The History of Greece

‘Episode 2: Sailing the Paleolithic Mediterranean’ also known as ‘Archaeologists Found Some Really Cool Rocks on Crete and I Spend 40 Minutes Explaining How Exciting They Are’.

I want to thank you all for your patience. This episode is a bit belated for a number of reasons. The main problem was that I realized, a few weeks back, that I made a huge error in interpreting the data and my timeline was completely wrong. In desperation, I sent an email with a some technical to Professor Strasser who is the director of the Plakias Stone Age Project. He was extremely kind and took the time to provide me with the answers I needed to try to fix up my script. Particularly, he confirmed a suspicion of mine that the Lower Paleolithics finds on Crete were probably much older than the 130,000 terminus ante quem, but said that there was not enough data, as of yet, to definitively date them before that point. There may still be errors in the episode; this period of archaeology is all new to me and I am fallible. However, this episode is a lot better than it was due to Professor Strasser’s assistance and I hope to be able to garner some interest among listeners in the Plakias Project and in Stone Age Greece more generally.

So, here is the long-awaited episode 2!

A fair warning: I had to gloss over a lot of the controversies in paleoanthropology. Please be patient with my over-simplification. The script is coming out soon (once I finish polishing up citations) and the word-count of the footnotes is about the same as the word-count of the episode. In these footnotes, I tried to deal with some of the some of the controversial issues as well as clarify information for those who are interested. Once the script comes out, I’d love to hear your thoughts about my presentation and interpretation of the archaeological data. Although if there’s something I got blatantly wrong, obviously feel free to contact me before the script is posted.

Please leave me comments (or send me an email: historyofgreecepodcast AT gmail DOT com) and let me know what you think about the episode! Did you like it? Did I talk too fast? Was the content interesting? Was the episode too long or too short? Your comments will help guide me for future episodes.

Also, if you are an expert on Stone Age Greece or paleoanthropology or Mediterranean/Aegean geology and might consider giving an interview on the podcast, shoot me an email and we can discuss possibilities. If your an expert in a later period (like the Bronze Age) and you’re interested, please contact me as well. I can record interviews earlier or add them into the chronology later (although I won’t actually do interviews on later periods for a while– I have to do enough research to make sure I can ask good questions).

For those of you who are interested in the Plakias Stone Age Project, you can check out their website or donate. I’m not affiliated with the project, but I think it’s pretty interesting work and archaeology could always use more funding.

Also, I’m going to try to make a few helpful charts, as well as updating the glossary and the bibliography ASAP. Stay tuned.