ABSTRACT
A different theory has been put forward by Renfrew (1987), who criticizes previous attempts to identifY ethnicities with artifactual assemblages. He draws attention to the fact that patterns in the processes) and not the artifacts can help us identifY different ethnic units (Renfrew 1987: 23-24, 120-21; 1988: 438). He links 'the spread of early Indo-European languages to a well defined demographic process itself closely correlated with the adoption of a farming economy' (Renfrew 1987: 266). Following an opinion he had expressed earlier (1974), he suggests that the Indo-European tribes started their expansion during the Neolithic period from a homeland in Anatolia. According to his theory, the Early Bronze Age inhabitants of Greece were not only Indo-Europeans but indeed Greeks. Renfrew's suggestions about an Anatolian homeland and a dispersion during the Neolithic have been heavily criticised (Anthony and Wailes, 1988; Gimbutas 1988), as were his linguistic analyses (Baldi 1988; Coleman 1988), and his model for dispersion (Barker 1988). What Renfrew was able to do, however, was to demonstrate that the arrival of the Greeks did not necessarily happen as a sudden and massive invasion by fierce conquerors (we shall return later to the idea of a migration in the form of a process rather of an event). Besides Renfrew, French (1974: 51) considers it possible that the Early Bronze Age Aegean was inhabited by Greeks.
