Explores the societies reflected in the Homeric poems, drawing upon documentary and material evidence from the Late Bronze Age to the early Archaic Period. In addition to the history and archaeology of Greece and Anatolia from ca. 1300-700 BC, topics include the collapse of complex civilisations in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean and the onset of a 'dark age', the nature of oral tradition, the historicity of political, social, and cultural arrangements described in the poem, the emergence of state-level societies, colonisation, and long-distance trade in the Aegean, and the origins of Panhellenism.