Introduction

The discovery of Greek Bronze Age inscriptions is undoubtedly the greatest archaeological triumph of the last half-century. The ivory and gold snake-goddess at Boston, Massachusetts, is the chief representative of Bronze Age Greece in America, where there are other objects at Philadelphia and the non-Minoan Cesnola collection of Cyprian pottery at New York. Sir Arthur Evans has found beneath the buildings of the Bronze Age deep neolithic deposits, that take the place back as a human settlement far into the mists of antiquity, the beginnings of human activity in the Greek lands. An enormous service has been done to the study of early Greek archaeology by Sir Arthur Evans; for the first time we have a reliable chronology of the development of the Bronze Age culture in Greece. The population remained the same from the Neolithic period till the end of the Age of Bronze.