Search Results

Sign in Modify your search

Perform this search in

Narrow Your Choices

Availability

Subject

  • Greek Material Culture: Bronze Age (2)
  • Greek Material Culture (2)
  • Science, Technology, and Medicine (2)

 1-2 of 2 Results  for:

  • Science, Technology, and Medicine x
  • Greek Material Culture: Bronze Age x
  • Greek Material Culture x
Clear all

Article

metallurgy, Greek  

Sandra Blakely

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Material Culture: Bronze Age
  2. Greek Material Culture
  3. Science, Technology, and Medicine

The story of metallurgy in ancient Greece spans five millennia and a geographic range reaching from the Greek colonies in the west to Anatolia and the Levant. An interdisciplinary effort, its study engages archaeological fieldwork, historical texts, and scientific analyses, and has moved from social evolutionary models through Marxist, processual, and post-processual frameworks. Metallurgical innovation and invention are productive loci for the investigation of historical change and emerging complexity. Three case studies—the transition from native ores to smelting, the emergence of bronze, and the spread of iron technology—foreground the entanglement of metallurgy with ecological strategies, maritime and overland mobility, the status of the crafter, and elite and non-elite control of production. Deterministic paradigms and models based on revolutionary innovations are yielding to more nuanced frameworks of gradual change, tempered by insights from ethnoarchaeology and from new excavations which shed fresh light on the cultural meanings of metallurgy among both metalworkers and patrons.

Article

pastoralism, Greek  

Stephen Hodkinson

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Greek Material Culture: Bronze Age
  2. Greek Material Culture
  3. Science, Technology, and Medicine
Although animals were ubiquitous throughout the Greek countryside, animal husbandry has until recently received little systematic attention; hence current interpretations are frequently embryonic. Zooarchaeological studies of animal bone assemblages from the historical period are particularly needed.Evidence of domesticated animals goes back to the 7th millennium bce. In the early neolithic modest flocks of ovicaprines (sheep and goats), kept primarily for meat, were integrated into small-scale gardening, grazing on fallow and stubble and supplying manure. More specialized stock-keeping arose in the late neolithic and bronze age, with increased exploitation of ‘secondary products’, especially ox traction and ovicaprine textile fibres, culminating in the large-scale wool production of the Minoan and Mycenaean palaces (see minoan and mycenaean civilization). Older views of the Dark Age as one of nomadic pastoralism (often associated with the ‘Dorian invasions’; see dorians; heraclidae) are now under challenge. ‘Homeric society’ rested upon arable production, with large herds as a store for surplus wealth. The period of independent poleis (discussed further below) witnessed smaller herd sizes; Hellenistic and Roman Greece a subsequent increase.