Franchthi 1997 Overview

Franchthi Neolithic Pottery
Karen D. Vitelli

Franchthi Cave is located in a limestone headland north of Kiladha Bay, in the southern Argolid of Greece. Today it is a coastal site, but at the beginning of the Neolithic period the cave mouth looked out across a plain cut by several streams to sandy beaches and coastal marshes a kilometer or two distant (Jameson et al. 1994:203; van Andel and Sutton 1987:Fig. 17). By the later Neolithic, subject of the present study, the ongoing rise in sea level had brought the shoreline to within 500 m of the cave and substantially decreased the extent of the coastal plain (Jameson et al. 1994:208, Fig. 3.32). Franchthi was the site of repeated activities by prehistoric peoples from the Upper Palaeolithic through the Neolithic periods.

From 1967 to 1976, usually in alternate summer seasons, Thomas W. Jacobsen directed excavations in the cave and along the modern shoreline, or Paralia, for Indiana University and the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, and with the permission and supervision of the Greek Archaeological Service and the Delta Ephoria in Nauplion. An international team of scholars worked, and continues working, on the publication of the vast and complex materials recovered from this long-lived and important archaeological site.

Among the published volumes, Fascicle 8 (Vitelli 1993a) provides my report on the ceramics from Franchthi Ceramic Phases l and 2, equivalent to the Early and Middle Neolithic phases in Greece generally. A break in occupation separates these earlier Neolithic phases from the subsequent deposits. The present volume completes the report on the remaining ceramics from the excavations-the later Neolithic, comprising Franchthi Ceramic Phases 3 to 5, an inventory of the ceramic objects other than pottery and figurines, and a report on the Post-Neolithic finds by James Dengate.

The total amount of pottery from the later Neolithic deposits at Franchthi constitutes only about a fifth of that from the entire excavations. Unlike the earlier Neolithic occupations, which were documented in multiple sequences inside the cave and on Paralia, the stratified material from the later Neolithic activities derives almost exclusively from a single trench. The methods and theory that guided my work on the entire assemblage are spelled out in Fascicle 8 (Vitelli 1993a:Part 1). For the present study, I needed to apply these to the specifics of the later Neolithic assemblage and deposits. My field analyses were completed, the data collected by the mid 1980s. When I began work on this volume, it looked as though my job would be much easier than has, in fact, proved the case.

The quantity of material is much smaller, but it is a far more diverse collection than that from the earlier Neolithic. Each of the greater number of ceramic categories required definition and description, but each has fewer examples than earlier categories by which to make clear its characteristics and range of variation. The limited amount of pottery (ca. 400 kg, vs 1500 kg for the earlier Neolithic) to represent activities over such a long span of time—as much as several millennia—raises questions by itself. The nature of the material and of the deposits from which it comes made it difficult to apply rigidly the approaches and standards that I developed for and from the more extensive and uniform material from the earlier Neolithic.

Since the stratified material comes largely from a single trench, I needed to digest and describe less contextual information than for the multiple sequences of the earlier Neolithic activities. On the other hand, a single stratigraphic column rarely, if ever, presents a straightforward record of sequential activities free of (potential) mixing among the strata. With a single sequence, I had nowhere to test the multiple hypotheses suggested by each deposit within the preserved column. The results of the phasing are, necessarily, more tentative than for the earlier Neolithic.

Nevertheless, it was clear from the beginning of this study that the social dynamics responsible for the later Neolithic deposits at Franchthi and elsewhere in the Peloponnese were very different than those that had obtained earlier. Whereas a single strong ceramic tradition was shared throughout southern Greece during the Middle Neolithic, and pieces made in that tradition rarely found their way beyond the region of production, the later Neolithic presents an almost dizzying array of ceramic stylistic traditions. Differences in social and economic organization between northern and southern Greece are more apparent than in the Middle Neolithic. The similarity between some northern and southern Greek ceramic styles is a sign that people in the later Neolithic participated in a larger world or sphere of interaction. Yet, in southern Greece, at the same time that we find signs of people acquiring goods and ideas from around the Aegean and beyond, we also find fewer and fewer signs of their activities at home in the reasonably well surveyed eastern Peloponnese.

The substantial remains from Middle Neolithic activities in the eastern Peloponnese dwindle to but a few sites in the late Neolithic. Because most of these are cave sites many have seen an increase in pastoralism in the later Neolithic, although shepherds in the hills with their flocks seem unlikely to have spawned the increase in "international" exchange evidenced in their material remains. Nor is it clear what happened to the apparently thriving Middle Neolithic communities. These, then, are the questions that, in addition to more general goals of the entire study, informed my analyses of the later Neolithic ceramics from Franchthi.