Iron and its Impacts in Greece

This lecture tackles an idea that has exercised scholarship for a long time: that the spread of iron metallurgy and iron artifacts profoundly changed life in the Aegean during the early first millennium BCE. It begins with some background about the Greek regional and chronological context, then reviews the history of the concept of an iron age, including how iron has been seen as politically, economically, and militarily impactful in previous scholarship. It then queries the evidentiary basis available for assessing iron’s impacts, finding, in the end, very little empirical support for a scenario in which the ‘coming of iron’ brough sweeping changes to political, economic, or military life in Greece. Consideration is then given to whether apparent changes in culture and ideology around the start of the Aegean iron age could have had anything to do with the introduction of iron metallurgy. A final section reflects on the concept of an iron age and how this epochal marker has impacted research on Greek history and archaeology.

Reception to follow.