This book presents a sociopolitical history of Greece from the Palatial Bronze Age to the early Archaic period (ca. 1400–700 BC), with a geographical focus on central Greece rather than on Crete or the Peloponnese. Due to the disparate approaches and priorities of Aegean archaeologists, Early Iron Age archaeologists, classical archaeologists and ancient historians, together with outdated notions of Greek ‘prehistory’ dating back to Schliemann, the Early Iron Age has long fallen into a cross-disciplinary gap and has been treated as marginal and of inferior importance to the Late Mycenaean period and the Archaic Cultural Revolution which frame it. With this nuanced and innovative contribution, Knodell successfully bridges this ancient chronological divide and its artificial modern counterpart: that between Aegeanists and Greek archaeologists, which has no grounding in the data, and which has only recently begun to be breached. Building on key recent studies by John K. Papadopoulos, Tamar Hodos and James Wright, among others, the author adopts an approach based on the comparative archaeology of complex societies, analysing the wide variety of regional differences in sociopolitical organization which characterized the Greek world from the Early Mycenaean period onwards, a productive ground on which the sequestered disciplines which study pre-Archaic Greece might be brought together. In line with recent trends in archaeological theory which have aimed to re-emphasize locality and regional idiosyncrasy, Knodell’s approach is driven by the need ‘to articulate local and regional specificity and difference’ (6). Of particular significance is Knodell’s provision of a broadly applicable theoretical base and multiscalar comparandum for studies of secondary state formation in other disciplines and geographical regions.

Chapters 1 and 2 are devoted to theoretical and comparative approaches, the archaeological evidence available from each of the geographical regions of central Greece under discussion, and the network and spatial models which the author uses to interpret this evidence. Knodell gives an excellent and fully up-to-date chronology for the cultural-historical and ceramic phases of Greek history from the Early Mycenaean period to the late Archaic, which could profitably be assigned to students (7). In chapter 3, Knodell demonstrates that, in contrast to overgeneralized narratives of the Greek Bronze Age which have extrapolated too heavily from the Mycenaean palatial centres, the palace systems of the Palatial Bronze Age were anomalous, and that village societies were the norm in Greece over the long term. In light of his extended account of the sociopolitical diversity of Mycenaean Greece, Knodell then resituates it within the geopolitics of the Late Bronze Age Eastern Mediterranean. As a means of delineating the scope of his book, Knodell does not integrate the history of the cultural, musical, artistic and symbolic worlds within his new social and political history of pre-Archaic Greece. Perhaps as a consequence of this, his accounts of Mycenaean interaction and engagement with the other societies of the Eastern Mediterranean are strikingly minimalist.

Chapter 4 addresses changes in material culture, settlement networks and political organization during the Postpalatial Bronze Age, arguing that the Greek societies which emerged in this period should be seen as a return to a previous and less complex sociopolitical mode, instead of being described with the loaded language of collapse and regression. Chapter 5 frames the Early Iron Age as a time of experimentation and transition from the Postpalatial Bronze Age. Knodell makes the subtle but powerful point (theorized elsewhere by Christopher Witmore: ‘Complexities and Emergence: The Case of Argos’, in A.R. Knodell and T.P. Leppard (eds), Regional Approaches to Society and Complexity: Studies in Honor of John F. Cherry (London 2017), 268–87) that the Early Iron Age should be understood on its own terms, and not as an intermediary to a later eventuality: the subsequent Archaic period and the rise of the polis, which was one among myriad historical possibilities that could have emerged from the sociopolitical and cultural conditions of Greece in the ninth century BC. In other words, the Early Iron Age and the Archaic period should be viewed as emergent rather than resultant entities. In wider comparative terms, as Witmore argued in the above article (269), this incentivizes us to think about how similar sociopolitical complexities could have turned out otherwise, and how the networks which Knodell discusses might operate differently in other ancient contexts. Ifind problematic Knodell’s demarcation of the eighth century BC as the ‘Protohistoric Iron Age’ and his designation of the Archaic period as a subsequent continuum from 700 to 480 BC, since Greece in the eighth century BC rapidly underwent a tremendous variety of sociopolitical, economic, cultural, literary, cultic and architectural changes which are integral to the Archaic period as a whole and cannot be separated from it. Nonetheless, Knodell’s approach in chapter 6 aptly demonstrates how one should approach the polis in a non-teleological fashion, as an unpredicted emergent entity which arose out of the Early Iron Age, while nonetheless appreciating the genuinely radical significance of the events of the early Archaic period. Knodell’s stimulating study provides a broad and solid foundation for further integrated research across multiple disciplines.