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45b - The material culture of Archaic Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
John Boardman
Edited by
John Boardman  and
N. G. L. Hammond
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Summary

It would be heartening to believe that our knowledge of the material conditions of life in ancient Greece improves as attention shifts from the earlier periods to the later. In many respects it becomes the poorer and it is for the earliest settlements and their comparatively simple trappings that we have the fullest evidence. Continuous occupation of the major sites has rendered it difficult to do more than sample the evidence for any given period and it is possible, for instance, still to be unsure whether even Athens had a city wall in the sixth century B.C.: evidence for it is allusive only, in texts, and on the ground there is nothing. Criteria other than acreage have to be applied to determine population numbers and in the Archaic period none inspire confidence. Even relative growth and decline, which might be gauged from the sizes of cemeteries, must depend upon more complete survival and excavation that it has generally proved possible to achieve. While the increasing sophistication of life greatly diversifies the archaeological record it has also meant that the range of possibly relevant evidence has widened to include important classes of objects which have survived irregularly (metalwork) or not at all (parchment, papyri, textiles). True, the figure arts of Greece tell more through detailed depiction of life. This has meant, for instance, that we learn about eighth-century weapons mainly from excavated objects, sixth-century ones from pictures of them or allusions in poetry, and it is not easy to say which period is the more reliably and completely served.

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Chapter
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The Cambridge Ancient History
, pp. 442 - 462
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1982

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