The 'Korakou culture' is another name for Early Helladic II, the second phase of the Early Bronze Age in mainland Greece, lasting from roughly 2650 to 2200 BC. The archaeologist Colin Renfrew proposed the place-name system in 1972 as an alternative to abstract numerical labels — Eutresis culture for Early Helladic I, Korakou for II, Tiryns for III — so that each phase would carry a specific geographic identity rather than a number. Both naming conventions remain in use. The culture was preceded by the Eutresis people and followed by the Tiryns culture, which emerged around 2200 BC after a period that appears to have seen widespread disruption across the eastern Mediterranean.

The most famous building of the Korakou world still stands, after a fashion, at Lerna in the northeastern Peloponnese. The House of the Tiles — named for the terracotta roof tiles that helped preserve it — was an unusually large structure for its time: approximately 25 by 12 metres, two storeys, mud-brick over a stone base, with clay floors and plastered walls. The ground floor had two main halls, smaller rooms, and corridors along each side. The roof tiles came in two varieties: the flat terracotta pieces of the main roof and schist tiles along the eaves. Like many Korakou-culture buildings, it was apparently destroyed by fire at the end of the period — possibly before it was even finished. The conflagration, however inadvertently, preserved it: a tumulus was piled over the ruins, protecting the structure for archaeologists to find millennia later.

The House of the Tiles belongs to a class of buildings now called 'corridor houses' — large, two-storey structures in which a series of halls are connected by corridors, with an internal stairway linking the floors. They appear at multiple sites. Archaeologists have debated their function for decades. Were they the palaces of local chieftains? Communal storehouses for agricultural produce? Some kind of proto-administrative centre? The question remains open. What the clay sealings found inside them suggest is some system of record-keeping or ownership — the Korakou people appear to have used cylinder seals, and intriguingly, the same seals seem to have been used at different sites, implying networks of exchange or authority that crossed local boundaries.

Korakou-culture pottery is the culture's most widely distributed fingerprint. The fine wares are distinctive: a ceramic slip, often burnished to a sheen, sometimes with painted geometric decoration. The coarser wares carry simple impressed patterns. Both types are found far beyond the Peloponnese — at Knossos in Crete, in the Cyclades, in Thessaly, and at Lefkas. The period also saw a rapid increase in metal use. Copper and bronze objects appear in graves: daggers, tweezers, and ornaments. A few gold and silver vessels survive. The terracotta animal figurines with split bellies, whose purpose remains unclear, add an unsettling note to the material record.

Many Korakou-culture coastal sites were fortified — sea-facing walls suggesting real or perceived threat from the water. Many of those sites end in a destruction layer: the tell-tale black band of burning that archaeologists learn to read as a full stop in a settlement's story. After the fires, some sites were reoccupied by the people of the Tiryns culture; others lay empty until the Mycenaean period, centuries later. What caused the end — whether it was invasion, environmental stress, internal conflict, or some combination — is debated and unresolved. The Korakou mound itself, that modest rise near Corinth where all of this was first named, stands as quietly as it always has.