Hello everyone,
I've been magically transported back to
Neolithic Greece,
and we're going to take a look at the
very first farmers to arrive in the
Aegean and the Balkans from Southwest
Asia. To do that we're going to look at
how they lived by stepping inside their
houses like this one
at Dispilio in Northern Greece and
we're going to rifle through the trash
of dead people.
Because archaeologists are creepy...
So the landscape of neolithic greece is obviously very complex. There are dozens if not hundreds
of sites that have been studied.
We're only going to look at a few of
them today. 
We're going to start off at Franchthi Cave in southern Greece
And then we're going to move north to
southern Albania and look at the site of
Vashtëmi and then
into northern Greece to look at Dispilio
To give a sense of the timeline i
think it is important
What we're focusing on is the transition
from the "Middle Stone Age" or the Mesolithic
to the Neolithic (the New Stone Age) when the first farmers
arrive from southwest Asia
into the Aegean world. And so we're going
to focus right now on the Early
Neolithic from about 6,500 to 5,800 BCE
Oftentimes this transition is shown
in a map like this with these kinds of arrows.
Farming and the domestication of plants
and animals
and the development of pottery begins in
southwest Asia
And from there over a span of several
thousands of years
The arrows show how these technologies and the people themselves
spread out across in most
directions
And we're going to be looking how they
spread out to the west into the Aegean
world and into the greek world.
Our first stop is going to be Franchthi Cave.
Now this is one of the most famous
Neolithic sites in greece for a number
of reasons.
For one it was excavated over 40 years
ago by Thomas Jacobson. And it was the very first
scientific excavation in Greece
bringing to light a whole new range of
evidence from plants to animals and
other kinds of things
that help enrich our picture of the life
of ancient peoples.
Another advantage to Franchthi Cave is the
deep trenches that they dug
These span the transition between
different Stone Age periods
The earliest hunter-gatherers in their
cave were there
over 20,000 years ago from the "Old Stone
Age" or the Paleolithic period
And it also includes a Mesolithic period,
so the "Middle Stone Age"
and then finally the Neolithic period
that we'll be looking mostly at today
In the Mesolithic period we see a
broader spectrum of hunting and gathering
than existed in the earlier
Paleolithic period. At this time there's
evidence for intensive
fishing. For example, several examples of
fish hooks exist.
And you can see in the upper
frame the large circular vertebrae from
tuna.
And these fishers were extremely
successful at hunting large schools of
tuna.
They learned their migration patterns
and targeted them very carefully.
To do so they used lithics or stone
tools such as these
made out of flint (which i'm named after)
And obsidian
all the way from the island of Milos
from over 200 kilometers away.
And this shows again just the sort of
skills of this hunter-gatherer
stone age population.
They were able to travel over the sea to
both fish
and to be able to get raw materials
such as obsidian.
However at this time most of the stone
tools were made of flint.
There's a brief hiatus in the cave
before the start of the Neolithic period
And so there's a big debate over whether
the first
farmers to use the cave were actually
the local hunter-gatherers that had
learned
from new farming populations that had
arrived from southwest Asia
how to farm or whether these were a
whole new population group.
At this time it's very unclear and we're
unable to answer the question without
doing aDNA analysis of some of the
ancient people.
However there is a bit of hint in the
sense that there is evidence of
Mesolithic looking stone tools
in the very earliest Neolithic layers. So
one of the possibilities is that these
were hunter-gatherers that had adopted
the technologies and the plants and the
animals from
first farmer groups to arrive.
But we're just not sure at this time
we can see a stark difference in the
artifacts in the Early Neolithic period
in the later Neolithic periods
In Franchthi cave, pottery first
arrives at this time.
And so with these pots here we can get a
sense of how pottery was made and used
So, for example, on the pot in the upper
right you see how it's shiny and glossy?
That's actually achieved from burnishing.
And what burnishing is is that they
polish
the surface of the clay to get it
extremely smooth
and shiny giving it a sort of decoration
and a sheen.
In the upper left we can see what's
called "Urfirnis ware."
This is where they're actually
painting on a slip in a different color
from the base color of the clay
And so these kind of new technologies, in
a sense they show
that these first farmers were interested
in decorating the pottery that they were
using for eating
drinking and storing foodstuffs.
At the lower left
you can see a sherd from a cook pot.
We can tell partly based on the fabric. It's
a grittier type of fabric
But also because of the burning patch that you see on the right side of it
And so this gives us a sense of why
pottery was so useful
Could you imagine cooking without
pots and pans made from pottery?
(or something else as we use metal or
aluminum today).
Or could you imagine life  without these kind of vessels?
So life for these first farmers was very
very different from in the preceding
stone age due to pottery
Another cool thing that's captured on
this pottery, as an article by Susan
Allen recently shows,
is that there's impressions of seeds.
For example this is an impression of
einkorn wheat
that was made while the pottery was
drying before it was fired
And so this gives us a better sense of
the plants in the cave
Through flotation and otherwise they
collected carbonized remains of plants
But there was no einkorn wheat for
example in the early neolithic layers
only in the impressions that you see
here. And so
this kind of multimodal study gives us a
better sense of life at this place.
Here we see a larger suite
of the artifacts
from Franchthi Cave in the Neolithic
period and I want to first draw your
attention to the bones in the lower
right of this image
This is the first time that we see
domesticated animals
such as sheep, goat, pig, and cow in Franchthi cave
These animals were domesticated in
southwest Asia and brought
oversea and over land to this region of
the world. And they dominate the faunal
assemblage, the the animal assemblage, in
the cave
No longer were the people occupying
this cave intensively focusing on
hunting and gathering instead they were
primarily farmers and animal herders.
We can look at their stone tool assemblage.
For example, they're still flint
but the stone tool assemblage now is
dominated by obsidian
One of the ideas is is that the local
hunter-gatherer population
probably showed the first farmers to
arrive where this obsidian came from on
the island of Milos over 200 kilometers
away
And so we should picture a kind
of intercultural exchange going on at
this time 
between these different groups.
and we can see a characteristic stone tools, such as small little blades just an inch or
two inches long
And little arrowheads made in obsidian here
There's a nice range of stone tools aswell at the site. It's not all chipped stone
tools like blades and arrowheads.
It includes for example these polished
stone axes
And these appear for the first time
in the Neolithic period. They were used
to chop down
the virgin forests in the area to create
plots of land for farming
and animal husbandry.
As well we have implements such as groundstone. And so
you could imagine that
these are used for creating flour out of
wheat or barley or even lentils or other legumes
And so this would have been
back-breaking labor
of grinding the produce
with the top stone against the bottom
stone to be able to transform a field of
wheat into a loaf of bread or a stew or a
gruel or a porridge
and with the arrival of fired clay we
start seeing figurines and other
ornaments
that show up in the cave marking a very
different kind of lifestyle
and elaboration than we saw in the
earlier stone age periods
in Greece and the Aegean.
Now, I'd like to head up to northern Greece
and we're going to take a look at two of
these sites not just northern Greece but
southern Albania and we're going to take
a look at two of these sites in the sort
of upland plateaus up there:
Vashtëmi and Dispilio. We'll
go to Vashtëmi first because I've
worked there.
This site was excavated by a
collaboration between Susan Allen at the
University of Cincinnati
and Illir Gjipali of the Institute of
Albanology in Tirana, Albania
And they've actually shed a whole new
light on the picture of the first
farmers that arrived into this region with their recent excavations. The site
here is located in the uplands
in a very wetland region not too far
from the modern lakes of Ohrid
and Prespa, and this is important.
So this is what the site looks like today.
It actually is excavated in modern
farmland.
They were growing alfalfa and corn when
I was there
participating in the excavation. And so a
series of trenches were excavated to be
able to get a better picture of this site
You can see here the team looking at the
various finds. So we have pottery drying
in the lower left
we have Gaël Piquès looking at the fish
bones in the middle left
Susan allen the co-director of the
project is examining some of the
plant remains. Jonida Martini, my wife, is
down there
processing small finds from the project,
including fish hooks and figurines
And so one of the most important finds
that was found were the dates.
By doing radiocarbon dates on some of
the organic materials from the
excavations
It placed the earliest dates of humans
at the site around 6400 BCE
And this correlates well with the
arrival of the very first farmers
And as Allen and the others state, it
"confirms its chronological position
along the leading edge of agricultural
settlers in southern Europe.
Moreover dates from Vashtëmi and other
Early Neolithic sites in southern
Albania
support a model of selective settlement
that defies a strictly
directional pattern of expansion and may
instead have been based on a preference
for wetland settings."
So when we see this kind of map of the spread of Neolithic
peoples
into europe, we see a series of arrows as
if it's a kind of progressive
diffusion of people and technology and
animals and plants
But this does not give enough agency to
people in the past
Instead we need to understand that they
were targeting certain types of
environments
to settle in first. Types of environments
that they saw as favorable
to the way of life that they wanted to
live
And that's why i want to again focus on
the region,
the setting that Vashtëmi is located in
You can't tell now but it's actually
located next to
where there used to be a large lake: Lake
Maliq
Now the site is on modern farmland, but
that's because Lake Maliq had been
drained
uh almost 100 years ago or so. And we
should instead picture the site to look
something like this on the edge of lake Prespa
A very wetland environment. And the finds
from the site confirmed this
not only were the people living there
farming - using plants such as emmer and
einkorn wheat and barley -
but also they had domesticated animals
such as sheep, goat, pig, and cow
and equally important there's a large
number of wild animals from the site.
Larger game such as red and roe deer, 
wild boar
turtle, hare, various bird species,
freshwater eel, and freshwater fish from
the lake.
And so we need to picture a lifestyle
that was focused on both
farming and herding AND hunting and
gathering.
Looking closer at the site we can get a
sense of what life was like from these
post holes here
But i think we can get a
clearer picture of what these post holes mean
if we move just a little bit southeast
entering into the borders of modern Greece
and head to the site of the Dispilio,
located on the Lake
Orestias. It has not been drained and
is still there today.
And the finds from there preserved well
due to the water. So
an abundance of wooden finds were found
And this has let archaeologists to create a
reconstruction of this site
And we get a sense that these houses and
these sort of Neolithic lakeside
settlements would have been on wooden
stilts placed above the water to be able
to deal with the rise and the fall of
these lakes
due to differential rainfall patterns in
different seasons
The findings of burned uh mud
and wattle and daub
give us a sense of the construction of
these houses. So what "wattle and daub"
is is you take the kind of wooden
lattice and you overlay that
with kind of dung and mud and clay that
then hardens
and this is actually a very not only
useful way of living - i know it sounds a
little gross with the dung -
but it actually provides excellent
insulation and there's been a revival of
this kind of
technology in various parts of the world
because of how effective (and sustainable) it is
If we step into their houses we can see
that the people living
at Dispilio used a similar-ish
repertoire of pottery
as those in Francthi Cave with a range
of sort of cook pots and storage vessels
and dining and drinking vessels as well
we also get evidence of kind of bone
implements such as this large cow
scapula (shoulder blade)
And it's interesting because the
etymology of "scapula" comes from ancient
Breek from the verb "skaptein" meaning "to dig"
and Neolithic peoples all over the world
from China to Europe to Africa and elsewhere
used these shoulder blades, or scapulae, of
large animals such as cattle
and turned them into hoes for digging early
plots of land
for farming. And so Dispilio really
gives us this excellent
snapshot of what life was like to live
as a very very very first farmer
in this kind of world of the Aegean,
targeting these biodiverse
rich areas where farming can be
practiced where hunting can be practiced
where fishing can be practiced and
herding can be practiced
They were very adapted to this kind of biodiverse environment
And this gives us a more nuanced picture
of the arrival of the first farmers into
this area of the world from southwest
Asia
And i want to end with one last point
that it's really important that we break
down
modern borders. There's
oftentimes a strong
division based on modern country lines
between
understanding the archaeological
cultures of one region versus another.
However Neolithic
people and ancient people in general did
not respect modern borders. They weren't
there. They are modern inventions,
and so if we really want to understand
the past we need to strip away as much
as we can of
our modern baggage to look into the past.
Well there you have it. The arrival of
the first farmers into the Aegean and
the Balkan regions
I hope you have a greater sense of the
scholarly debates over how the first
farmers arrived
and how they interacted with the local
landscape what their preferences were
and how they interacted with the local
population of hunter-gatherers.
All these things are still under debate
today. And I really hope that you have a
better sense of what it was like to live
in the stone age, especially as one of
these early farmers
in one of these sites such as Dispilio.
I'd like to end with a big thank you
to Susan Allen. She's one of my former
professors and i learned a lot about the
Neolithic and
Early Neolithic period in the Aegean
from her.
