Geometric pottery has not yet received the thorough, detailed study which it deserves, partly because the task is a mammoth one and partly because some of its local manifestations, as at Argos, are only now coming to light. From even a cursory inspection of its many aspects, however, the historian can deduce several fundamental conclusions about the progress of the Aegean world down to 800 B.C.

The general intellectual outlook which had appeared in the eleventh century was now consolidated to a significant degree. Much which was in embryo in 1000 had become reasonably well developed by 800. In this process the Minoan Mycenaean inheritance had been transmuted or finally rejected; the Aegean world which had existed before 1000 differed from that which rises more clearly in our vision after 800. Those modern scholars who urge that we must keep in mind the fundamental continuity of Aegean development from earliest times -- granted occasional irruptions of peoples and ideas from outside -- are correct; but all too many observers have been misled by this fact into minimizing the degree of change which took place in the early first millennium.

The focus of novelty in this world now lay in the south-eastern districts of the Greek mainland, and by 800 virtually the entire Aegean, always excepting its northern shores, had accepted the Geometric style of pottery. While Protogeometric vases usually turn up, especially outside Greece proper, together with as many or more examples of local stamp, these ``non Greek'' patterns had mostly vanished by the later ninth century. In their place came local variations within the common style -- tentative, as it were, in Protogeometric products but truly distinct and sharply defined as the Geometric spirit developed. Attica, though important, was not the only teacher of this age. One can take a vase of about 800 B.C. and, without any knowledge of its place of origin, venture to assign it to a specific area; imitation and borrowing of motifs now become ascertainable. The potters of the Aegean islands thus stood apart from those of the mainland, and in Greece itself Argive, Corinthian, Attic, Boeotian, and other Geometric sequences have each their own hallmarks. These local variations were to become ever sharper in the next century and a half.