Stone Age Greek Pottery
Around the time that people
in Greece settled down in houses and villages, and began planting
their own crops and herding
animals, they also began to produce pottery.
This Neolithic period was
around 6000 BC. The first pottery was
plain, but very soon people began to decorate it. The earliest kind
of decorated pottery in Greece is called Rainbow Ware, though it is
really only black and red, because of the way the colors blend into
each other.
In the Middle Neolithic, people began producing another kind of
pottery with red and white decoration in geometric patterns, which is
known as Sesklo ware. Sesklo ware got to be very well known around Greece,
so much that other towns began to make cheap knockoffs of it for people
who couldn't afford the real thing.
Then in the Late Neolithic, the Dimini people made a new kind of
pottery, black and cream-colored, often in spirals. (They may have been
influenced by West Asian
styles.)
Stone Age
Early Bronze Age
Late Bronze Age
Sub-Mycenean (Dark Age)
Geometric
Black-Figure
Red-Figure
To find out more about Greek Stone Age pottery, check out these books on Amazon.com or from your library:
The Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction, by William R. Biers (1996)
Greek Art and Archaeology (3rd Edition), by John G. Pedley (2002).
The Early Neolithic in Greece : The First Farming Communities in Europe, by Catherine Perlès, Norman Yoffee (Editor) (2001). This is a book for specialists, but there's not much on the Greek Stone Age for kids.
