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Volume 99 No. 4
October 1995
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| REVIEW OF AEGEAN PREHISTORY |
The Humeima Hoard: Byzantine and Sasanian Coins and Jewelry from Southern Jordan
Curtis Runnels
A complete reversal of our view of Stone Age Greece has occurred in the last decade, and Greece has moved from its position on the margins of European prehistory to a position near the center. This change is chiefly the result of the growing theoretical interest in the emergence of modern humans between 100,000 and 40,000 B.P., and the continuing interest in the origins of agriculture and its spread to Europe in the early Holocene. For the former problem, new fossils and dating techniques have shown that the area encompassing the Balkans, Turkey, and southwest Asia was the center of activity in a key period of human evolution. The importance is based on geography, for these lands lay athwart the passage from Africa into Europe and Asia that was traversed, perhaps repeatedly, by hominids migrating from the heartland of humanity. The second area of interest is of longer standing, but new evidence, chiefly from regional surface surveys, indicates that Greece was the center of the earliest Neolithic cultures on European soil.
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