- The Cambridge Companion to the Aegean Bronze Age edited by Cynthia Shelmerdine (2008). A good, academic ‘start here’ guide to most areas of Aegean prehistory, with bibliographies and guides to further reading.
- The Oxford Handbook of the Bronze Age Aegean edited by Eric Cline (2010). A hefty tome weighing in at 930 pages, this book touches on all aspects of the Bronze Age Aegean, from ca. 3000 BC to 1000 BC. Features contibutions from just about every leading expert in the field.
- Greece in the Bronze Age by Emily Vermeule (1974). A classic. This elegant book gives a very rounded coverage, with chapters on Mycenaean society as well as art and archaeological data. Now significantly dated, however.
- The End of the Bronze Age by Robert Drews (1993). This book covers the Bronze Age collapse that affected Greece, Anatolia, and Syria. Drews’ rebuttal of some once widely-accepted theories on the collapse is the most useful part. His own argument, that the collapse was caused by changes in military practice, is much less useful and largely discredited.
- 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed by Eric H. Cline (2014). This is essentially an update to the good parts of Drews’s book. Cline summarizes the major debates, discusses the relevant evidence, and brings it all together in an easy-to-read manner that is very accessible to the general reader. Good on the Eastern Mediterranean context of the Late Bronze Age ‘Collapse’ but weaker on the economic and ideological factors specific to the Aegean, and generally more lurid than the scholarly consensus for the period. Read together with…
- The Aegean from Bronze Age to Iron Age: Continuity and Change Between the Twelfth and Eighth Centuries BC by Oliver Dickinson (2006) – more academic than Cline’s book and with much greater emphasis on what didn’t change at the end of the Late Bronze Age.
- The Aegean Bronze Age by Oliver Dickinson (1994). A comprehensive synthesis of a wide range of data, useful for beginners and researchers alike. Now a little dated but a foundational text for a generation of Aegeanists.
- The Mycenaeans by Louise Schofield (2007). This is an accessible, up-to-date, and well-illustrated introduction to Mycenaean Greece. If you only want to buy a single book on the Mycenaeans, this should be it.
- The Trojans and their Neighbours by Trevor Bryce (2006). Though focused on Troy, this is currently the best book that deals with the relationship between Bronze Age Greeks and the peoples of Anatolia.
Late Bronze Age (ca. 1600 to 1200 BCE)
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