John Bennet

Economy and Administration

Introduction Mainland Greece in the Early Mycenaean period (LH I-II) was home to a number of political centers competing for resources, power, and territorial control (Ch. 10, pp. 242- 51). By the beginning of LH III the most successful developed into full-fledged states, political structures administered from central places of power. These central places are marked archaeologically by the monumental buildings we call palaces (Fig. 11.1; Ch. 11, pp. 261-4), and in most cases by administrative records inscribed on clay tablets in an early form of Greek. Recent scholars prefer “state” or the even more neutral “ polity ” (politically organized society) to the older term “kingdom,” to avoid possibly misleading presumptions about internal political organization. Palace-centered states were not universal in Mycenaean Greece; regions such as Achaea and Laconia apparently never developed a monumental center like Mycenae or Pylos. These areas may have continued to operate at the level of the Early Mycenaean village-centered societies, outside the control of any particular center; and indeed they benefited from the collapse of the palatial administrations ca. 1190 bce , at the end of LH IIIB (Ch. 15, pp. 395, 397-9, 405-6). We do know something about a number of Late Mycenaean states, however, particularly those controlled from Mycenae and Tiryns in the Argolid, Thebes in Boeotia, Pylos in Messenia, and Knossos on Crete.

Pylos Regional Archaeological Project, Part III: Sir William Gell's Itinerary in the Pylia and Regional Landscapes in the Morea in the Second Ottoman Period

This article previews the study of the Second Ottoman period (1715-1821) by members of the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project. By closely comparing Sir William Gells apparently dispassionate descriptions of the Navarino Bay area with other documentary and archaeological data, we suggest that reconstruction of settlement and land use relying solely on Gells descriptions can result in misrepresentation. This conclusion has implications for modern Greek social and economic history, since the image that Gell sketches appears to support a commonly held belief that settlement during Ottoman occupation was concentrated in more mountainous areas, while the lowlands were largely devoid of permanent habitation.

Halford W. Haskell, Richard E. Jones, Peter M. Day & John T. Killen. Transport stirrup jars of the Bronze Age Aegean and East Mediterranean (Prehistory Monographs 33). xxx+192 pages of text, 120 bw 978-1-931534-62-8 hardback

A controversy arose in Oxford in the early 1960s over the dating of the Linear B tablets from Knossos, which were conventionally dated c. 1400 BC, but seemed so similar to their Pylian counterparts on the Peloponnese, dated to the late LH IIIB [Late Helladic IIIB] period, c. 1200 BC. In this controversy, a set of ceramic transport-storage vessels (c. 0.40m high, with a capacity of 12–14l, called ‘stirrup jars’; henceforth TSJs), at the time only known on mainland Greek sites, offered potentially important data: because many bore Linear B inscriptions painted before firing, including some place-names known on the Knossos documents, they appeared to be part of the Knossos administration; if they could be shown to have been made on Crete, then they might hold a key to the dating of Linear B administration. The question framed is a ‘classic’ in ceramic provenance studies: given vessels (TSJs) found in region B (Greek mainland), probably manufactured in region A (Crete, implied by independent evidence, the placenames), could analysis of the TSJs’ clay composition provide objective confirmation of their origin? The present volume has its ultimate origins in pioneering work on exactly this question, published by Hector Catling and Anne Millett in 1965. They analysed, using Optical Emission Spectroscopy (OES), 25 of the stirrup jars excavated at Thebes in 1921 by Keramopoulos and demonstrated a Cretan origin, most likely in eastern Crete.

80.

There are some other negatives. The definition of figuration used is too vague for coverage to be appropriately detailed. Some material culture assemblages are given scant attention (e.g. life-size and monumental sculpture) whilst others are treated with comparative extravagance (e.g. the so-called ‘Venus figurines’). Despite the global character of figuration there seems to be an emphasis on material from the Near East and South America. This is not to claim that other regional case studies are ignored, simply that they are underrepresented. The treatment of the various theoretical schools follows a similarly disproportionate pattern. In spite of their relevance to discussions of representation, form and embodiment are given little attention. Furthermore the notion of distributed personhood is largely absent notwithstanding references to ‘external symbolic storage’. Greater consideration of the performative dimensions of art, representation and metaphor would also have been worth exploring further to offer more sophisticated appreciations of past worlds.