Evans and other workers has been derived. The deposit left
by Neolithic man on the hill of Kephala averages about 6 metres
in thickness below the later deposit which marks the occupation
of the site by the post-Neolithic culture. We are thus led to an
almost fabulous antiquity for the first occupation of the site.
In the earliest beginnings of human development, progress, with
its consequent accumulation, is slow, and if we allow a rate of
3 feet of deposit for each thousand years, we shall probably not
be very far wrong. Such an allowance brings us to about 10,000
B.C. as the time when Neolithic man began his first settlement on
the hill of Knossos.
_Neolithic Age_.--The remains found in the deposit of this period
are naturally of a very simple and primitive character. They consist
of pottery, handmade without any use of the wheel, and hand-burnished,
black in colour, and, in the latest specimens, adorned with incised
ornament, which is sometimes filled in with a white chalky substance.
While this description is characteristic of the deposit generally, a
gradual progress in the potter's art is traceable from the virgin soil
upwards. In the earliest stratum, immediately above the depositless
virgin soil, the pottery, for the depth of the first metre, was entirely
plain, unfired, polished within and without, with no appearance of
narrowed necks or moulded bases.
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