introduction

In this chapter, I explore economic activity in the Aegean Bronze Age (c. 3000–1000 bc). I focus on the “palatial” societies of Late Bronze Age Crete and mainland Greece, but offer an outline of prior developments, on which they were based. I emphasize what might be termed the “core” of the Mycenaean world (mainland Greece from southern Thessaly to the southern Peloponnese, the islands of the Aegean, including Crete, plus much of coastal southwest Anatolia). Such a definition is just as deficient for the Bronze Age as it is for the Early Iron Age and later, since it does not “bound” the world in which inhabitants of the Bronze Age Aegean moved or with which they were in contact, as will become apparent in the discussion of exchange.

It is a commonplace to emphasize the agricultural basis for all ancient societies and, for five millennia, this was true of the Aegean region. The standard western Old World cultigens (wheat, barley, and pulses) and domesticated animals (sheep, goats, pigs, and cattle) arrived by 7000 bc (with or without people), in eastern mainland Greece and on Crete, at least at Knossos. For Crete, lack of evidence for prior human settlement strongly suggests deliberate colonization at that time, probably from southwest Anatolia. The Bronze Age in the Aegean officially begins late in the fourth millennium bc, although metalworking is quite common before this, and regular use of tin bronze relatively rare before the later third millennium. By 3000 bc permanent human populations practicing agriculture had reached all but the tiniest Aegean islands, facilitating the formation of an interaction zone comprising the eastern Greek mainland, the northern Aegean, western Anatolia, and Crete.