End of the Bronze Age in Greecetended to occupy, the theory runs into a second obstacle. Very
reasonably, given the material evidence, Snodgrass concludes
that there was considerable continuity of population in the
conquered areas. As it now stands, Snodgrass's theory suggests
that the South Greek population was not exterminated, but
that a fair number of South Greek speakers survived to live side
by side with the newcomers. Here one faces the same dilemma
encountered with the theses of Desborough and Chadwick:
how could the North Greek essence of Peloponnesian Doric
have been so faithfully maintained if in the Peloponnese the
North Greeks merged with a South Greek population?
In order to get around this dilemma, we must make two
adjustments. Instead of imagining the Dorians moving into
lands occupied by speakers of South Greek, let us imagine
them taking over lands from which the South Greeks had al-
ready departed, and in which the people who remained did not
speak Greek at all. In other words, let us suppose that the
Greek speakers of the LH Argolid, for example, had not sur-
vived the destruction wrought in the late thirteenth and the
twelfth centuries, and that what remained toward the end of
the twelfth century was tile village and rural population, few
of whom spoke Greek. And then let us imagine that some time
elapsed between the destructions and the second coming of
Greek speakers to the'Argolid—the arrival of Dorian conquer-
ors from northern Greece. Such a reconstruction would account
both for the continuity (however steep the decline) from the
Bronze Age to the Dark Age in pottery, artifacts, and the en-
tire material record, and for the remarkably clean discontinuity
between a South Greek and a North Greek dialect. On this
view, Doric speakers did not come to the Argolid as destroyers,
nor did they come as squatters and infiltrators. They "took
over" the Argolid and its population just as the shaft-grave
dynasts had taken it over in the sixteenth century.
The date of the proposed Dorian takeover may have been not
far removed from the Apollodoran date of 1104 B.C. A consid-
erably later date, varyingly placed in the first or the second half
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