American scientists have taken another look at the site of Bronze Age Greek village of Nichoria in Messinia, Peloponnese, to determine whether its civilization was destroyed by catastrophic climate conditions or abandoned for a return to a simple, pastoral way of life, according to a redorbit.com article. The village of Nichoria thrived during the Bronze Age, but the Greek Dark Age, beginning around 1200 B.C., saw the collapse of a society that was rich in culture, art, architecture and writing. During the Dark Age, which was between two periods of advancement and preceded the golden age of great philosophers and the building of Parthenon, Greece returned to a time of simple, pastoral existence that is widely assumed to have seen people leave established communities and become more nomadic. This was inferred due to the large number of cattle bone fragments found in the soil. However, two doctoral students challenged that. W. Flint Dibble, a University of Cincinnati student in the Department of Classics, and Daniel J. Fallu, of the archaeology department at Boston University, claim that smaller bones may have been destroyed by the soil’s corrosive nature, whereas the larger cattle bones survived, possibly skewing the evidence of what the inhabitants did for a living. “There’s no monumental architecture and little art, writing disappears and there are considerably fewer sites,” said Dibble. He explained that Nichoria is one of the few settlements in Greece that remained occupied during both the Bronze Age and the Greek Dark Age. It’s believed that the widespread abandonment of settlements was due to the adoption of pastoralism, making populations more mobile as they herded animals. The explanations for the civilization’s sudden collapse in the Dark Age have ranged from believing it was the result of the invasion of another society to a catastrophic climate event. The two researchers suggested that soil formation after the site’s abandonment in the Dark Age led to poor preservation of the historical record. “We’re using modern biology to understand what is happening to ancient remains and we’re finding that the bone is dissolving away,” Dibble explained. “I’ve found teeth that are hollow because the dense enamel is still there, but the dentin is gone, which also tells me that more porous bone is dissolving away.” Closer study of the soil Dibble and Fallu found, also cast doubt on the idea that flourishing Greek civilization, during which Greece was known as a Mediterranean superpower, collapsed due to a catastrophic climate event. “We were exploring this as evidence for a possible climate event but the soil samples came back inconclusive,” said Dibble. “We actually think that as more of these sites are abandoned in the Dark Age, the landscape becomes very stable and the weather destroys more of what’s in the top upper layers than the archaeological material buried deeper below. At this site, we have no evidence that the destruction of bone was the result of climate change.” The team re-examined bags of evidence from previous digs, including the first excavation of Nichoria in the late ’60s led by the University of Minnesota. Dibble said that they were lucky to find that the bags still had dirt in them along with the bones, so that they could study both elements. “I want to see if this kind of soil environment that destroys bones also destroys other types of evidence, because there is bone destruction at other sites being studied from the Dark Age,” said Dibble. “Bone is made up of calcium carbonate, so other carbon materials could be destroyed, such as charred plants – key to understanding agriculture at that time. Also, there are few metal objects from the Dark Age and the soil environment might be an explanation for that.”
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