Excavation and research in the Cyclades in the last thirty years have added substantially to the body of evidence for the Late Bronze Age in the islands. Whilst much of the excavated material is not yet fully published, our understanding of the culture and history of the LC period has been considerably extended. Below, I review this evidence and make some suggestions as to its interpretation.

Most recent discussions of Minoan colonies have referred to bases, trading posts, or settlements without attempting to define these terms, or to define the term ‘colony’ itself. Welcome exceptions are the papers by Renfrew and Shaw in the publication of the Second Thera Congress, which have sought to put the discussion on a more clearly defined basis. Warren's list of criteria by which to identify a Minoan settlement abroad is also a useful move in the direction of establishing a framework within which the problem can be discussed. This short paper is a preliminary attempt to take recent progress a stage further. It begins with a summary of the development of Minoan trade until the end of LM I, thus placing the ‘colonies’ in a historical perspective. Attention is then given to the problem of defining what is meant by the term ‘colony’, and to suggesting how the different types of colony can be recognized in the archaeological record. Next the settlements at Ayia Irini on Keos, Phylakopi on Melos, and Akrotiri on Thera are briefly examined in the light of their recent excavations in an attempt to match them to one of the ‘models’ of a colony which has been established. These three sites are selected for discussion since all have been excavated or re-excavated within the last fifteen years. Finally, a concluding section briefly considers the evidence from the site of Kastri on Kythera, and summarises the conclusions reached.

If the Unexplored Mansion must rest content with a name rendered obsolete by subsequent archaeological activity it is perhaps fitting that the Little Palace Well, which was sunk through its ruins, should glory in a similarly inappropriate title. The well was brought to light by one of nature's not infrequent excesses at Knossos. In winter and spring the area is subjected to occasional heavy downpours which erode the ground surface and reveal traces of ancient occupation. In the early weeks of 1938 subsidence caused by such winter storms exposed the top of the well, which lay just behind the façade of the Unexplored Mansion at a point where the west scarp of Evans's Little Palace excavations towered high above the level of the Minoan ruins. R. W. Hutchinson, who was then Curator at Knossos, conducted a small rescue operation and the results were briefly described in the JHS for that year. The outbreak of the Second World War prevented anything more than preliminary work on the pottery before archaeological activity at Knossos was brought to a halt. The whole and restored pots were transported to Herakleion Museum for safe keeping, and the fragments remained at Knossos and were eventually housed in the new Stratigraphic Museum.

This article is the fourth in a series designed to chart the diffusion of Hellenistic motifs, not only from province to province but also across craft boundaries. We are seldom able to measure these processes with any degree of chronological precision, but when we can the evidence indicates the astonishing speed with which even the most complex decorative innovations could become common property over wide areas. The Medusa Rondanini and a closely related body of derivative material provide one of the few easily documented cases for such rapid diffusion. Though we cannot expect to understand completely the mechanics of the process, the isolation and examination of its visible proofs provide some valuable controls for a much wider group of objects.

In 1973, after an interval of many years, the British School at Athens returned to Sparta to resume work in an area with which it had been associated since early in the present century. The site chosen was the Mycenaean settlement at the Menelaion, briefly investigated by R. M. Dawkins in 1910. Full seasons of excavation were completed in each of the years 1973–6, and 1980. A cleaning season was undertaken in 1977, while supplementary excavations were made in the autumns of 1977 and 1978. Several brief preliminary accounts of this work have appeared, while one or two objects of particular intrinsic interest have been published in detail.

For the time being, at least, the excavation of the prehistoric site at the Menelaion is at an end. Though work on the preparation of the final report is well advanced, it will be some time before this can be published, and the many classes of pottery and other objects can be made generally available.

In BSA 74 (1979) 1–80, an account was given of MM III and LM I buildings and their contents uncovered in 1975 at Knossos during a rescue excavation undertaken by the British School, in the northern half of the Staphylakis field, on the south-east flank of the acropolis (Site Plan, Fig. 1). In that account reference was made (p. 4) to the discovery of other ancient features within the heavily ploughed area. The more important of these finds are briefly described in what follows, to complete the summary publication of the results of the 1975 operation.

Full details of the circumstances in which this investigation was undertaken are given in BSA 74, together with acknowledgements to all those who assisted the authors on the site and in the preparation of the material for publication. A brief account of the whole excavation appeared in AR 1976–77.

The method of spanning or roofing spaces by means of corbelling has recommended itself quite widely to primitive peoples. It has been recognized in a number of prehistoric cultures: the megalithic tombs of Copper Age Iberia, tombs such as Maes Howe, Orkney and Newgrange, Co. Meath, in the British Isles, as well as several tombs in Brittany, employ the method. The Sacred Wells of the Nuragic Culture in Sardinia were also roofed with corbelled domes. In these west European examples the gap spanned by corbelling tends to be relatively small, two or three metres, and the slope of the corbelling conservative. The point is demonstrated clearly by the ‘tholos tombs’ of Iberia; the greatest distance of their chambers is covered by a single slab, and their walls are corbelled out only a relatively short distance. The technique was by no means limited to the illiterate communities of prehistoric Europe. Relatively modern examples have been reported from the south of France and from Italy, where the technique is used for roofing buildings which are not covered by the earthen mounds found over the megalithic tombs. The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom used a steep and narrow corbelling to roof the passages and chambers of, for example, the Bent Pyramid of Sneferu, and the Great Pyramid of Kheops at Giza. However the skill and daring of the Mycenaean engineers who commonly spanned distances of eight metres, and in the largest tombs over fourteen, is unmatched in the history of the technique. Indeed only the invention of the true dome enabled larger spaces to be bridged without internal supports. As the Mycenaean tholos tombs illustrate the technique at its most perfect, they provide an especially appropriate example from which to examine the principles of corbelled structures.

In the summer of 1975 the owner of a small estate on the eastern slopes of Lower Gypsadhes decided to build a private road upslope to a belvedere overlooking the palace area. In the course of grading, several archaeological features were damaged before work was halted by the intervention of the Antiquities Guard. The Ephor of Antiquities at Herakleion then asked the British School to undertake rescue excavations in the area, and the Director of the School requested that I investigate the most important of the damaged constructions, an Iron Age chamber tomb.

About half-way along the course of the new road was a large area covered with the shattered remains of Geometric and Orientalizing vessels, but no sign of a tomb remained above ground. Preliminary excavation revealed the cause of this pattern.

The stirrup vase is thought to have been a container for oil and in ancient Greece one of the uses of oil was for washing oneself, much like toilet soap. It has a solid central column with a handle on each side of it and in front a spout. This peculiar arrangement should have a purpose and I suggest a possible one.

Hold the hand palm upwards and insert the second and third fingers through the handles, gripping the spout between the tips of the fingers and the column between the lower joints. Then, keeping the palm upwards, bend the fingers to tilt the spout over the palm of the hand. Oil will then run or drip out into the palm and the other hand can be used to smear it on the user's body without putting the stirrup vase down, so solving the problem one has nowadays of losing the soap in the bath.

Interest in the prehistory of the Cyclades may fairly be said to have been awakened in the middle of the nineteenth century when travellers like Walpole or Fiedler were intrigued by what we now regard as one of the characteristic products of ECII times in the Cyclades—the marble folded-arm figurines whose harmony, balance, and economy of artistic expression appeal so much to the admirers of twentieth-century artists such as Mondrian or Modigliani. Reports of other prehistoric material from the Cyclades soon followed from J. T. Bent, U. Köhler, and F. Dümmler, whilst more systematic explorations began with the work of Edgar in Pelos, and Atkinson and others at Phylakopi on Melos.

The coarse-ware stirrup-jars presented here come from two buildings at Mycenae excavated by Alan Wace from 1950 to 1952: the House of the Wine Merchant (HWM), and the House of the Oil Merchant (HOM). Over fifty examples were found in the HWM, and twenty-seven (plus three semi-fine ones) in the HOM, and as such they comprise the largest surviving deposits of the type apart from that of the Kadmeion at Thebes (where Keramopoullos found at least 120).

Although coarse stirrup-jars have received an increasing amount of attention in the last quarter-century, nearly all of the work has focused on those bearing painted Linear B inscriptions; results of philological studies, and of scientific analyses of the clay fabric, have provided fresh evidence for the debate concerning the political and economic relations between Post-Palatial Crete and the Greek mainland. With one possible exception, none of the jars from the two Mycenae deposits is inscribed, but the evidence indicates that, as is the case with inscribed jars, many were manufactured on Crete. Many of the jars fall into distinct typological groups, with parallels from other findspots at Mycenae, and other Aegean sites. The deposits are fairly well dated, and illustrate the diversity of coarse-ware stirrup-jars in use at Mycenae in the late fourteenth to the middle of the thirteenth century B.C.

The purpose of this study is to combine an archaeological and a historical analysis of settlement within the territory of the polis of Mantineia in E. Arkadia during the Archaic and Classical periods. Its aim is twofold: first, to collect and interpret the evidence for settlements and their history; secondly, to examine that evidence in relation to Mantineia's society and economy, in order to assess the significance of changes of settlement patterns for the nature of the Mantineian polis. The changes in question revolve around the eventful history of the town of Mantineia which was founded sometime in the late Archaic or early Classical period, destroyed by the Spartans and compulsorily abandoned in 385 B.C., and finally refounded in 370, remaining in existence until the sixth to seventh centuries A.D.

The significance of these changes for the political and military history of the Peloponnese, especially for the vital interests of Spartan foreign policy, was realized in antiquity and has been discussed in detail in several modern accounts. The location of Mantineian territory within the Peloponnese (Fig. 1) made it a strategic military focus and thoroughfare. Mantineia, together with Tegea and Pallantion, occupied the modern valley of Tripolis, which enclosed the largest plain of E. Arkadia and was linked directly with the valley of Sparta through the N. Lakonian hills by at least two major routes used by military traffic.

The four seasons of excavation conducted by D. M. Robinson at Olynthos between 1928 and 1938 produced a large quantity of red-figure pottery from settlement and cemetery. This material was published in volumes 5 and 13 of the final report. Robinson recognized that many of the red-figure fragments were of local Chalcidic fabric, and he tried to distinguish a few hands, but he made no detailed study. In ARV 1507–9 J. D. Beazley attributed a number of vases to a Painter of Olynthos 5.156 and a Group of Olynthos 5.141, and noted that they ‘might be local Olynthian’ but he ‘did not see that they differed from Attic in clay or technique’. More recently a few local red-figure vases, from private collections and rescue excavations, have been published, and others, still unpublished, are on display in the museums of Salonica and Polygiros. The excavations at Torone, still in progress, have also produced some fragments of non-Attic red-figure. On the basis of this material I have tried to distinguish more clearly some of the red-figure painters active in the Chalcidice in the fourth century; but I ought to emphasize that there are many vases and fragments not included here.

Custom regards such displays as honourable, and they cannot be made without leaving behind them an impression of power. Again, any splendour that I may have exhibited at home in providing choruses or otherwise, is naturally envied by my fellow-citizens, but in the eyes of foreigners has an air of strength … And this is no useless folly, when a man at his own private cost benefits not himself only but his city …

So in Thucydides' words Alkibiades spoke in defence of the celebrations of his recent chariot victories, against the charges of extravagance brought by Nikias. The tone and phrasing in his apology underscore the pleonexia of Alkibiades, yet in it there is an echo of the funeral oration of Perikles:

Rather, the admiration of the present and succeeding ages will be ours, since we have not left our power without witness … We have forced every sea and land to be the highway of our daring and everywhere, whether for evil or for good, have left imperishable monuments behind us.

Perikles may not have been referring specifically to architectural or sculptural monuments, but from the Kerameikos, his audience would have seen the buildings on the Akropolis already associated with his name. One may read into his words disguised justification of his policies, remembering that charges of extravagance were also brought against him.

A fruitful combination of excavation, fieldwork, and research has in recent years increased our knowledge of the Temple of Apollo Epikourios at Bassai. In particular, the sculptured frieze which encircled the interior of the cella has been the subject of numerous studies, the most recent being the monograph by C. Hofkes-Brukker and A. Mallwitz published in 1975. The investigations made at Bassai by N. Yalouris and F. A. Cooper have produced important new evidence. As a result of the excavations conducted by Yalouris since 1959, the early history of the sanctuary and of the structures preceding the classical (‘Iktinian’) temple are reasonably clear. Furthermore, Cooper has shown that the ‘Iktinian’ building, the fourth in a series of temples to Apollo on the site, was not designed to receive pedimental sculpture, and that some, if not all, of this temple's akroteria were floral. The traditional attributions of pedimental and akroterial statues must be discarded, along with the theory that the ‘Iktinian’ building was started as early as the middle of the fifth century B.C.

Yet, despite this progress, and the fact that the temple is one of the best-preserved monuments from antiquity, many issues remain controversial. Scholars postulate several building phases for the Classical temple. The chronology of the sculptures is still debated, as is the order of the twenty-three frieze-slabs within the cella.

The present contribution in this series of Notes is principally concerned with vases in Heraklion Museum which excavators of Knossos either did not publish or illustrated very sketchily. The vases range in date from MM III/LM I to LM IIIC. Two groups are from Evans's excavations in the Palace and near the Temple Tomb, five pots may be ascribed to Hogarth's tests on Gypsadhes Hill and a further five were found by Forsdyke in the Mavrospelio Cemetery.

Both vases appear on a photograph numbered 465.1 in the Evans archives of the Ashmolean Museum. They were then unrestored and included with them is a much larger amphora decorated with body bands and a disc on the shoulder, Plate 57a. The back of the print has been annotated; Evans gives brief descriptions, stating that the amphora was 48 cm high; Mackenzie ascribes the vases to the ‘Deposit with tripod W of the NE Magazines’ while, at the bottom, is written in Greek in a hand which I take to be that of their foreman ‘In the North Magazines’. It looks as though the excavators were uncertain where the pots had been found and the foreman was called in to help.

Elemental analysis of coarse-ware stirrup-jars from Thebes provided the first objective evidence for the movement of coarse wares in the Late Bronze Age Aegean. While the evidence of the optical emission spectrometry analysis indicates that stirrup-jars occur in several fabrics, the assignation of these fabrics to specific sources has been the subject of some debate, summarized and discussed in the light of fresh evidence by Catling and Jones but continued by McArthur.

It was to cast more light on the general questions that a large sample of stirrup-jars from Mycenae was analysed by petrological analysis. This method of analysis involves the identification of the rocks and minerals within the clay and relates them to geological sources most compatible with the archaeological evidence. Recent discussions of the method include Courtois, Peacock, and de Paepe.

With considerable help and collaboration from Dr. E. French and Lord William Taylour, and permission from the Greek Department of Antiquities, 37 samples were taken from stirrup jars from the House of the Wine Merchants (= HWM; dated LH IIIA/B), 25 from the House of the Oil Merchants (= HOM; dated to the end of LH IIIB1), and ten samples from stoppers found in the stirrup jars in the House of the Oil Merchants. The aim was to define the fabrics petrologically in order to relate these to the typology proposed by Haskell (this volume), and to suggest possible origins for them based on geological evidence.