End of the Bronze Age in Greecestruction of Mycenaean Greece and showed that a Dorian In-
vasion could not have caused it. Not only was there no positive
evidence for a new population in the twelfth-century Pelo-
ponnese, but there was good reason to think that many parts
of the Peloponnese and Central Greece had almost no popula-
tion at all at the end of the second millennium. The term
"Dark Age" had frequently been applied to the period 1200—
800 B.C., but Desborough's Last Mycenaeans showed how
dreadfully dark and desolate at least the first half of that period
had been. Desborough found no evidence of Dorian intruders
until ca. 1075—1050 B.C. At that time, well after the Myce-
naean world had been ruined, innovations in burial practice
(specifically, the frequent use of cist-grave burials) suggested
the arrival of newcomers. The "Dorian Invasion," Desborough
concluded, could only have been an infiltration into a half-
empty land. In other words, the Dorians came not as destroyers
and conquerors but as squatters. 5
The thoroughness of Desborough's survey made his conclu-
sions authoritative for a time, but in 1971 they were broadly
challenged by Anthony Snodgrass. 6 Snodgrass pointed out that
the eleventh-century cist graves not only seemed to have indig-
enous precursors, but also did not correspond geographically
with any conceivably Doric movement: cist graves appeared in
Attica, for instance, and not in Messenia, Crete, or Thera.
Snodgrass concluded that if one was looking for new customs
or intrusive artifacts, the evidence for a Dorian migration into
the Peloponnese was no better for the eleventh century than it
chaeologicalSurvey ca. 1200 B.C.—1000 B.C. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1964).
- Desborough reviewed the question of the Dorians once more in
The Greek Dark Ages (New York: St. Martin's, 1972) and reached rather
different conclusions. In this study Desborough dated the arrival of the Do-
rians ca. 1125 B.C., and credited them with introducing the Submycenaean
culture into central Greece and the northern Peloponnese. - A. Snodgrass, The Dark Age of Greece (Edinburgh: Edinburgh
Univ. Press, 1971), 296—317.
207