Dimini and Sesklo: Greece’s Neolithic People May Have Destroyed Each Other

Were Greece’s Neolithic Dimini people responsible for the violent conquest of the Sesklo people, or did the two settlements in fact live alongside one another for many years peacefully?

Dimini, a modern-day Greek village in Thessaly, houses the remains of a Neolithic settlement built by one of Europe’s most ancient peoples, the ‘Diminians’. Not far from the village lies another village, Sesklo, which in the neolithic age was home to the ancient people known as Seskloans.

The Sesklo settlement is the earliest known Neolithic culture in Europe, with researchers dating the presence of its earliest inhabitants to around 7500 BC, though this is known as the proto-Sesklo or pre-Sesklo period.

The culture reached its peak at around 5000 BC, when its settlement covered an area of roughly 200,000 square meters and comprised around 500 to 800 houses with a population estimated to be as much as 5,000 people.

The inhabitants of Sesklo made their villages on hillsides near fertile valleys, where the grew wheat and barley, and kept herds of sheep, goats and cattle, as well as swine, and a number of dogs.

In the early period of the Sesklo people’s existence, their homes were small and made of either wood or mudbrick, with just one or two rooms. However, over time their house-building methods became more homogenized and all homes were made from adobe (clay) with a stone foundation.

Greece’s Neolithic Dimini Settlement and the Theory of Invasion

The Dimini settlement on the other hand is believed to only have reached 5,000 square meters at its peak. The settlement was centered around a megaron (building used for sacrificial processions, royal functions and court meetings) in an oval courtyard, with smaller buildings and houses situated outside the defensive fortifications.

The site at Dimini is thought to have flourished during the late Neolithic period and borrowed the building techniques employed earlier at Sesklo, including stone walls.

The Dimini fortifications were made up of six or seven concentric circle walls that stood at around three meters tall, each separated by about a meter of space.

There is a scholarly suggestion known as the ‘invasion theory’, which states that the people of Dimini were responsible for the violent conquest of the Sesklo culture in around 5,000 BC.

It was first put forward because remains at Sesklo, discovered in the 19th century by Greek archaeologist Christos Tsountas, showed signs of extensive burning and destruction – evidence for conflict.

Some evidence points towards the Diminians as the perpetrators of the destruction and ultimately, the people who put an end to the Seskloans, but it has also been argued that the burning could have been caused by other things, such as the use of flammable building materials.

One Greek scholar, Professor Ioannis Lyritzis, posits a different version of events between the Diminians and the Seskloans.

He and another academic compared ceramic materials from both Sesklo and Dimini using thermoluminescence methods, and discovered that the people living in the settlement in Dimini appeared around 4,800 BC, four centuries before the fall of the Sesklo civilization.
Leading Lyritzis to conclude that the two settlements coexisted peacefully for a prolonged period of time.