Lights and Darks: Data, Labeling, and Language in the History of Scholarship on Early Greece

by Sarah C. Murray

Hesperia, Volume 87, Issue 1
Page(s): 17-54
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2972/hesperia.87.1.0017
Year: 2018
VIEW ONLINE

ABSTRACT:

The historiography of the Greek Early Iron Age (1200-700 B.C.), and the history and appropriateness of the use of the period designations “Dark Age” and “Early Iron Age” to describe it, have been the topic of significant scholarly discussion over the course of the last several decades. This article contributes to the discussion in the form of a quantitative analysis of the appearance of these two terms in a sample of the relevant scholarship from the 20th century. In addition, it compares trends in terminology with another sample set of data that was designed to model the history of discovery of sites spanning the transition from the Late Bronze Age to the Early Iron Age, which are taken as a reasonable proxy for the diachronic evolution of our knowledge of the archaeological record.