Dimini

a Late Neolithic settlement near the city of Volos in Thessaly, Greece. An acropolis, a unique remain of the Neolithic period in Greece, has been investigated (in 1901 and 1903 by the Greek archaeologists V. Staes and C. Tsuntas). The foundations of six or seven ovals of stone walls have been preserved atop a 16-m-high hill. In the central court and between the walls were dwellings called megara. Clay vessels were also found—cups and spherical amphorae, among others—decorated with brown painted or incised ornamentation, as well as stone and clay anthropomorphic-like figurines, polished stone wedgeshaped axes, and other objects. The entire Late Neolithic period in Greece is sometimes called the Dimini Period, although Dimini proper was only one phase of it in Thessaly (the first half of the fourth millennium B.C.). Some archaeologists believe the Dimini culture to have come from the more northern regions of the Balkan peninsula and from the Danube.