ABSTRACT
Many books on pre-Roman Italy have started their narratives with beginnings of the Iron Age. This phenomenon is probably caused by the fact that Bronze Age cultures and societies have always been problematical issues for ‘Classical’ archaeologists. This observation has been repeatedly made for Bronze Age Greece. On the one hand the Greek Bronze Age was considered as a heyday of civilization and could be shown to display links with Iron Age cultures and societies of Greece that were generally considered to be part of the domain of classical archaeology. On the other hand, the Bronze Age societies of Greece were separated from the later ‘classical’ world by the uncanny Dark Ages. Scholars studying the Greek Bronze Age, moreover, rarely ventured into the Iron Age or later periods of ancient Greece and students of the ‘classical’ world of Greece of the first millennium BC almost never looked into problems of the Bronze Age. The Dark Age was a great divide in the archaeology of Greece. Since this ‘classic’ phase in Greece was often believed to have contributed to the formation of western civilization in a significant way, the Greek Dark Ages were considered to be a period when a cultural dusk spread over the human world and the torch of civilization burned low.
