We don't actually know—and that's the most honest answer I can give you. The oldest evidence we have is from Keros, a small uninhabited island southeast of Naxos, dated around 2700 BCE. Archaeologists found thousands of deliberately broken Cycladic figurines there, transported by boat from islands fifty kilometres apart. Someone coordinated moving these fragments across the Aegean. But the ritual logic behind it? Completely opaque to us.
Everyone assumes the figurines were broken by accident—that we're looking at archaeological debris. That's wrong. The evidence shows these marble faces were intentionally shattered on their home islands, then someone made the effort to carry the pieces by boat to Keros and deposit them there. The whole object wasn't sacred. The broken piece was. That tells us something fundamental about their ritual thinking—but we'd be lying if we said we understood what it was.
Archaeological excavations at Keros (c. 2700 BCE) reveal thousands of fragments from Cycladic figurines originating from multiple islands across the Cyclades, deliberately deposited in ritual layers. The fragmentation pattern and cross-island transport indicate coordinated ritual practice predating Egyptian pyramid construction and Minoan civilization.
The deposit layer on Keros sounds like walking on broken pottery. That sound is three thousand years older than Homer. The figurines came from everywhere—Paros, Naxos, islands spread across vast distances. Someone decided that deliberately breaking these objects and moving the pieces mattered enough to organize. Whether they represented fertility, ancestors, or something we don't have a word for anymore—that's the question that keeps me up.
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