BRONZE AGE
Bronze is a metal that is a mixture of a little tin and a lot of copper. It was invented in Western Asia, where copper was smelted as early as 6000 BC, and during the 3000's BC experiments showed that adding tin to the copper made it harder: that is bronze. Bronze came to Greece slowly around 3000 BC and did not make a big disturbance. Those same Dimini people from the Neolithic continued living in Greece, but they slowly started to use a little bronze. Bronze knives and swords were much easier to make and sharper than stone, bone or wood ones. At the same time, lead, silver, and gold started to be used more as well.
But bronze was very expensive, too. Copper wasn't so hard to get, but tin had to be carried on donkeys from very far away in England or Afghanistan (see map). So only the richer or stronger people could afford bronze tools or weapons. Soon a real class system started to develop, where the richer people nearly always married each other and not the poorer people, and it was always these richer people who were in charge. One way archaeologists can tell that there is a class of rich people whose children inherit their wealth is by finding graves with children buried in them who have gold jewelry and bronze tools and weapons with them.
Lerna is an example of an Early Bronze Age village that has been excavated. Like Dimini, Lerna had a big house in the center, at the top of the hill, which may have been the house of the chief. This house is called the House of the Tiles, because it had clay tiles for the roof. Lerna also had many baskets which had been sealed with a special mark pressed into a lump of clay (project idea). This shows that people cared about protecting their property so it would not be stolen
Lerna also had big stone walls, built with defensive tricks to make it hard for invaders to break in. But around 2100 BC, just as the people of Lerna were in the middle of rebuilding these walls to make them even stronger, some new people invaded Greece and burned down the whole town. Many other towns all over Greece and much of Europe were also destroyed around this time.