---

Modern Description: The Bay of Grotta was the site of the Bronze Age city of Naxos, which archaeologists are slowly revealing in piecemeal fashion in the midst of today's habitations. The shoreline has receded considerably and the foundations of much of the prehistoric city and the later structures built over it now lie under water in the bay. Aerial photography shows clearly where a long, roughly rectangular shelf of building and wall foundations extends 10–15m out to sea, and stretches for much of the length of the bay. At the neck of the causeway to ‘Palatía', to the east side, just before the first buildings of the town, can be seen a segment of uncovered ancient street (running at right angles to the axis of the causeway): this would have communicated between the ancient north and south shores. Excavations carried out at the western end of Grotta Bay (‘Kokkinovrachos') showed that the later levels of habitation in the area lay over a Neolithic settlement of the mid-5th millennium BC: the finding of obsidian from Milos and pottery techniques influenced by mainland Greece shows that this was a settlement that enjoyed external contacts. It is with the 3rd millennium BC, however, that there is a ‘revolution' and that the previously discontinuous pattern of Neolithic habitation is transformed into an interconnected tissue of settlements which are found all over the Aegean islands. This change is perhaps as much the result of advances in sea-transportation as it is of improvements in agricultural technique and management. Populations suddenly increase and settlements acquire social organisation. We know more about this period from burials than from anything else because of the perishable nature of the domestic building. The graves were shallow cists lined and covered with flagstones in which the body was buried with the knees drawn up to the chin. The richer graves typically contain pottery and marble vessels, jewellery and bronze weapons: but of their contents, it is the small marble figurines which have spoken most eloquently of this distant period to the popular imagination. Following the upheavals at the close of the Early Bronze Age, of which we have ample evidence from all around the Aegean area, the populations of the many flourishing Cycladic settlements were radically reduced: most of the smaller ones were abandoned and the population seems to have concentrated in a few of the most strategically secure places. Grotta became in this period the most important— if not the only—large settlement on Naxos. And by the 15th century BC its art and culture began to have a pronounced Mycenaean accent.
Wikidata ID: Q56117448
Trismegistos Geo: 34120

Info: McGilchrist's Greek Islands

(From McGilchrist’s Greek Islands, © Nigel McGilchrist 2010, excerpted with his gracious permission. Click for the books)

---