast. The earliest humans in Greece were Neanderthals, who wandered through the area before 70,000 BCE.

Early Mainland: Stone Age through Middle Helladic

His careful excavations and detailed record keeping have become models for later archaeologists. Blegen is sometimes called the father of modern archaeology in Greece. Carl Blegen's excavations here have uncovered a major palace compound which is now recognized as Nestor's palace. Kourouniotis discovered a site at Ano Englianos. Excavations at Tiryns continue.ĭuring the early investigations of Mycenaean culture, there was much debate over the location of Pylos, Nestor's palace. Excavations were undertaken by Dorpfeld from 1884 and were continued by the German Archaeological Institute. Schliemann was the first to explore Tiryns, in 1876. Whether Schliemann is to blame for such a result or whether one might have expected such losses in the period in which archaeological techniques were first being developed is still hotly debated. Though he sparked much on-site investigation and began the process by which the Bronze Age civilizations of Greece have become better known, his techniques have also led to the loss of much that would have been valuable to later investigators. Other excavations at Mycenae continued through the 1950s.Ĭontroversies surrounding Schliemann's methods abound. Christos Tsountas excavated the site from 1880 to 1902 he uncovered the palace at the summit and the secret cistern. The graves were actually from a period about 2 centuries earlier. The Lions Gate had been uncovered in 1841 (shortly after Greek independence.) In 1874 Schliemann's excavations of the area uncovered the enormous booty of the shaft graves-which Schliemann mistook for the burial place of Homer's heroes. Undaunted, Schliemann next sought Agamemnon's Mycenae. Further, his methods were such that significant portions of the site were destroyed in his efforts to dig down to the Troy of the Trojan War. Schliemann, however, found a site with numerous levels of habitation, and initially incorrectly identified the Troy of Homer's time. His first major effort was to discover Troy, which he did-in northwest Anatolia. In the late 19th century, Heinrich Schliemann, a German businessman with a deep love of the Greeks in general and Homer in particular, sought to prove the historical accuracy of the Iliad. To be sure there were Mycenaean citadels beyond the Peloponnese, including Athens, and Mycenaean influence extended well beyond the mainland, e.g., to Crete and the islands and, as Homer relates, ultimately to Anatolia and Troy.

Other Peloponnese sites include Sparta (in Laconia, the southeastern area) and Pylos (in Messinia, on the southwestern coast. A number of sites (Argos, Mycenae, and Tiryns) were located in the Argolis, the eastern area by the Bay of Argos. The major Mycenaean citadels were located in the Peloponnese. The ultimate destruction of these citadels ushered in the Greek Dark Age-a span of centuries through which the stories of heroes survived to become the basis of myths central to classical Greek culture. The Mycenaeans are still remembered through tales of their epic struggle against Troy-a struggle that, though successful, may also have marked the beginning of the decline of Mycenaean centers. From hilltop citadels, Agamemnon and Menelaos ruled over fertile Peloponnesian valleys and traded with cities throughout the Aegean. Homeric legends hark back to the height of the Mycenaean civilization-the heroic age to the Classical Greeks.

Warlike mycenaean art