Grotta Pelos culture is the most ancient prehistoric culture of the Bronze Age in the Greek Cyclades. Refers to the period of 3000 - 2650 years. BC e. and is the initial stage of the Cycladic culture , which later lost its original appearance and acquired the features of the Minoan culture. The name of the culture was given by the British archaeologist Colin Renfrew on the sites of Grotta (Greek Γρόττα) and Pelos (Πελός) on the island of Naxos . Other finds of this culture are found in other places of the same island, as well as in the lowermost layers of the settlement of Filakopi on the island of Milos . The Greek archaeologist Christ Dumas designates this culture differently - the Pelos Lakkudes culture .
Content
Facilities
The settlements of the Grotta-Pelos period were not found, however, the walls of the fences around the necropolis, which belong to this culture, remained. In Agia Anariri (Agia Anárjiri) on about. Naxos preserved wall of almost 40 meters and a height of about 1 meter of flat stones, folded by dry masonry .
Residential buildings were either short-lived reed huts, or their foundations could not be recognized due to geological erosion. Since the cemeteries contained only 15 to 20 graves, it is assumed that people did not live in villages - on the contrary, families or clans lived in one or several separate houses.
Tombstone
The graves consist of vertical flat stone slabs or small walls of dry masonry; they usually contain only one body, occasionally burials containing from 2 to 8 corpses; sometimes graves are separated by a stone slab on 2 levels.
Funerary gifts are not found in all graves. They consist mainly of ceramic vessels in the form of bowls or jars of dark clay, characteristic of the Cycladic Islands. The vessels are massive and with thick walls, the ornament looks in the form of a spiral painting, less often - geometric patterns. On some fragments it is possible to guess about the use of vessels from marble .
Marble figures of the same type as the Cycladic idol were also found in some graves (see photo). Three forms predominate:
- pronounced human figures in full growth with hands folded on the stomach
- highly stylized human figures with short protruding arms
- abstract shapes resembling a fiddle.
Metals are very rare. Only on one of the burial fields in Naxos were found several pieces of copper wire, several sews of the same material and one neck chain with silver pearls.
Culture
The culture of Grotta Pelos in its basic features corresponds to the modern cultures of mainland Greece, the island of Crete. Especially noticeable similarity with the construction of the tombs in Yasos (Kariya) on the west coast of Anatolia . The culture of Grotta Pelos is a further development of the culture of the Neolithic settlement of Kefal on the island of Kei .
New finds on the burial field at Grotte connect the ceramic fragments with a white geometric pattern and the obsidian blades to the Neolithic settlement of Saliagos . Since the culture of Saliagos disappeared already around 3700 BC, the question of its connections with later cultures remains controversial.
Literature
- Werner Ekschmitt : Die Kykladen. Bronzezeit, geometrische und archaische Zeit . Verlag Philipp von Zabern, Mainz 1993, ISBN 3-8053-1533-3 .
- Colin Renfrew: The Emergence of Civilization. The Cyclades and the Aegean in the Third Millennium BC . Methuen, London 1972, ISBN 0-416-16480-3 .