Alright, so i'm coming to you from the
lovely Preveli Gorge
on the island of Crete. It's just a
lovely set of scenery around me
And we're going to be discussing
landscapes in early Greece
By early Greece, i mean the earliest
humans and hominids to arrive
into the area that we think of as modern
Greece today
So tens to hundreds of thousands of
years ago. Hunter-gatherers that were
living here.
So we're going to be looking into
how the landscape has changed
over time,
then we're going to see how humans
interacted and adapted with that landscape,
and finally we're going to check
out how archaeologists use our
understanding
of the landscape both today and in the
past
to be able to explore archaeology.
Let's look at the landscape of what we
call Greece today
So we can see Crete - the large
island of Crete - is near the bottom of
the screen in the South.
Further North is a set of islands that
we call the Cyclades.
And we'll be looking specifically at
Milos.
And to the west is the mainland of what
we call Greece today.
The southern part is the Peloponnese
is marked by the three fingers that we
can see jutting out to the South
and further north the territory of
modern Greece stretches out into the
Balkan regions.
Do check out Sidari in the upper left
That's on the island of Corfu.
So we're going to be exploring most of
the sites that you see here
on this map and understanding how they
fit into the landscape throughout
the stone age of Greece.
so let's think about our timeline here
specifically let's think about it at a
geological scale first.
There's the Pleistocene - which we
often call the ice age -
which began about two and a half million
years ago.
And eventually that transitions into the
period that we're now
in called the Holocene where the
glaciers have receded and it's
warmer. That began around 11 500
years ago.
When we think of the ice age we
oftentimes think of glaciers,
of course like the alps here. However
in Greece -
what we call Greece - the glaciers
did not extend that far
south, though there was a small one
near Mount Olympus
And when we think about the ice age
it's not just some sort of static
period. Our understanding from
paleoclimatological studies
shows major changes in temperature for
brief periods of time.
So if you look at the top blue line the
zero is around today's temperature.
And for much of the ice age it was about
six degrees Celsius cooler
than it is today. That's about 12 degrees
Fahrenheit, and that's on
average. But you see these spikes that
occur. These are interglacial periods.
These are periods
where the earth warmed and the ice melted. These were periods actually very
similar to our own and they lasted
around on
average 10 000 years. There were several
of them that split up the Pleistocene.
This is one of the reasons why we
actually know that
our own period of extended warming
that's going on right now is caused by
humans.
If we were still following the natural
interglacial cycles,
we would actually be expecting to be
transitioning
back to an ice age. Not right away.
Maybe in a thousand or two thousand or three thousand years
But what we would not expect is for it
to be getting warmer right now
If you look at these sort of
interglacial periods you see there's a
sharp spike of a warm
warm period and then they gradually
get cooler until it
accelerates back to an ice age.
So this is really key to understand our own
context even
and how we're affecting the climate
during what should be a
natural interglacial period,
not rapid global warming
Alright, let's map out these kind of
geological periods onto cultural periods
So we're going to be looking at the
Paleolithic (the old stone age)
and the Mesolithic (the middle stone age).
This video will end
at the Neolithic (the new stone age) when
the first farmers arrived
into the Aegean region and into the area we
now call Greece
Now the Paleolithic is an extremely long
period of time from about 2.7 million
years ago
and started in Africa, of course, with the
first hominids creating tools.
The middle paleolithic... Oh the lower
Paleolithic is oftentimes associated at
least this far
north with Homo erectus populations,
the Middle Paleolithic is more
associated with Neandertal populations
and the Upper Paleolithic roughly
corresponds to when humans
modern Homo sapiens sapiens
arrived into this area
So why do we call it the Upper, Middle,
and Lower paleolithic? It's because when
we dig,
the lower we get the older things are.
So when we look at kind of a stratigraphic
profile of what we've been digging,
the Lower Paleolithic would be
underneath the Middle Paleolithic which
would be underneath the Upper
paleolithic
and so that hopefully helps explain
these confusing names
So these are definitely Stone Ages and
most of the artifacts that we find are
made from stone primarily from flint
The reason why is because
flint and also obsidian which is a
volcanic glass that we'll see a little
bit later,
they fracture in a specific way. It's
called concoidal fracturing
And this allows for controlled shaping
and creation of sharp edges
to create implements in in a way that
humans can control
That's really important because
they're not just bashing rocks together
They're using a hammer stone or an
antler to be able to
shape a tool or an object that they can
use.
Mostly for cutting of some sort and these tools are of various sizes
And of course we're thinking about
periods where most of the archaeology
comes from caves. So we'll be checking
out a number of caves
In particular Franchthi Cave, one of the
most important stone age sites from
the area of modern Greece.
But i think we should first stop off at
the site of Marathousa
located near the center of the
Peloponnese. This is actually the
site where we have the earliest evidence
for hominid occupation
in the area and uh hominids were
there from the Lower Paleolithic. The excavations led by Eleni
Panagopoulou
have shown that they've been there for
around half, they were there around half
a million years ago
So we are talking a very very long time
ago. There are no hominid remains that
I know of from the site, but they would
have probably been Homo erectus
And what they discovered is actually
frankly amazing
They discovered an elephant slaughter
and butchery
area. And there's large
remains of elephants that were
slaughtered and then butchered in situ.
And there was a range of stone tools
found in the area showing that the
hominids
were targeting these elephants. And
this is key because when you think about
the Ice Age we need to understand that
the landscape was very different from
today.
I mean elephants are not in Greece today
outside of zoos.
And that's because with most of the
water being trapped
at the poles, the landscape and the
climate was drier.
And so areas that we would think of as
forested today
are instead more savannah or steppe-like
with a grassland and
scrub throughout. And there were a range
of animals that are very different from
today -
things like elephants,  of course mammoths were further to the north
in the colder areas, but also other
animals like lions and other kind of
things that we would no longer think of
as in Europe
existed in this area of the Balkans
during the Pleistocene. And so this site
was actually found fortuitously in a
sense
due to mining for lignite which is a
type of coal
And so it was the mining for lignite, in
between two different seams,
that identified the site with the
archaeological horizon in between them
And it was in this horizon that the
paleontological finds of the elephants
and the archaeological finds that the
stone tools
were found. It's very fortuitous
because most of our finds
come from caves from this period.
Caves kind of act as kind as
a time capsule. They will protect the
archaeological remains from things like
rainfall that will disturb them,
they will stop them from being
overburdened with meters and meters and
meters of sediment
Making it so that if we find a cave we
can potentially find
the evidence that humans and hominins
lived in it in the past
we're going to look at some of the
evidence from within these caves and so
i'm going to take you to the Malcolm H.
Wiener Laboratory for Archaeological
Science,
where we're going to look at some animal
bones to understand how these early
humans
hunted within this landscape.
So I'm here at the Wiener Laboratory in
Athens and we're going to look at some
animal bones to get a sense for how
Paleolithic people hunted.
Animal bones of course give a sense of
the kind of animals they hunted and the
kind of strategies that
they used. So we're going to look at a
couple of assemblages of bones
the first one is from Klithi
Cave in Northwest Greece.
It was excavated by Eric Higgs and Geoff
Bailey. I'm going to look at the animal
bone report published by Nellie Phoca-Cosmetatou. So what the animal
bones from this cave seem to show is
that they're dominated by ibex
Ibex is a kind of wild goat. I don't have
any wild goat skeletons here in the lab
but i do have a domestic goat to give
you a sense of what
animal we're looking at um it's not
exactly the same but it's similar
with a different kind of horn morphology and whatnot
Now this cave is located extremely high
in the mountains in northwest Greece at
430 meters above sea level.
And so there's a range of ibex bones in
the cave
But what we can tell is that certain
bones are there more often than others. What i mean is the type of
anatomical part. We're talking about
where it is on the leg
And so in the cave there's a lot of
meaty elements from the vertebra,
the ribs, their shoulder blades,
and then the upper front leg and
then there's the hip
and the upper back legs. But what's
missing
are the lower legs, these sort of
feet bones and little toe bones and
things like that
And so what that's telling us is that
these hunter-gatherers probably needed
to range around through the mountains to
be able to hunt these ibex
and they prioritized bringing back the
meaty parts
to the cave for consumption. They
would leave the less meaty parts, the
things that were less valuable,
at the kill site where they actually
hunted the ibex.
And so this is interesting because it's
so high up this
site has been interpreted by Phoca-Cosmetatou
as a specialist hunting site.
And they probably went up there in the
summer when it was warm up into the
mountains
and they focused on hunting the ibex
populations that were ranging around the
mountains.
And then they were only able to bring
back to the cave for consumption
the more meaty body parts.
OK, so the next cave we're going to focus on is Klissoura Cave
and that's in a very different location
from Klithi Cave. It's located in
southern Greece in the Argolid.
And it's nowhere near as high in the
mountains. It's actually above
the Argolid plain and so what we're
thinking about here
is a different assemblage of animals
Most of the animals that end up in this
cave are fallow deer
They're a type of deer species that
prefers woodland. So this is a woodland
environment
and the hunter gatherers in the Middle
Paleolithic and the Upper Paleolithic,
from sixty thousand years ago down to
about ten thousand years ago
were focusing on fallow deer.
However, they had a very different strategy
than the hunter-gatherers of Klithi
Cave and what we see is a different body
part assembled showing up
So in addition to the meatier parts of
the body we see
a lot of lower legs and foot bones and
less meaty parts
And this suggests that the
fallow deer were roaming right near the
cave.
It was not such an effort to schlep the
different parts of the carcass back to
the cave. And at the same time we
therefore have a different kind of
processing going on
The people that lived and and used
Klissoura cave
were interested in extracting as
many nutrients
as they could and they would carefully
break the bones,
even small little ones like toe bones, in
order to extract the marrow
because the marrow was an important part
of their nutrients. And there is a
slight change in hunting practice
between the earlier Middle Paleolithic
and then the later Upper Paleolithic. And
so what we see
for example is a change in ages so
during the Middle Paleolithic they were
focused on
prime age animals, sort of animals that
would have had teeth like this
and would have looked like this. And then
in the Upper Paleolithic it included
both adults
but also little baby deer. And so this
suggests that they were expanding their
hunting
And in fact the cave is used more
intensively there's arguments from one
of the excavators uh Takis Karkanas, the
director here of the lab,
that uh there was maybe even a structure
at the site. And there's a newer range of
implements this suggests it's being
inhabited year long as opposed to in
the earlier period when it was only
inhabited during the cold
the cooler months. And so it's by using
these suites of animal bones from body
parts to ages
and the way they're treated that we
can get a sense of hunting strategies in
the stone age.
So now we're going to focus on the
transition from the Pleistocene
to the Holocene as the ice age ends and
how this impacts humans.
So we have to imagine all this Arctic
ice
melting and it's going to have a huge
impact on the landscape around humans.
It's going to cause an increase in sea
levels,
just as we're experiencing today as our
climate warms. It's also going to cause a
change in weather patterns which we're
also experiencing today.
Notably in Greece much more rainfall
which really impacts the landscape.
So let's first check out sea level rise
by looking at the Cycladic islands
in the middle of the Aegean and this is
a there's a large number of
small and large islands in this region.
And in the past
after 130 meters of sea level rise,
we can understand that things probably
looked much much different in the past.
So here's what it looked like in the
past this sort of Paleocycladic plateau
It would have been very very different.
Most of the land is now
underwater. And it was much closer to
the mainland, so far
easier to reach. And so we've lost much
of our evidence of course for early
hunter-gatherers in the
late Paleolithic and Mesolithic because
those sites are now
underwater. What we think of as
islands at today's sea level would have
actually in the past been
mountain peaks and even large upland
plateaus.
But we can check out how this affected
humans in more detail if we zoom over to
Franchthi Cave to the west.
Franchthi Cave is one of the most famous
stone age sites in Greece. It was
excavated about 40 to 50 years ago by
Thomas Jacobson
and was one of the first scientific
projects in Greece and really
revolutionized our understanding
of the Paleolithic, the Mesolithic, and
the Neolithic because all these phases
are found in this cave today. It's
actually located right next to the coast
It's a very pleasant walk along the
coast
And it has a great view of the sea
and the the Argolid bay
But in the past before sea levels rose
the coast would have been much further
away.
About 18 000 years ago the coast would
have been nine
kilometers away, dropping to about six
kilometers away twelve thousand years
ago,
and three kilometers away around eight
thousand years ago during the Mesolithic.
And so we can imagine that this would
have impacted humans in a big way
Especially as the landscape changes from
a sort of more savannah or steppe like
environment
to a more wooded environment.
And then finally, so if we
check out
the material culture, the lithics
meaning stone tools
and the fauna meaning animal bones from
Paleolithic Franchthi Cave,
we can see that they're crafting flint
mostly a local
resource into the tools that they're
using to hunt and to butcher
Now the animals that they're mostly
hunting in the early part of the Upper
Paleolithic
are large aurochs which are
wild cattle and a form of wild donkey or
ass
And so these would have been well
adapted to the kind of steppe like
savannah that the coastal plain,
the large coastal plain, would have been
at that time.
However as the coastal plain shrinks and
rainfall increases,
we see a change in the animals that are
that are hunted to
mostly red deer. And these are adapted to
a forest-like environment. So we can see
that human strategies are changing
with the local animals. During the
Mesolithic we see a sharp transition
One of them is in stone tools the stone
tools get much smaller and become what
we call
microlithis. And there's also a few
examples of obsidian
if you can see the black stone sort of
under the number 16 at the bottom.
This is obsidian all the way from the
island of Milos in the Cyclades.
And this shows that these peoples would
have been excellent at seafaring.
They would have had to travel about 200
kilometers
to get to the volcanic island of Milos
to be able to extract this resource and
bring it back
It was it was superior to the local
flints in many ways for working into
stone tools.
But if we look more closely at the fauna
what we can see in the Mesolithic is
this kind of explosion and sort of
species variation.
This is what many scholars call a more
broad spectrum diet
and so in addition to hunting mammals
and large herbivores such as deer that
are found near the cave
they also started focusing on sea
resources
In the early part of the Mesolithic
period they primarily focused on
shallow water resources such as shells
like
like mollusks and things like
that and also terrestrial snails,
turtles, and other kinds of animals. By
the middle part of the Mesolithic we see
an increase
into open sea fishes so barracuda and
some tuna.
And then finally by the very end of the
Mesolithic we see this kind of
increase in in tuna bones. There's this
focus on tuna at the time. Those are what
i have circled here
And it seems clear that the local
hunter-gatherers probably started to
understand the migratory patterns
of large schools of tuna that were
coming by not too far from the cave.
And so during certain seasons they were
able to have a glut
of tuna fish in a sense. And so we can
see
humans adapting to this new landscape at
this time
and becoming more accustomed to the sea
as the sea gets closer
and as their technology changes and the
landscape changes around them.
And this is a characteristic of much of
mesolithic culture that we've found so far.
Much of it is near the coast
Not all of it there is some mesolithic
from Theopetra Cave
but along western Greece there's a
series of shell middens, in particular a
very famous one is from Sidari
on the island of Corfu. And i could not
get a picture of one of these from
greece
but this is an example of a mesolithic
shell midden eroding out of a scarp
in the United Kingdom. And so we have to
imagine giant giant piles of shellfish
that were collected and consumed by
these Mesolithic hunter-gatherers
as they were exploiting kind of these
new environments that the
rises in sea level made available.
Now the Mesolithic culture in Greece has
been very difficult to find over the
last several decades.
And so Curtis Runnels and his team, what
they did is they put together a site
location model
to be able to identify more Mesolithic
sites to be able to understand better
how Mesolithic culture operated in
Greece.
And so what they did is their model
"is based on the assumption that
Mesolithic foragers
were responding to the environmental
possibilities created in the early
Holocene
by the loss of coastal plains to marine
transgression" - meaning sea level rise -
"and the replacement on land of the late
Pleistocene Artemisia steppe
with a more open woodland." Their model
predicted "that Mesolithic foragers
established residential sites and
special-purpose sites
(such as hunting stands, overnight camps,
shell middens, and flint
extraction sites) in" 1. locations with
the widest range of plant animal and
other resources so primarily coastal
wetlands
like near Franchthi Cave or Sidari.
2. they had caves and rock shelters near
fresh water
and 3. the early Holocene coastline
is near the present shoreline because
this minimizes the effects of the rising
sea that would have
on submerged sites on the coastal plain.
We need this if we're going to be able
to find them because obviously so many
Mesolithic sites
are now under water. And so what they did
was they chose an area near Franchthi
and they did a survey around here in the
Kandia region in the Argolid
And they found dozens of Mesolithic
sites, oftentimes near caves, a few were
in caves, and some as you can see are
right on the coast
And this has just exploded prehistoric
Paleolithic and Mesolithic research in
Greece as different teams are starting
to put together site location models
to be able to find these ephemeral stone
age sites
that were produced by hunters, some of
which might still exist on the ground
and others that could exist in caves.
So what i'd like to go now is see how
this has been applied
to the island of Crete to the south
Looking at the Plakias regional survey
directed by Thomas Strasser. And so what
he's found is evidence of stone age
seafaring because crete
is - let's go back a second - is nowhere
near the mainland
To get there from the mainland takes
an extensive sea
voyage. And so he used many of the same
principles put together by Runnels and
in fact Runnels was part of the team. And what they did was they surveyed
the landscape and looked for stone tools
and they were able to find a large
number of stone tools throughout the
landscape
The larger ones here are argued to be
from the Lower Paleolithic
However we don't have any absolute dates
yet. They come from a road cut that i'll
show you in a second.
The lower ones on the other hand are
tiny little mesolithic microliths.
All this white stone by the way is
quartz. It's much more
difficult to be able to
to be able to flake and control and
transform into a tool than obsidian or
flint. There is no local flint in the
area of Plakias
However you notice in the lower right
corner there's some obsidian there
And so the the smaller uh quartz and
obsidian come from excavations he did
that Thomas Strasser did and
they showed that there was a connection
between Crete and Milos in the
Mesolithic period as well.
So here's the Mesolithic site of
Damnoni that he excavated. you can see in
the
at the bottom in the foreground some of
the small trenches that were put in and
this is where
those small stone tools came from and in
the back is a sea cave that was molded
by the waves when the
when the sea was much higher uh in the
distant distant past
And so this is a very clear example of a
nice Mesolithic site, the very first one
found on Crete.
And those larger potentially Upper
Paleolithic tools come from this road
cut near Preveli gorge
And so as you can see it's similar to
finding the site of Marathousa
modern uh interaction with the landscape,
making a cut in order to make a lay a
road surface,
is what created a profile that
archaeologists were able to find likely
stone tools that date back
we don't really know the exact age but
certainly tens of thousands if not
hundreds of thousands of years ago.
And Preveli Gorge is just such a
beautiful landscape. It's really what you
sort of picture as a land before time
It's very very lush with a river running
through the gorge we're looking down
from the site
on the gorge and it comes out on a beach
that's just lovely.
Well there you have it the landscape of
early Greece
before i go take a quick dip here at the
lovely Preveli gorge
I'd like to make a few quick corrections
First of all, the start date of the Upper
Paleolithic here in Greece is now
thought to begin about 40 000 years ago
not 35 000 years ago
and that's just because as we find
new things these dates are always
subject to revision
Second of all, the stone tools found in
the Plakias region, so not far from here
were made mostly made of quartz, not quartzite
and that's just my bad
Third of all, I forgot to mention that
the director of excavations at Klisoura Cave
was Margarita Koumouzelis, and the author
of the animal bone report was Britt Starkovitch
And finally, I'd like to give a big thank
you to the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
and the Malcolm H. Wiener Laboratory for
Archaeological Science for letting me
film using the reference collection
And a personal thank you to the director
of the lab, Takis Karkanas,
my former boss. He's actually one of the
leading figures researching Paleolithic Greece
And he's he's worked with most of the
projects that we talked about today
Well alright, I hope you all get a
sense of how the landscape has
has changed drastically over the years -
over thousands of years.
in the ice age and all the way down
until today. And how hominids and humans
were able to adapt to these changes in
the landscape
And importantly how us archaeologists
use our knowledge of the landscape
to be able to find new archaeology.
It's for this reason
that this video is probably out of date
by the time that you're seeing it
But i'm going to ignore that for now and
I'm going to go take a dip here at
Preveli. So i'll see you all later
Bye!
