ABSTRACT
A pervasive scholarly focus on ethnic agency in movement and related settlement in the later EIA seen in the Al Mina and other cases, ties into Classical archaeology's interest in 'Greeks' abroad in the Archaic to Hellenistic periods. Some important polities in the Aegean region clearly had a state structure paralleling forms in the central Aegean, used Greek as their main written language, and identified themselves as linked to particular polities within central Greece. As in the Al Mina case, acceptance of 'Greek colonisation' as a generic kind of Early Iron Age movement process has fed assumptions that mass migration from the central Aegean to the west Anatolian region early in the period directly caused these developments. Export-linked economic growth in the Aegean was clearly a major factor in the intensified trade and settlement seen in the central Mediterranean by the late eighth century.
