The Dark Age of Greece An Archaeological Survey of the Eleventh to the Eighth Centuries BC

"Professor Snodgrass constructs a narrative of four centuries of Greek history from an exhaustive synthesis of literary and archaeological evidence - pottery, burial-practices, architecture and metalwork, and what can be discovered of religion, commerce, and language. He argues that this was in truth a dark age, from the perspective both of scholarship and, more importantly, of the people who lived through it in poor, isolated communities, conscious of lost skills and departed glories. The recession was caused, he shows, not by external factors but by processes of internal collapse. And yet, although the book reveals material discontinuity, its ultimate conclusion is that at the most fundamental level of culture, human population, a continuity can be discerned, between the greatness of Mycenae and the rebirth of urban civilization, the dawning of the Classical age." [Publisher's description].