Why a book on the Early Neolithic of Greece? The simplest answer is that a book on the subject does not exist. Yet, the Early Neolithic of Greece is the oldest in Europe, probably by several centuries. It is also frequently referred to as the source of all further development in Europe, either through the ‘maritime route’, along the Mediterranean coasts, or through the inland, Danubian route. Such broad statements reveal how poorly the Early Neolithic of Greece (or, for that matter, the Neolithic of Greece in general) is known outside of a small circle of specialists: the relations between the Greek Early Neolithic and that of the Adriatic coast, on the one hand, and of Bulgaria on the other, are in fact very problematic. Similarly, I have found that specialists of the Near Eastern Neolithic are sometimes incredulous when they discover, through lectures, some achievements of Greek Neolithic societies. In both cases the Neolithic in Greece has been superficially and rapidly considered as a distant yet familiar parallel to better known areas, without further investigation. Providing access to currently available data concerning this period and region, showing that the Greek Neolithic possesses its own originality can, by itself, justify this book.

Other motives can be found within the ‘small circle of specialists’ itself. Major issues such as the origins of the Neolithic in Greece or the existence of a preceramic phase are still vividly, and sometimes violently debated.

A biased debate

The status of the earliest Neolithic in Greece is still a matter of debate. Is it, as first suggested by Milojčić, an ‘Aceramic’, or ‘Preceramic’ Neolithic? Is it, as claimed by many, a fully ceramic Early Neolithic? Or could it represent a discrete ‘ceramic’ phase that this simple dichotomy has thus far obscured?

Milojčić was the first to suggest that a ‘Preceramic’ Neolithic may have existed in Europe, as it did in the Near East (Milojčić 1952). His subsequent excavations at Argissa in Thessaly seemingly brought the confirmation he sought: the basal levels were conspicuously poorer in sherds than the overlying ceramic Neolithic levels (Milojčić 1955, 1956, 1959b, 1960; Milojčić et al. 1962). Soon after, Evans published the preliminary results of his excavations at Knossos, where he too recognized ‘aceramic’ levels at the base of a long Neolithic sequence (Evans 1964). Meanwhile, Theocharis had undertaken trial excavations at several other Thessalian sites, where he also uncovered levels that he considered ‘Preceramic’ (Sesklo from 1956 on, Soufli in 1958, Achilleion in 1961 and Gediki in 1962). He then published the first synthesis of the ‘Preceramic’ in Greece in his doctoral dissertation ‘The dawn of Thessalian Prehistory’ (Theocharis 1967).

However, as early as 1970, Nandris reviewed the published evidence and firmly concluded, ‘It is now clear that the Greek “PPN” is by no means aceramic’ (Nandris 1970: 193).

The natural features of Greece, its climate, topography, water resources and soils, had decisive effects on the Neolithic economy and settlement patterns. They define several distinct provinces, characterized by different historical dynamics throughout the Neolithic and early Bronze Age, whose roots can be traced within the Early Neolithic.

Topography

Paramount amongst those factors is topography, for its impact on the climate and means of communication. The rugged topography of mainland Greece derives from the Alpine orogenic phase and the subsequent epi-orogenic subsidence accidents (Bintliff 1977; Higgins and Higgins 1996; Jacobshagen 1986). The main topographic features are related to a system of ancient sub-marine ridges and furrows of predominant NW/SE orientation. Pelagic and neritic sediments accumulated during the Mesosoic subsidence phase, until the start of the Alpine orogenic phase during the mid-Cretaceous. The latter took place progressively, in a wave-like progression from east to west, uplifting first the continental Hercynian bedrock – the Rhodopes and part of the Pelagonian Zone, with Mounts Ossa and Mavrovouni – then the massive Mesosoic limestones. Important subsidence basins then formed during the epi-orogenic phase, in direct relation with the NW/SE ridge and furrow structure: the West Macedonian Plain (the old Vardar furrow), the Thessalian Plain, the Saronic Gulf and the Kopaïs Basin (Sub-Pelagonian Intermediate Zone), the lowlands of Elis and Messenia. Other subsidence basins have different directions (compare the Gulf of Corinth) and result from still active tectonic movements in this sensitive area at the junction of the African and European plates.

The definitions of the Early Neolithic in Greece

The Early Neolithic is a phase of long duration, witnessing the expansion of farming over Greece and the multiplication of large sedentary villages. Besides the first widespread presence of pottery, it is characterized by well-built houses, elaborate house equipment, long-distance circulation of goods and abundant evidence of symbolic expression. With the possible exception of its earliest stage, the Early Neolithic is not a ‘transitional’ or ‘formative’ phase. On the contrary, it sets the stage for what will prove to be, in its fundamental structures, a remarkably stable socioeconomic organization throughout the Neolithic.

The Early Neolithic is classically defined on the basis of its pottery, with the predominance of small and medium-sized open bowls, often monochrome and well burnished, more rarely decorated with simple painted patterns or with impressions. Low ring feet are a common feature. The Early Neolithic starts with the first relatively abundant ceramic production (Monochrome phase) and ends with the appearance of characteristic Middle Neolithic (MN) ware, the Urfirnis in the Peloponnese or the Sesklo ware in Thessaly for instance.

Despite marked differences in the ceramic productions, the Early Neolithic was not immediately distinguished from the Middle Neolithic. Tsountas (1908), followed by Wace and Thompson (1912), divided the Thessalian Neolithic into two periods only, corresponding to the present-day Sesklo (MN) and Dimini or Late Neolithic (LN) cultures. Tsountas had, however, already recognized the specificity of the earliest monochrome wares at Sesklo (Tsountas 1908: 159–60).

In Greece, as elsewhere, archaeological traditions have paid little attention to the organization of Neolithic craft productions. The ‘German School’, headed by VI. Milojčić, concentrated on chrono-cultural classifications, based on the shape and decoration of potteries. The ‘British School’, led by E. Higgs and C. Renfrew, took a more resolutely economic orientation. Yet, until Torrence's pioneering study (Torrence 1986), the latter did not include the production of domestic tools and implements. Following Childe's models, the organization of production was assumed to be village-based and simple (Childe 1951a). Few questioned that the technical options could be explained in purely utilitarian terms, disregarding the new demands, new possibilities and new constraints that sedentism and farming set on craft production.

On the whole, artefacts were studied not as the product of an ‘art’, but as ‘finished objects’, from purely formal or aesthetic points of view. The knowledge, skills and technical choices involved in their manufacture were basically ignored, and so were, consequently, the cultural, economic and social choices that underlay the organization of production. Yet, how the artefacts were produced and what they were used for was an integral part of social strategies: ‘the Neolithic is not an “economy” but a mode of human behaviour, in which socially transmitted ideas about what kind of raw materials and what species of plants and animals to exploit, and in what way to do so, are applied both to subsistence and non-utilitarian ends’ (Nandris 1990: 12).

Around 7000 BC, marked changes took place: farmers settled in the previously uninhabited alluvial basins, built permanent villages and introduced domestic plants and animals. Theoretically, several processes could account for this radical shift (Barker 1985: 71): a purely autochthonous process, without external contacts; a local process spurred by the acquisition, through exchanges, of foreign goods and techniques (that is, cultural diffusion); the migration into Greece of foreign groups of farmers and herders, solely responsible for the sedentary Neolithic settlements (that is, demic diffusion); or, finally, a mixed process based on interactions between local hunter-gatherers and incoming farmers.

These various possibilities have each been defended by different – or sometimes the same – scholars. However, few nowadays would support the extreme position of Higgs and Jarman (1969, 1972), who considered possible an entirely indigenous shift to a Neolithic economy, based on the local domestication of animal and plant species. Conversely, none of the advocates of a demic diffusion, such as Childe (1957, 1958) or Ammerman and Cavalli-Sforza (1984), denied that some degree of interaction could have taken place between indigenous groups and immigrant farmers. Yet even without calling for extreme models, there remains ample space for widely differing perspectives, depending on the respective roles attributed to local hunter-gatherers or to foreign migrant groups.

Indigenist models and the claims for the local domestication of plants and animals

Autochthonous, or ‘indigenist’ models have progressively gained importance in Greece as in the rest of Europe, in opposition to the purely migrationist views advanced until the end of the 1960s (Weinberg 1970: 570–1).

All societies have to deal with the practical, psychological and social problems created by death. The responses vary widely and depend as much on beliefs as on the organization of the living society. A primary reading of the available data on EN funerary customs reveals a pattern shared with the Balkans: no organized necropolises, no conspicuous monuments, but a variety of ‘domestic’ funerary rituals comprising primary burials in pits, secondary burials, cremations and bone scatters. The interpretations have converged in pointing out the lack of sophistication and ‘simplicity’ of the funerary rituals, the latter being, in turn, considered as the expression of a simple, ‘egalitarian’ society (cf. Demoule and Perlès 1993; Gallis 1996a; Hourmouziadis 1973b). Yet, I shall now argue that we have all been misled in our reading of the data: we have considered the exception to be the rule.

More than twenty years ago, Hourmouziadis already pointed out that the populations of the large settlements of Sesklo and Dimini had obviously been disposed of in unexcavated cemeteries or outside the settlements. No burial had been uncovered, despite the vast areas covered by the excavations (Hourmouziadis 1973b: 209–10). Since then, only one burial, of EN1 date, has been found at Sesklo: that of an adult, in sector C below the Acropolis (Theocharis 1977: 88–93). More generally, the sample of Early Neolithic burials has remained extremely meagre in spite of further excavations and the discovery of several cremations at Soufli (Gallis 1975, 1982).

For several decades, the exploitation of domesticated species as potential food resources has been considered a prime – or rather, the prime – factor in the process of Neolithization. This view was recently challenged in the light of archaeological data from the Near East, America and Japan, which suggest that domesticated species were initially too limited in number and scope to have had much dietary importance. In parallel, the relative importance of domesticates in fully developed Neolithic economies has been re-evaluated – and downplayed – in large areas of eastern, central and western Neolithic Europe. Does this mean that the quasiexclusive reliance on domesticated plants and animals, considered a characteristic of Greek Neolithic communities, should also be re-evaluated?

In Greece as elsewhere, taphonomic biases and unequal recovery techniques can lead to widely differing interpretations of the subsistence economy. A debate over the importance of domestic resources in the Early Neolithic of Greece, which were traditionally viewed as predominant, has recently been opened by Björk (1995). Halstead himself, who had defined the economy as typically agro-pastoral in several influential papers which will be largely followed here (Halstead 1977, 1981a, 1984, 1989a), recently argued that the importance of wild resources may have been underestimated due to poor preservation and recovery (Halstead 1989b: 29).

Yet, even if wild resources were locally available, it does not necessarily follow that they were exploited on a large scale. Subsistence economy is culturally based, and must be studied as the expression of social choices within the possibilities offered by the environment and the level of technical development.

In many societies, architecture directly reflects the social organization and symbolic conception of space. The distribution of houses within a settlement, their size and building techniques, the structuring of space and activities within the house, can all relate, to a greater or lesser degree, to the social and sexual relations within the group and to its ideological background. ‘L'architecture domestique – structuration et codification spatiale par excellence – produit et reproduit, dans le temps et pour chaque maisonnée, la vision partagée que la société a du monde’ (Domestic architecture, which implements by excellence a structuration and codification of space, produces and reproduces through time, for each household, the shared vision of the world of the society) (Coudart 1994: 228). At the same time, individual houses materialize the divisions within the group: they emphasize the importance of the lineage, the household or the individual as a discrete unit. Differences in status, wealth or role can thus be expressed in the size, layout or ornamentation of the house. Village architecture thus results from an interplay between collective norms, collectively accepted variations, and individual differentiation.

The respective strength of these three components can vary, however, as do the architectural features that reveal them. I shall argue here that Early Neolithic architecture in Greece is characterized by an unusually high level of intersite variation and change through time. Because of the limited scale of most excavations, intrasite variability is more difficult to assess, but may also have been important.

In the densely settled regions of northern Greece, interaction between individuals, families and groups was not only a necessity, but also an unavoidable consequence of settlement patterns. Interactions, willingly or unwillingly, peacefully or aggressively, were constantly taking place at many different levels: within the household, within the village community, with neighbouring communities or with more distant groups. ‘How to deal with others’, when ‘others’ were both numerous and variously related – or unrelated – to oneself, was probably the most difficult problem these early Neolithic societies had to solve. How and to what degree this universal problem was solved depends in large part on the social structures in general and, in particular, on the nature of the institutions developed to regulate conflicts.

Early Neolithic societies have long been considered ‘simple’, lacking status and role differentiation as well as hierarchical institutions. But some time ago Sherratt had already opposed Childe's vision of Neolithic societies as ‘simple’, arguing that the ability to organize large-scale exchanges without hierarchical control was, by itself, indicative of some form of complexity (Sherratt 1982: 15). There is indeed no sociological reason why a ‘complex’ society should necessarily be organized along hierarchical lines, even if hierarchy is a frequent outcome of socioeconomic differentiation. Early Neolithic Greece provides evidence for differentiated status, roles and functions, and for intense interaction at all levels of society.

The importance given in the previous chapter to flaked-stone tools and pottery should not delude us: especially for the case of chipped-stone tools, it reflects their importance for the prehistorian more than their importance for the prehistoric villager! Functional studies have indeed begun to make clear that many tasks formerly performed with chipped-stone tools, such as wood and skin working, were now performed with implements made from polished stone, bone, or even shell and teeth. These ‘transfers’ within traditional crafts, together with the introduction of new activities, resulted in a complex technological system that was highly sensitive to local idiosyncrasies, traditions and even fashions.

Bone tools, grinding tools, pounding tools, polished celts or the miscellaneous sherd-discs, sling bullets, spools, spindle whorls, and so forth, all classified as ‘small finds’ in traditional excavations, are now just beginning to receive the attention they deserve. Until recently a lack of systematic studies, a reliance on traditional approaches and morphological classifications, and a nearabsence of functional analyses have all drastically limited our understanding of ‘small finds’. These varied artefacts cannot be satisfactorily analyzed either from the point of view of their production or from the point of view of their use. Even the traditional groupings such as ‘bone tools’ or ‘ground stones’ are mostly artificial. They do not correspond to homogeneous categories in terms of manufacturing techniques, nor, necessarily, to functionally related groups of artefacts.

‘How to deal with others’, when, due to sedentism, ‘others’ had become more numerous and could no longer be chosen or changed at will, was, I have suggested, one of the most fundamental problems facing Neolithic societies. Obviously, the first farmers in Greece were not the first folk anywhere to face this problem. Several solutions had already been implemented, in particular in the Near East during the several millennia that witnessed the development of sedentary life.

Nevertheless, our first farmers in Greece may have had, or wanted, to implement new solutions and develop new mechanisms of social regulation. After a farming economy was introduced in continental Greece, the first villagers created, in the most favourable areas, a dense network of closely spaced settlements that had little or no equivalent in the Near East. They had to experiment with sedentary life in small or medium-sized, but densely distributed, communities. Compared with life in some of the largest PPNB or Early Pottery Neolithic agglomerations of the Near East, such as those that reached 12 hectares of densely packed houses at Abu Hureyra or Çatal Hüyük, this necessarily entailed a different socioeconomic organization.

The size of the largest Near Eastern prehistoric agglomerations precludes, according to decision-making theories (Johnson G. 1978, 1982; Reynolds 1984), an egalitarian organization, or a purely horizontal mode of integration. Successive levels of decision would have been necessary in communities grouping hundreds, perhaps thousands of people.