IllustrationsFIGURES 1. Nested (but often overlapping) scales of social and spatial units 20 2. Line graph and table of number of sites by period, by region, in central Greece 44 3. Comparative sizes of Mycenaean palaces 72 4. Some lesser-known tholoi of central Greece 87 5. LH IIIC pottery with seafaring, siege, and feasting scenes 130 6. Toumba building and cemetery at Lefkandi 163 7. Examples of Geometric pottery with early writing and figural scenes 221 MAPS xiv Preface and Acknowledgementsto the Mediterranean? How can archaeological analysis cross these scales? How do the trajectories of early Greek societies relate to those of other human groups (or not)? These questions are necessarily broad, and in this book I have aimed to address them in a way that will resonate with archaeologists interested in other parts of the world as well. With this in mind, I set out to write an archaeological history relevant to people working in a variety of disciplinary traditions-archaeologists and historians of ancient Greece, as well as anthropological archaeologists concerned with the broader archaeology of complex societies.The arguments in this book are built on the achievements of generations of previous scholars. I hope to do justice to their work in discussing it here, incorporating it into new analyses or visualizations, or reframing it in new interpretations. Even if I am in occasional disagreement with these scholars, I have tremendous respect for the efforts of fieldwork, interpretation, and publication that have allowed for the type of synthesis presented here. This book deals with a broad range of evidence and ideas, and it is inevitable that I have gotten some of it wrong. There are certainly sites, discoveries, or interpretations that I have overlooked, and the relevant dataset is ever evolving. Nevertheless, I hope to have provided some new insights concerning early Greece and the Mediterranean world, in ways that will be useful to other scholars as well.My interests in early Greece and the archaeology of complex societies were fos-