MINOAN AND MYCENAEAN POTI'ERY COMPOSITION AND PROVENANCE

BY H. W. CATLING Department of Antiquitieh , Ashmoleun Museum, Oxford

HE Research Laboratory has concluded a major part of its investigation into the relationship between composition and provenance amongst the Minoan T and Mycenaean painted pottery current in the Aegean area and beyond

between, say, 1500 and 1100 B.C. The investigation was the work of Mrs. E. E Richards with the assistance of Mrs. A. E. Blin-Stoyle. Mrs. A. Millett played an active part in the later stages of the work. An interim account was published by Richards, Blin-Stoyle and Catling in Archaeometry 4 (1961), 31-38, while a detailed report by the same authors on the final results has appeared in Annual of the British School ut Athens 58 (1963), 94-115. The object of the present note is to summarise the archaeological results.

The Greek Late Bronze Age (including Minoan Crete as well as Mycenaean Greece) produced conditions favourable to regular mercanltile and other types of exchange between widely separated regions. Thus, Minoan and, to a very much greater extent, Mycenaean pottery besides being very widely distributed in the lands where is was produced (Crete; central and south Greece; the islands of the Aegean, up to and including the Dodecanese) have been found in Italy and Sicily, north-west Asia Minor, Cilicia, coastal and inland sites in Syria and Palestine, Egypt and Cyprus.

The period of widest distribution, namely that between c. 140O-c. 1250 B.C. coincided with a remarkable degree of homogeneity in the shapes of the vases made by Aegean potters, in the ornaments they chose for the painted decoration, and the manner in which they drew those ornaments. This has led to much uncertainty about the sources from which this pottery reached these remoter areas, particularly as there also exists the possibility of imitation by local potters or the establishment in, say, Cyprus of Aegean colonies complete with their own pottery industries. The Oxford investigation was undertaken in the hope that it might establish criteria independent of the conventional archaeological methods for demonstrating the source from which a particular vase or fragment of a vase has come.

Early on in the investigation it was found that the composition of pottery collected at Mycenae was easily distinguishable from pottery collected from Knossos. Both sites may surely be assumed to have been manufacturing centres. This very satisfactory result prompted the expansion of the work until, at its con- clusion, over 500 samples (each one of which, it has to be remembered, represents a one-time complete vase) had been examined from some 30 sites in Greece, the Islands and elsewhere.

Two rather different types of site were chosen for investigation. In the first place, material from obvious manufacturing centres at the heart of the Minoan/Mycenaean world was dealt with (Fig. 1). Thus from Crete, as well as 53 samples tested from the great site of Knossos others were examined from Zakrol and Palaikastroz in 1 First excavated by the British School at Athens early in the present century-Annual

of the British School at Athens vii, 121 ff. New excavations undertaken since 1962 by Dr. N. Platon of the Greek Archaeological Service show the site is of outstanding impor- tance. Cf. Archaeological Reports 196243, 32 f . Illustrated London News, 29-2-64, 312 ff. and 1-3-64, 350 ff.

2 Excavated by the British School from 1902-1906. Reports in BSA viii, ix, x, xi and xii. Bosanquet and Dawkins, The Unpublished Objects from the Palaikastro Excavations. 1902-06. (London, 1923.) 'The British School returned to the site in 1962 to check stratigraphy-ee Archaeological Reports 196243, 31 f .

2 A H C H A E O M E T R Y

. . -. __ .. - . .

15 ZAKRO 16 PHYLAKOPI 28 EMPORIO

7 AMARINIWS 17 !ALY505

9 MARMARIANI 19 LNKOMI

FIG. I . Map to show the location of sites from which material has been analysed.

the extreme east of the island, Gournia3 within the Gulf of Mirabello, Tylissos4 a little way west of Knossos and, on the south side of the island, Ayia Triadhas. a rich dependency of the nearby palace site at Phaistos, second only in importance to Knossos. Eleven sites on the Greek mainland and one on the immediately neighbouring island of Euboea were studied. Three of them are in Thessaly, on the northern limit of the Mycenaean homelands. Of these, Iolchos6 (the modem Volos) was the capital of the region, and site of a palace at present in course of excavation. Central Greece is represented by Thebes, in Boeotia; and by the island site of Amarinthos in Euboea, which in effect belongs to this part of the Mycenaean world. It was unfortunate that no material could be obtained from Athens; the whole of ,4ttica is but poorly represented by a set of sherds in poor physical con- dition collected at a large, recently excavated chamber-tomb cemetery at Perati in east Attica.7 Other sherds come from Megara Minoa on the shore of the Saronic Gulf, some way west of Athens. The remaining mainland sites tested are in the Peloponnese; first Korakou) on the shore of the Gulf of Corinth, in sight of the

3 H. B. Hawes and others, Gournia, Vasilike und other prehistoric sites on the I.sthniiis of

4 J. Hazzidakes, Tylissos ri I'dpoque Minoenne (Paris, 1921) and Leu villiis minoenncs de

5 Only preliminary accounts have so far been published. Cf. G. P. Caratelli, Monumenti

6 Preliminary reports by D. Theochares in Archaeology xi (1958). 1 3 ff. and Ergon tes

7 V. R. Desborough, The Last Mycenaeans (Oxford, 1963) 115 f . and references quoted. 8 C. Blegen, Korakou: a prehistoric settlement near Corinth (Boston and New York, 1921).

Hierupetra, Crete. (Philadelphia, 1908.)

Tylissos (Paris, 1934).

Antichi X I (1945), 422 ff. and references quoted.

Archaeologikes Etaireias for 1956 and 1960.

A R C H A E O M E T R Y 3

west end of the Canal, then Mycenae and Berbatig in the Argolid, then, on opposite sides of the region, Aegira in Achaea and Ayios Stephanoslo in Laconia. To com- plete the list of sites within the Aegean world proper three islands were investigated, sherds coming from Phylakopi in Melos.11 lalysos in Rhodes12 and Emporio in Chios.13

The second type of site selected for study lies beyond the limits of the true Aegean world. The grounds for including them were that they have all produced much Mycenaean pottery, over the source of which there has been considerable disagreement. The sites are Tell Atchana.14 an extremely important city in the ’Amq Plain in north Syria, excavated before and after the last war by Sir Leonard Woolley, Tell el Amarnals in Egypt, and three prosperous towns in Cyprus on or near the south or east coast of the island-Enkomi,16 Hala Sultan Tekke17 and Arpera Chiflik.18

I t might no doubt be objected that there are serious gaps in the list of sites investigated (see Fig. I ) , particularly in the first category. This would be to miss the point of the investigation, which was to show whether the method had any practical value for this particular set of archaeological problems; it was never intended to be exhaustive.

It remains to summarise the archaeological results of the inquiry. From the 500-odd samples tested, 13 distinct types of composition were identified. These have been termed “Groups” and lettered arbitrarily from A to M (see Fig. 2 and Appendix A). In addition, eight samples harmonised neither with one another to form another group, nor with any of the groups themselves. These have, for the time being, been designated “rogues”; none of the sites produced more than one of them (Appendix A). Of the groups, Group A is numerically far more impor- tant than the remainder. Firstly, Group A-type composition characterises 108 of the 110 samples examined from the sites of the Peloponnese. The two exceptions are both from Korakou on the Gulf of Corinth; one is a ‘rogue’, the other belongs to Group B (see below). Group A, it is clear, represents Peloponnesian manufacture. Since i t is unthinkable that a single site provided the whole of the Peloponnese with its pottery in the Mycenaean period, it follows that clays used by potters throughout the region are homogeneous enough

It has a two-fold distribution.

9 10

11 12

13

14 15

16

11

18

A. Akerstrom, Opuscula Atheniensia I (1 953), 9, with referenax. Only preliminary notices have been published of the British excavations at this site. Cf. Archaeological Reports 196041, 32 f . T. D. Atkinson and others, Excuvations uf Phylakopi in Melos, London, 1904. References to the many excavations in the Mycenaean cemeteries of Ialysos have been collected by F. H. Stubbing, Mycenaean Po//c,ry in the Levatit (Cambridge, 1951), 5 ff. Excavations in Chios were conducted from 1952 by the British School. Only preliminary accounts of the Bronze Age remains have so far been published. Sir C. L. Woolley, AIaIakh (London, 1955). Peet and Woolley, The City of Akhenuten I (London, 1923); Frankfort and Pendlebury, The Ciry of Akhenaten I 1 (London, 1933); Pendlebury, The City of Akhenaten I I I (London, 1951). The chief sources for the many excavations at this site are A. S. Murray, A . H. Smith and H. B. Walters, Exravurions in Cyprus (London, 1900). E. Gjerstad and others, Swedish Cyprus Expedition I (Stockholm, 1934) 467-575. C. F. A. Schaeffer, Enkomi-Alasia, Paris 1952. References collected by 0. Masson in Bulletin de Correspondance Hellenique lxxxi (1957), 25 ff. Cyprus: Annual Report of the Curator of Antiquities I91.5. 4 ff.

4 A H C H A E O M E T R Y

@ GROUP F . ** ARCA T - :IMPORTED

@ GROUP K ' PRODUCTION AREA ,

FIG. 2

in composition to prevent them being distinguishable by the present method. It would obviously be very desirable to examine other Peloponnesian sites, especially some of those in Messenia, in the south-west, including the metropolitan site of Pylos19. to see if they share in this homogeneity.

The second aspect of the distribution of Group A illustrates the manner in which pottery produced in the Peloponnese found a wider market in the course of trade. The most striking instances occur on the outer perimeter of distribution, at Tell Atchana (north Syria), Tell Amarna (Egypt), and the three sites in Cyprus (see Fig. 2).

The results from Cyprus are of compelling interest, since the origin of the Mycenaean pottery found there has long been highly controversial. Because of this, particular care was taken in selecing material for the investigation. The sites themselves were chosen as good examples of a well-known group20 at which pottery of Mycenaean type has been found in great abundance, particularly in grave- groups. It has always appeared possible to isolate two distinct varieties of this pottery, one identical with material found in the Mycenaean world proper, one fairly obviously imitative, and likely to be the work of Cypriot potters attempting to emulate the high quality of the former. Controversy has centred on the first of these two categories. According to one view, the pottery was made at Mycenaean centres outside Cyprus, and was imported to the island by Mycenaean traders whose

19 References to the preliminary reports on the American excavation at this palace site are

20 See Opuscula Arheniensio IV (19621, 142 f . collected in American Journal of Archaeology 67 ( l%3) 155. n. 1 .

A R C H A E O M E T R Y 5

mercantile interest in the island doubtless was focussed on its supplies of copper. According to a second view, Mycenaean potters migrated to Cyprus soon after 1400 B.C. and settled in several of the richer towns (amongst which would be included the three sites with which we are dealing) where their workshops pro- duced pottery that is indistinguishable in appearance from contemporary produc- tion in the Mycenaean homelands.

Twenty sherds were examined from Enkomi; ten of these looked indistinguish- able from true Mycenaean pottery. The remaining ten looked like copies. The same choice was made from Arpera Chiflik; ten and ten. From the third site, Hala Sultan Tekke, all 20 sherds tested looked to be true Mycenaean. The test showed that the composition of the 20 Hala Sulmtan Tekke sherds conformed to the characteristics of Group A. At Enkomi and Arpera, the ten fragments chosen because they looked Mycenaean also conformed to Group A. These results became even more significant when compared with the sherds that had looked imitations. Those from Arpera gave a new type of composition, Group L, encountered no- where else. Those from Enkomi yielded yet another variety, Group M, also unique.

One more test was made for Cyprus. Ten sherds were investigated that belong to pottery fabrics admitted, by common consent, to have been made in Cyprus, and to have nothing to do with Mycenaean pottery, although most are contemporary with it. The ten pieces included examples of Red Polished V, White Slip 1, White Slip 11, Black Slip and Base Ring wares.21 They canie from six widely separated sites. Their compositions proved to be remarkably heterogeneous, but none of them has anything to do with Group A.

The Cypriot results may be summarised and interpreted as follows. The com- position of Late Bronze Age fabrics known to have been made in the island show Cypriot potters used a great variety of clays. Sixty sherds of Mycenaean type were investigated. Forty of them, chosen because they looked Mycenaean in the true sense, share the composition characteristic of Group A, irrespective of the sites on which they were collected. The 20 sherds which looked imitative divide, according to find-spot, into two groups, L and M, which, so far, have been recorded nowhere else. The conclusion seems inescapable that at all three sites much Mycenaean pottery is present that was produced in Greece, in the Peloponnese. In addition, at two of the sites (the matter was not put to the test at the third) were workshops imitating the imported pottery, using clays unique to those sites.

Thus Group A-type composition occurs in the Mycenaean pottery of Cyprus, Egypt and North Syria, and shows that it was the Peloponnese which dominated trade between the Aegean and the Levant in the fourteenth and thirteenth cen- turies B.C. This is of the greatest interest and it is difficult to resist the conclusion that this trade from the Peloponnese will in fact have been controlled by the Mycenaean settlements of the Argolid under the central direction of Mycenae her- self. It also strongly suggests that Mycenaean interest in Cyprus was almost exclusively mercantile and was not political; the port-towns of Cyprus may have had their Greek trading houses, but they did not have colonies of Mycenaean Greeks controlling their affairs-though this was to come at the end of the thirteenth century and start of the twelfth.

21 Accounts of these fabrics are to be found in E. Gjerstad, Studies on Prehistoric Cyprics (Uppsala, 1926). E. Sjijqvist, Problems of the Lute Cypriote Bronze Age (Stockholm, 1940) and P. Astrom, The Middle Cypriote Bronze Age (Lund, 1957).

6 A H C H A E O M E T R Y

Before leaving this discussion of Group A it remains to notice its distribution nearer the area in which it was produced (see Fig. 2). On the Greek mainland, outside the Peloponnese, i t was the normal fabric at Megara Minoa. This is so close to the Peloponnese, however, that it is not surprising that the clay is still the same. Group A is also present at Thebes, but i t amounts to less than 25 per cent. of the samples, which is more suggestive of a n imported fabric than local manu- facture. I t has not been detected in any of the samples from sites to the north of Thebes. Among the islands, it appears plentifully in Rhodes as an import, and the same is true in Melos, at Phylakopi. I t was extremely rare amongst the samples from Crete, but two cases at Knossos and three at Palaikastro were recorded.

Next in numerical importance is Group B. Clay of this type was very widely, though not exclusively, used by the Minoan potters of Crete, for it typifies the pottery of Knossos, Tylissos, Ayia Triadha and Gournia. I t also occurs at Palaikastro and Zakro, though in very small amounts. Group B has introduced a complication into the results of the investigation. Out of 22 sherds tested from Thebes in Boeotia, 14 were found to have compositions not to be distinguished from Group B. Two suggestions can be made. The Theban potters used clay which ciinnot be distinguished-so far as this method is concerned-from the clay used in Crete by Minoan potters. Alternatively, Thebes maintained such intense trading links with Crete, and imported so much Cretan pottery that in a random sample of 22 fragments collected in Thebes, 14-more than 63 per cent,-should be imports. Though the latter remains a conceivable explanation, it is highly improb- able and the first must be preferred. This means that instances of Group B-type composition found neither in Crete nor in Thebes will always be equivocal, though commonsense will no doubt usually adjudicate. Thus, in the present investigation, three sherds of Group B from the island of Melos are much more likely to have come from Crete than from Boeotia. On the other hand, four Group B sherds from Argyropoulis in Thessaly suggest imports brought overland from Thebes rather than by sea from Crete. But the four Group B sherds from Megara Minoa, and a singleton from Korakou (near Corinth) pose questions which must remain unanswered.

The remaining groups are smaller and more localised, and can be dealt with more summarily. Group C is restricted to Perati in east Attica; no other group was found there. It is of great potential use that Perati should be distinguishable in this fashion, for it seems to be the western-most member of a diminutive Mycenaean Commonwealth that escaped the great disaster which caused so much damage to the Mycenaean world at the close of the thirteenth century B.C.22 Perati's associates belong to the islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. They continued fairly lively exchanges with each other during the twelfth century, and with the few sites of the mainland that had partially recovered from the catastrophe.

Two more groups belong to the Greek mainland. These are Groups D and E, which have been found in Thessaly and in Euboea. Group E is more localised than Group D, for it occurs only at Volos (where it amounted to 35 per cent. of the samples) and Marmariane, where it was the only fabric present. Group D formed 80 per cent. of the Argyropoulis sherds. 65 per cent, from Volos and 68 per cent. from Amarinthos in Euboea. It provided the one export piece from north

22 Desborough, The Lasf Mycenaeans, 20 f.

A K C H A E O M E T R Y 7

Greece, which got no further than Thebes however. These results suggest that this region had no share in the widespread mercantile activity of the Peloponnese.

The next groups, F and G, are Cretan, where they have been identified at Zakro and Palaikastro, both in the extreme east. F seems to characterise Zakro, G was only recorded at Palaikastro. It must be emphasised, however, that both these groups are represented by a very small number of samples; more work on these two sites is highly desirable. One example of Group F was found outside Crete, at Phylakopi, on Melos. I t is encouraging to find that there are such differences within Crete, and that Group B does not monopolise the whole island. It is parti- cularly welcome that Zakro apparently has a Group of its own, in view of the site’s prominence which recent excavations have made very clear.

Results from the site of Phylakopi on the Island of Melos were amongst the most interesting of the whole investigation (see Appendix A). Forty-two sherds were tested; six types of composition were isolated. One of these was a ‘rogue’. Just over half belong to Group A, and show how overwhelmingly the Peloponnese dominated the island’s trade. Cretan share in this trade is suggested by three examples of Group B and one of Group F. The remaining samples belong to two groups which have not been isolated anywhere else. Group H consists merely of five sherds which, to the eye, are completely indistinguishable from the 22 Group A sherds on the same site. They must be imports, but the area where they were made remains to be identified. The local potters of Melos in the Late Bronze Age were much under the spell of their more sophisticated neighbours; their imitations of Minoan pottery are easily recognizable, and cannot be confused with the fabrics they copy. Since this ware was certainly made on Melos i t was extremely useful to find that its composition (Group I ) isolates it from the imported pottery.

The diversity of material on Melos is a just reflection of its commercial impor- tance midway between Crete and Greece, and an obvious staging port for ships travelling to and from the east Mediterranean. I t is interesting that the only other site where several groups were present should be Palaikastro in east Crete, equally well located for the r61e of staging port (Fig. 1 , No. 13).

The last two groups to be mentioned were identified in the samples from lalysos on Rhodes. These groups, J and K, are rather closely related; they must represent minor differences in the clay used by the potters of the Mycenaean colonies on the island. Samples of their work were also represented outside the island, though in very small quantities, at Thebes, on the mainland and at Gournia and Palaikastro in Crete. As is noted above, a high proportion of the Rhodian samples proved to belong to Group A, and must therefore represent imports from the Peloponnese.

The Bronze Age site at Emporio on the island of Chios was not established as a Mycenaean colony until early in the twelfth century at the period of disturbance and decline in the Mycenaean world.23 The 33 samples tested from here produced heterogeneous results that are only otherwise paralleled in the investigation by the nowMycenaean fabrics of Cyprus. It would be necessary to test a very large number of samples from Emporio to determine whether any order could be given to results which at present are too confused to be of any use.

Such are the main achievements of the Oxford investigation. Their potential value can hardly be exaggerated. Perhaps the most obvious gain is the distinction to be made between the Mycenaean pottery of the Peloponnese and the Minoan

23 Ibid, 158 f .

8 A R C H A E O M E T R Y

pottery of Crete. It should be possible now to resolve some of the long-standing problems connected with the early appearances of Aegean pottery in Egypt and the Levant-which pieces are Minoan, which Mycenaean. Equally, we oughit more closely to see how Mycenaean vigour and enterprise supplanted Minoan colonial activities in the Cyclades. the Dodecanese and, indeed, at the important site of Miletus in south-west Asia Minor. It is well, however, to recognize that the solution of some problems by this method has been ruled out by the nature of the results. Obviously, the ambiguities of Group B will prevent identification of the source of the notorious inscribed stirrup jars at Thebes.24 The widespread dis- tribution of Group A as the product of the Peloponnese does not allow any analysis of the way in which pottery may have been exchanged in the course of local trade within the Peloponnese itself; vases of Group A-type composition found abroad cannot be attributed to a source more specific than “Peloponnese”, how- ever anxious we may be to conjecture this Peloponnesian site rather than that.

It is to be hoped that the future will see the investigation taken a stage further, both by examining material from new sites in the ‘production areas’ of Crete, Greece and the Islands, and by making use of the knowledge already gained to tackle outstanding problems. Doubtful points like the source of the Mycenaean piotorial vases in Cyprus or the origin of the Mycenaean pottery found at Troy must be gut to the test.

24 L. R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans, (London, 1962), 167 ff.

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