ACHILLEION

The densest group of Neolithic settlements in all of Europe is found in the rich plain of Thessaly in central Greece. Most of these sites are related to Sesklo, a Thessalian site where first the "Neolithic triad" (pottery, domesticated plants, and animals) was identified in 1901. Ever since, this red-painted pottery has been referred to as "Sesklo" ware, no matter where it is found. Achilleion, a Sesklo site, is located on the southern edge of the eastern part of the plain. A Greek-American team excavated this site in 1973 and 1974, and the director, the late Marija Gimbutas, published the results in 1989. Achilleion produced a long sequence of radiocarbon dates (c. 6400–5600 b.c.) and is among the earliest of Neolithic sites in Greece. The goals of the project were, first, to explore this site for evidence of a "pre-pottery Neolithic," that is, levels with domestication but no pottery; second, to obtain data for radiocarbon dating; and, last, to understand the life of the villagers, as evidenced by their houses, pottery, tools, technology, symbols, and what they traded, herded, hunted, planted, and gathered.

STRATIGRAPHY AND LIVING SPACE

Four squares, each 5 by 5 meters (A–D), were placed at the summit of the low-lying mound, and sterile soil was reached in A, B, and Test Pit East at a depth of 5 meters. Test pits and small soundings were dug to establish the extent of habitation. Based on the soil stratigraphy, the carbon dates, and the seriation of a huge sample of pottery (more than 100,000 sherds), four phases were defined (Achilleion I–IV) covering about eight hundred years of early to classical Sesklo.

Building practices changed over time. The standard, adopted in Achilleion II, of stone foundations with walls made of posts interlaced with brush and sealed with mud plaster varied over time only by number and size of rooms. Excavation near a house wall exposed a "courtyard" of Achilleion III (c. 6000 b.c.) filled with artifacts and features that included an unusual stone and clay platform with round, pebble-lined indentations, 30 centimeters in diameter, at each corner. On the platform were five figurines, stone cutting and grinding tools, and associated pottery sherds, apparently representing outdoor domestic activity of a communal nature. The two-room structure of Achilleion IV was referred to as a "shrine" because figurines, special pottery, and tools were clustered in one room; although this interpretation is debatable, the recovery of figurines and other cult objects indicates a lively symbolic life. Exposure of other "living" floors illustrates the dense combination of tools, artifacts, rubbish piles, partial structures, hearths, ovens, and other items of the material culture of Neolithic village life.

POTS AND POTTERS

The Achilleion I (c. 6500 b.c.) villagers produced simple monochromatic pink, gray, tan, or dark brown wares; later potters added dark red-brown (Achilleion II) and, in phases III and IV (c. 6000–5700 b.c.), burnished red-buff and red-orange. Favored shapes were rounded, open and closed, some with high necks and ring-bases. Linear designs of red paint on a white slip background were first tabulated in late Achilleion I (triangles and crossed lines) and the very characteristic step pattern introduced in phase II (c. 6300–6150 b.c.). Products of phase III and IV (c. 6000–5600 b.c.) seem to have been the work of more knowledgeable and adventurous potters launching checkerboard, boxes, filled-lozenge, nesting chevrons, and the most recognized of Sesklo motifs—the flame pattern and its elaborations. Potters making crude and fine wares had developed into crafters.

TOOLS, TASKS, AND CRAFTS

The many and varied artifacts and features imply workers, crafters, and apprentices or helpers in a village in which men and women, young and old, all participated. Among the numerous items (and associated workers' activities) were: clay spindle whorls and spools (shepherds, spinners, weavers); fine and coarse pottery and polishers (potter specialists); imported obsidian for cutting tools (traders, cooks, farmers); stone adzes, axes, and grinders and carbonized plant remains (stone carvers, sowers, reapers, cooks, consumers) (fig. 1: 3, 6); mat impressions on clay (basket and mat makers); bone tools (herders, hunters, and cooks) and the recycling of bones ground and shaped into tools (fig. 1: 7).

Conservation of resources was detected by presence of the "silica gloss" on the edge of small chipped stone blades—part of a composite sickle.

These were inserted, as "teeth," into a groove prepared in a wood or antler handle. As the sickle was used in reaping, free silica in the plants fused onto and dulled the teeth. The reaper removed, rotated, and reinserted them, producing a reusable sickle; and his/her conserving behavior is identifiable when the shiny silica gloss covers opposite margins of the small blades.

ANIMAL AND PLANT HUSBANDRY

The settlers planted and reaped domesticated cereal crops (emmer and einkorn wheat, barley, and perhaps oats), either in mixed fields or separately. They added lentils in Achilleion I and II and peas in Achilleion III and IV. Wild pistachio nuts, acorns, and wild grapes were collected. Subsistence also was based on those animals husbanded by the villagers: sheep, goats, cattle, pigs, and dogs (the latter not for food); all had been domesticated by the time the first pit house had been erected in Achilleion I. The same mixed seed material and faunal remains have been identified from other early Neolithic Thessalian sites.

Wild animals did not play an important role in the diet, but hunters exploited the forested mountains for red deer, ibex, wild cat, and boar as well as the plain for wild cattle and fallow and roe deer. Wild ancestors allow for local domestication, but it is assumed that sheep and goat, already domesticated, were brought to Thessaly from either the north or the east (the Balkans in the case sheep and Anatolia for goats).

SYMBOLISM

Achilleion is noted especially for the recovery, in an archaeological context, of a large and varied assemblage of small clay schematic human and naturalistic animal figurines (fig. 1: 1–5). These items were studied by the excavator Marija Gimbutas, who interpreted them as symbols of the "gods and goddesses of Old Europe," representing prehistoric religion, cult practice, and matriarchy. "Old Europe" encompasses Neolithic through Chalcolithic Greece and the Balkans (c. 7000–3500 b.c.), where virtually all excavations of prehistoric sites reveal similar figurines and various cult objects. The Thessalian sites of these millennia were the richest, and the ubiquity of the pottery designs and especially the figurines, with masks as faces and "coffee bean" eyes (fig. 1: 1, 2, 4, 5), suggests that they were easily recognizable symbols standing for a kind of cultural association. Some of them also may symbolize a household cult of regeneration (fig. 1: 3).

Gimbutas's analysis has been the subject of controversy and is part of an ongoing debate that has been summarized by Richard Lesure. Nevertheless, her ideas captured the popular imagination and led some feminist writers to proclaim that once God was a woman.

THE CONTRIBUTION OF ACHILLEION

The rich recovery of material culture provides an opportunity to look at how life at Achilleion worked—in some ways quite sophisticated and elaborate for the mid-seventh to mid-sixth millennia b.c., without even considering the symbolism embedded in the ubiquitous and challenging figurine assemblage. For example, a raw material, obsidian, was used systematically for small cutting blades over the eight hundred years of settlement, possibly because it holds a sharp cutting edge. The source of this volcanic glass is the island of Melos in the Cycladic group, some 300 kilometers away. Transporting raw materials from afar required considerable effort, which endows them with extra value. Although it is not known what the Achilleion villagers offered in return, one can infer that planning, organization, and a long-term procurement strategy (or strategies) were successfully in operation—a certain and exciting example of the abilities and social dynamics of the villagers.

One of the goals of this excavation was to locate a pre-pottery Neolithic level, which had been reported when Dimitrios Theocharis, the late dean of Thessalian prehistory, tested the site in 1961. The evidence from the lowest Achilleion I levels (c. 6500 b.c.), however, always included pottery. The absence of this pre-pottery horizon at Achilleion suggests that the first settlers probably were not a local population but rather agriculturalists from elsewhere who brought with them the knowledge of pottery making and fully domesticated plants and animals—the Neolithic triad. Based on the pottery styles, and present knowledge of plant and animal domestication, these first settlers could have been from Anatolia or the Near East, who arrived with maritime traders or colonists or both, as suggested by Catherine Perlès and Kostas Gallis. Chronology is an essential issue in prehistory because there are no written records. Thus the forty-two calibrated radiocarbon dates from Achilleion, tied to the development of an Early to Middle Neolithic village, is a contribution in and of itself, one which will reverberate in terms of this time period in Greece and throughout the Balkans for some time to come.

bibliography

Gallis, Kostas I. "The Neolithic World." In Neolithic Culture in Greece. Edited by George A. Papathanassopoulos, pp. 23–37. Athens, Greece: Goulandris Museum of Cycladic Art, 1996.

Gimbutas, Marija. The Goddesses and Gods of Old Europe. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Gimbutas, Marija, Shan Winn, and Daniel Shimabuku. Achilleion: A Neolithic Settlement in Thessaly, Greece, 6400–5600b.c. Monumenta Archaeologica, no. 14. Los Angeles: UCLA Institute of Archaeology, 1989.

Lesure, Richard G. "The Goddess Diffracted: Thinking about the Figurines of Early Villages." Current Anthropology 43, no. 4 (2002): 587–610.

Perlès, Catherine. The Early Neolithic in Greece: The FirstFarming Communities in Europe. Cambridge World Archaeology. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Ernestine S. Elster