The Coming of the Greeks
ca. 2100 B.c, but if there was, the invasion would have origi-
nated not in some distant Indo-European Urheimat, but in
nearby Boeotia. 41
Taken together, the archaeological evidence in no way sup-
ports a thesis that the Greeks arrived in Greece ca. 2100 or ca.
1900 B.C. The vogue that the EH in date has recently enjoyed
is simply a result of the fact that the grounds for the old con-
sensus—that the arrival of the Greeks occurred ca. 1900
B.C.—have been undermined. The argument on behalf of
either date ultimately depends on an erroneous observation and
a dubious presupposition. The observation, made by Wace and
Blegen and recently shown to be incorrect, is that Minyan
Ware was an invaders' ware that broke in upon the otherwise
steady evolution of mainland pottery. The dubious presuppo-
sition is that any significant movement of people will be detec-
tible in the pottery record. This assumption, which was
scarcely questioned in Blegen's day, is no longer unchallenged.
Certain migrations, about whose reality the literary records
leave no doubt, seem to have introduced nothing that can be
detected by achaeologists. Thus the Ostrogothic and Hunmc
invasions of the Roman Empire, or the slightly later Slavic mi-
grations into Greece and other parts of the Balkan peninsula,
left virtually no material documentation. Even more dramatic
is the complete absence throughout the Peloponnese of any in-
trusive pottery style or decoration corresponding to the Dorian
Invasion (although this analogy will obviously have no force for
those scholars who, precisely because it is not ceramically at-
tested, deny that there was a Dorian Invasion). 42
Historians therefore have good reason today to be wary of
the assumption, promoted in some of the early archaeological
- Cf. ibid., 349-50: "The source of such an immigrant popula-
tion, it is now becoming clear, must have been central Greece in general
and probably Boiotia in particular."
- Since they concerned themselves only with pre-Mycenaean pot-
tery, Blegen and Wace did not deal with the presence or absence of a Do-
rian pottery in the material record of the twelfth century B.C.
44
