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Late Minoan IIIB Pottery from Knossos

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

Mervyn Popham
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Extract

In two recent articles in this periodical the author has considered Late Minoan IIIB and IIIC pottery from Crete. In both these studies, material surviving from Evans' excavation of the Little Palace at Knossos has been mentioned and in part illustrated. It is the main purpose of this article to describe this pottery in greater detail and, at the same time, to take some account of two comparable but small deposits from recent excavations at Knossos. Since only a few vases could be restored from these deposits, use will be made of other material to illustrate whole vases and to give a more complete picture.

The pottery from the Little Palace, which we shall be considering, was excavated by Evans in 1908 and derives mainly from two regions: the rooms south of the Shrine (and adjacent to the main staircase) and the courtyard between this building and the Unexplored Mansion. Neither are closed deposits, for they contain a considerable admixture of L.M. IIIA sherds. It has, therefore, been necessary to select the IIIB pottery on stylistic and not stratigraphical grounds. But knowledge of similar material from better-stratified deposits elsewhere has made this selection less arbitrary than it would otherwise have been. The Little Palace pottery (Plates 47a–f; 48a, b, d; 50b; 51a–f) consists almost entirely of decorated sherds and, clearly, most of the plain fragments were thrown away.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 65 , November 1970 , pp. 195 - 202
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1970

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References

1 ‘Some Late Minoan Pottery from Crete’, BSA lx (1965) 316–42; ‘Late Minoan Pottery, A Summary’, BSA lxii (1967) 337–51. My thanks are due, as before, to the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens for permitting me to study and publish this pottery; and to Dr. St. Alexiou and Miss A. Lembessis of Heraklion Museum for readily granting me facilities there. I am grateful, too, to Mr. Y. Tzedakis for having shown me his material from recent excavations in W. Crete and for our many fruitful discussions about it. The drawings and photographs are by the author. Abbreviations beside the drawings have the following meaning; LP = Little Palace; MUM = Minoan Unexplored Mansion; SMXT = Stratigraphical Museum extension; RR = Royal Road. HM has been used for Heraklion Museum.

2 Most of the sherds illustrated are contained in Strat. Mus. boxes P.I. 8 and P.I. 14, ‘The Room of the tall gypsum door jambs’ and ‘Space W. between Little Palace and Unexplored Mansion, S. end’. Other sherds are from P.I. 7, P.I. 9, and P.I. 12. The location of these areas is given in the Guide to the Stratigraphical Museum. The generally mixed character of the levels from which the pottery was obtained is not only obvious from the contents of the various boxes but is confirmed by Mackenzie's notes on the excavation: see Palmer, and Boardman, , On the Knossos Tablets 167–8 and 65.Google Scholar

3 In particular the two other deposits to be considered below and the material from the BSA excavations near the Royal Road carried out in 1958–61, under the direction of M. S. F. Hood whose permission to mention and illustrate some of the pottery then found is gratefully acknowledged.

4 Called Pit ‘U’ in the excavation note-book.

5 For preliminary reports on this excavation, see Archaeological Reports 1969 31–3 and Kadmos viii 43–5.

6 Knowledge of the bowl and cup bases, of which there are few in the Little Palace material, is mainly derived from the Royal Road pottery: see n. 3 above.

7 See BSA lx (1965) 321 n. 19a. Mrs. Elizabeth French's observations quoted there have been confirmed by sub-sequent excavations at Lefkandi, where the reserved line on bowls does not appear until the second building phase of L.H. IIIC; see Popham, and Sackett, , Excavations at Lefkandi, Euboea 1964–66, 19.Google Scholar

8 Fig. 1, 5 is from the Royal Road excavations; Plate 52a is HM no. 10894 which, together with the other bowls illustrated from HM, comes from chamber-tombs at Phoinikia. Two bowls from the NW. House have been illustrated in BSA lxii (1967) pls. 87 (c) and (d).

9 A marked feature of much of the finer pottery from Chania is its whitish clay which the potters often masked with a wash of light brown paint. The cup has been reconstructed from fragments found in box P.I. 9, as was the other cup at Plate 51c.

10 Plate 49c, HM no. 2657 is from Evans's excavations of 1902: see also n. 28. Plate 49b is HM no. 211 and was purchased by the Museum from a collection; it is stated to have come from Knossos.

11 These are from the Little Palace; the foot in each case has been restored on the analogy of the intact examples from the chamber tomb at Milatos. Fragments of plain examples of this shape were found in the L.M. IIIB levels in the Unexplored Mansion.

12 This and the more rounded type are discussed and illustrated in BSA lxiv (1969) 301–2; fig. 10 is an example of the conical version while fig. 11 is a paper reconstruction of the round-bowl type made from sherds from the Little Palace.

13 Its fabric suggests it was made in Chania; see nn. 9 and 31.

14 They were, of course, current in L.M. IIIA 2 but seem more frequent in L.M. IIIB. For the difference in the types, see BSA lxiv (1969) 300–1.

15 Popham, , The Destruction of the Palace at Knossos, Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology xii (Lund, 1970)Google Scholar figs. 16–17. This same study illustrates L.M. IIIA motives from which some of the L.M. IIIB designs have descended. The ‘champagne cups’ illustrated in BSA lxiv (1969) 301, figs. 7 and 8 are from the Little Palace.

16 Apparently all imports from Chania: see n. 31. Stirrup-jars and other vases from the L.M. IIIB deposits in the Palace have been published by the author in The Last Days of the Palace at Knossos (Lund, 1964); this is henceforth abbreviated to LDPK.

17 BSA lx (1965) 320–32.

18 HM no. 10898.

19 HM no. 10895; wheel and shell filling, not illustrated, is present in the Royal Road material.

20 HM no. 10894.

21 The kylix sherds on Plate 48e are from box V 1931 TP 8 in the Strat. Mus.

22 BSA lx (1965) 316–42. (See Addendum.)

23 Some caution, however, is advisable. The group of fragmentary pottery from the Royal Road excavations seems to belong to much the same period as the pottery under consideration. It contains several cases of antithetic spiral and Mycenaean panelled patterns, and one probable example of the tricurved streamer pattern. Clearly, without good large deposits of stratified L.M. IIIB pottery, we are unlikely to be able to refine our classification beyond what has been attempted in this study which, indeed, may well have gone into closer distinctions than the material and its contexts justify.

24 Some account should, perhaps, have been given of the fabric. The clay is the usual buff to light brown fine clay of Knossos with a smooth buff slip, which in cases appears to have been polished or rubbed. The paint is usually warm brown to cherry red and lustrous, the interior being frequently chocolate brown. There are only a few cases of a matt slip, matt paint, and the closely set wheel-marks noted in the previous study of the later material (BSA lx (1965) 317).

25 The pottery from Kastri and Karphi is considered in BSA lx (1965), 334.

26 See n. 16 and LPDK 8 and n. 28.

27 Strat. Mus. box G. II. 8 from the Propylaeum, S., illustrated in The Destruction of the Palace at Knossos, pl. 34 f.Google Scholar

28 For the cup from the Corridor of the Sword Tablets, see LDPK, pl. 27b. Plate 49c is HM no. 2657 and marked K 02, 46, but no provenance is recorded. The IIIB bowl at LDPK, pl. 8c–d and p. 18, vase 30 could also be from the Palace.

29 Strat. Mus. box L. III. 13A, NE. Angle of Palace, N. Test Pits.

30 Tzedakis, I., BCH xciii (1969) 369–418Google Scholar, a well illustrated and invaluable article to anyone studying Late Minoan III pottery.

31 The cup, Plate 51d; the tankard Fig. 1, 1; the sherds from six vases at Plate 48b. In addition the tankard published in LDPK, 19, fig. 2 is probably from the same area as are the sherds of a stirrup-jar found in the SE. House illustrated in BSA lx (1965) pl. 85ƒ. On exports from Chania to regions other than Knossos, see Tzedakis, , BCH xciii (1969) 412 n. 1.Google Scholar