I thought the Dark Ages were a Renaissance Humanist myth.
I believe S.L. was referring to the supposed dark age that followed the supposed collapse of the Bronze Age civ. Scientific dating has shown that it, too, is a modern myth — there was no single beginning or end to the use of bronze, and there wasn’t a Greek dark age.
http://www.varchive.org/dag/index.htm
http://www.varchive.org/ce/theses.htm
Pretty much all historians agree the period from around 500 to 1000 qualifies pretty well as a Dark Age in western Europe relative to what came before and after. Some take off a century or two on the front or back of this period.
Where the Renaissance Humanist guys came in was classifying absolutely everything from the Fall of Rome to their own perfectness as “dark ages,” including the High Middle Ages, which were as creative as any period in history, but denigrated by the RHs for not slavishly imitating the Greeks and Romans.
The funny part, of course, is that Renaissance civilization drew at least as much from the “dark” Middle Ages as from classical civilization.
My point was that the earlier Bronze Age civilization collapsed about as completely as the later classical version and was followed by a true “dark age.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_Dark_Ages