Stone Age Greek Architecture
Before the New Stone Age, people had lived in caves, but around 6000 BC people living in Greece began to build houses for themselves instead. At first they built small houses out of wattle and daub: sticks woven together and plastered over with mud. The roofs were thatched with grass and they left a hole in the top to let out the smoke from the fire (there were no chimneys yet). The houses were very small, and really people spent most of their time outside, as you do when you are camping out and there is only a small tent. Unless it was raining (which is not very often in Greece), people cooked outside, ate outside, worked and played outside, and often slept outside if it was warm enough. The little houses, like your tent when you are camping, were mainly to keep things in.
At this time people also built wooden palisades (walls) around their villages, to keep out wolves and bears and wild boars, and maybe to keep in the chickens and goats and babies. People lived in small groups of a hundred or so people, inside these walls. They did not build roads, and when you went to the next village you had to walk on a dirt path, and if you came to a river you had to wade across or swim, or use a raft.
Later in the Stone Age, people began to build more substantial houses. These had stone foundations and mud-brick walls, and were a little larger. They also began to build stone and mud-brick walls around their villages. But there were still no roads or bridges.
Megaron House
In the Late Neolithic, about 4000 BC, new ways of doing things came to Greece, probably from West Asia. One of these new things was a way to build a bigger house: the megaron, or "big room" house. A megaron house was a large rectangular room, sometimes with a curved apse at one end, and with a porch at the other end, like this one.
Stone Age Greek
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Stone Age Greek Art
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This page was reviewed for accuracy by Ioannis Georganas in March 2005.
