Stone Age Greek Pottery

Around the time that people in Greece settled down in houses and villages, and began planting their own crops and herding animals, they also began to produce pottery. This Neolithic period was around 6000 BC. The first pottery was plain, but very soon people began to decorate it. The earliest kind of decorated pottery in Greece is called Rainbow Ware, though it is really only black and red, because of the way the colors blend into each other.

In the Middle Neolithic, people began producing another kind of pottery with red and white decoration in geometric patterns, which is known as Sesklo ware. Sesklo ware got to be very well known around Greece, so much that other towns began to make cheap knockoffs of it for people who couldn't afford the real thing.

Then in the Late Neolithic, the Dimini people made a new kind of pottery, black and cream-colored, often in spirals. (They may have been influenced by West Asian styles.)

Stone Age
Early Bronze Age
Late Bronze Age
Sub-Mycenean (Dark Age)
Geometric
Black-Figure
Red-Figure

To find out more about Greek Stone Age pottery, check out these books on Amazon.com or from your library:

The Archaeology of Greece: An Introduction, by William R. Biers (1996)

Greek Art and Archaeology (3rd Edition), by John G. Pedley (2002).

The Early Neolithic in Greece : The First Farming Communities in Europe, by Catherine Perlès, Norman Yoffee (Editor) (2001). This is a book for specialists, but there's not much on the Greek Stone Age for kids.