Art and Identity in Dark Age Greece, 1100–700 BC

This book explores how art and material culture were used to construct age, gender and social identity in the Greek Early Iron Age, 1100–700 BCE. Coming between the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces and the creation of Archaic city-states, these four centuries witnessed fundamental cultural developments and political realignments. Whereas previous archaeological research has emphasized class-based aspects of change, this study offers a more comprehensive view of early Greece by recognizing the place of children and women in a warrior-focused society. Combining iconographic analysis, gender theory, mortuary analysis, typological study and object biography, Susan Langdon explores how early figural art was used to mediate critical stages in the life-course of men and women. She shows how an understanding of the artistic and material contexts of social change clarifies the emergence of distinctive gender and class asymmetries that laid the basis for classical Greek society.

Introduction; 1. Art made to order; 2. Geometric art comes of age: an archaeology of maturation; 3. Virgin territory: the construction of the maiden; 4. Maiden, interrupted: the art of abduction; 5. The domestication of the warrior; Epilogue: back from the dark.

This book explores how art and material culture were used to construct age, gender and social identity in the Greek Early Iron Age, 1100-700 BCE. This study offers a comprehensive view of early Greece by recognizing the place of children and women in a warrior-focused society.

Susan Langdon is associate professor of Greek art and archaeology at the University of Missouri. A scholar of early Greek pottery, sculpture and iconography, she curated the exhibition From Pasture to Polis: Art in the Age of Homer, from which she published the exhibition catalog and New Light on a Dark Age, a volume of papers from the accompanying symposium. She is also coauthor of Artifact and Assemblage: The Finds from a Regional Survey of the Southern Argolid, Greece, I: The Prehistoric and Early Iron Age Pottery and Lithic Artifacts.