This chapter summarizes the archaeologist's view of what happened to Greece, the quality of life and how it was affected by those diverse factors which can set a civilization on the move. When turning from agriculture to technology one can face a change in archaeological terminology, from 'Bronze Age' to 'Iron Age', which could easily suggest some form of industrial revolution resulting in that production surplus upon which the economy and population might further grow. The material conditions of life in Geometric Greece might more readily be gauged from homes than from artefacts consigned to graves and sanctuaries. In discussions of Greece in the early Iron Age allowance has repeatedly to be made for two such external stimuli Greece's own Bronze Age past and her relations with the older civilizations of the Near East. Bronze Age art was essentially foreign and the Protogeometric and Geometric Greeks had their own no less subtle and far more lasting idiom to develop.

The final disintegration of Mycenaean civilization, marked in certain areas by the survival of Mycenaean settlements until their total or partial desertion, and in central mainland Greece by the introduction of new factors which, even though in some aspects based on the old, maybe said to constitute the beginning of the Dark Age. The period from about the middle of the eleventh century to the end of the tenth is marked by a time of settling down and resumption of peaceful communication. The period is named Protogeometric because much of Greece and the Aegean is dominated by pottery of this style. The island of Crete, in spite of its very close connexions with the Mycenaean world, exhibits individual characteristics which place it, in other ways, outside the Mycenaean koine. The Cretans enjoyed an advantage apparently denied to the rest of the Greek world, except the Dodecanese, until the final years of the tenth century: their contacts with Cyprus.