SPECTROGRAPHIC ANALYSIS OF MYCENAEAN AND MINOAN POTTERY I. Introductory Note

BY H. W. CATLING Ashmolean Museum

R. M. S. F. Hood, Director of the British School of Archaeology in Athens, first suggested the great potential value of the present experiment M on Minoan and Mycenaean pottery: what follows is an interim account.

He has provided, with authority generously given by the Director-General of Antiquities in Greece, Dr. J . Papadimitriou, part of the experimental material." The remainder has been made available by the Department of Antiquities of the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

The intention of the experiment has been to establish whether the chemical constituents of the clays used by potters of the Late Bronze Age at sites throughout Crete, Greece and the Greek Islands differ significantly from site to site or region

~-

CYPRUS

@ MYCENAL @ BERBATI @ TIRYNS @ KORAKOU

' @ MARMARIANI @ KNOSSOS @ FWYLAKOPI @ ENKOMI @I HALA SULTAN TEKKE @ ARPERA @ TELL ATCHANA

* The sherds provided by Mr. Hood from sites in Crete and Greece were carefully chosen for their qualities of ordinariness to ensure the exclusion of exotic pieces. The great majority are of 14th and 13th century B.C. date. The sets of sherds on which experimental work has been concluded are housed in the Ashmolean.

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

to region, to the point where such differences can be used to identify the sources of manufacture of controversial vases and fragments.

We give a brief outline of the archaeological background to the experiment which, if nothing else, may help to explain the need for testing sets of sherds from so many sites, so widely scattered. For clarity. their locations are marked on the accompanying map (Fig. l).*

INTER-RELATIONSHIPS OF CRETE AND GREECE IN THE LATE BRONZE AGE

The fortunes of Minoan Crete and Mycenaean Greece became closely inter- woven during the Late Bronze Age - say, the years 1550-1150 B.C. Previously, exchanges between the two areas had been on a modest scale, and their respective material cultures developed independently; there is little difficulty in distinguishing between Cretan and Greek artifacts before the 16th century B.C. During that century, however, the clarity of the distinction begins to fade. Ties were formed between Greece and Crete - their nature is still elusive - of which the most obvious and disconcerting result is the growing homogeneity of Minoan and My- cenaean painted pottery. During the 15th century B.C. this process was carried still further. An impression of the kind of forces that were at work is given by the probable course of eventst at the great Cretan palatial site of Knossos. Here the Minoan rulers were replaced by a new dynasty from the Greek mainland, who appear to have taken over the administration of all Crete. The other palaces of Phaistos and Mallia had been destroyed; it is uncertain whether the new dynasts were responsible for this. This phase in the occupation of Knossos is marked by a type of painted pottery (the so-called ‘Palace Style’) made nowhere else in Crete. Its idiom is constantly echoed in the contemporary painted pottery of the Greek mainland. Difficulties obviously arise in making sure distinctions in either area between what is locally made and what is imported from the other region. More- over, this congruence in the character of Mycenaean and Minoan pottery coincides with a period of great eastward expansion from the Aegean area, accompanied by the planting of colonies on the west coast of Asia Minor and in the.Dodecanese. At the same time there is clear evidence of an expanding trade with Cyprus, with the cities of the Levant and with Egypt. This is clear enough, in broad terms, from the distribution of the pottery. Thanks, however, to the homogeneity of the pottery in form and decoration, it is much less clear for how much of the expan- sionist movement Crete and Greece were each individually responsible. This un- certainty is. of course, due to the subjective element in identifying the source(s) of manufacture of the painted pottery. At present, judgments are perforce made - or denied - on a basis of the minutiae of ornamental detail and tricks of draughts- manship. Obviously, an objective standard would be very desirable.

MYCENAEAN TRADE AND COLONIZATION In or around 1400 B.C., the power and prosperity of Crete was brought low by

the violent sack of Knossos. It is not clear whether this was the work of disaffected

* It is hoped that several more sites in Crcle mav bc testcd, as well as others in Greece, particularly in Messenia, Laconia, Attica and Boeotia. Tests are also planned on Mycenacan sherds from sites in Egypt (in particular, Tell el Amarna).

t It should be noted that a verv different interpretation of the evidence has recently been propounded by Professor L. R. Palmer. cf. Palmer. Mycenaeans cind Minoans, London (1961).

A R C H A E O M E T R Y 33

Minoans, or metropolitan Greeks grown jealous of the wealth and power which their Knossian relatives had built up with their command of the sea. However it happened, it assured Mycenaean ascendancy in the east Mediterranean over the greater part of the next two centuries. Life went on in Crete, and its material culture shows that it remained in the Mycenaean orbit, albeit now in the r61e of poor relation. Its painted pottery was still close enough to the products of the Greek mainland for there to be difficulty at times in distinguishing between Minoan and Mycenaean fabrics.

During the two centuries after 1400 B.C., the Mycenaean world of Greece and the island settlements became culturally so close-knit that it is virtually impossible to attribute Mycenaean painted pottery to its individual centres of production. While it is a reasonable assumption that the vast mass of such pottery found at each of the metropolitan sites was locally produced, it is not possible, when such pottery is found beyond the limits of the Mycenaean world proper, to say from which centre it came. We are therefore denied extremely valuable information on the identity of the Mycenaean cities chiefly responsible for the vigorous trade carried on with Cyprus, with Egypt and with many of the coastal cities of Syria and Palestine. In Cyprus, there is so much Mycenaean pottery at certain sites that it has been used as an argument in favour of Mycenaean colonial settlements in the island. in which the pottery was locally manufactured by emigrant potters. According to another interpretation of the same evidence most of it was imported from the West, and a little was made by Cypriot potters copying a valued foreign model. We need to know whether this pottery was made in Cyprus or not; if it was not made in Cyprus, from which of the Greek centres did it come? The past history of Aegean archaeology shows that these problems cannot be settled satis- factorily merely by looking at the vases and fragments; and objective standard of the kind at which this experiment is directed seems to offer the only hope of a fool- proof solution.

It is too much to hope that each site from which a set of sherds is tested in the laboratory will produce a unique pattern, or that the potteries of sites so closely grouped, for example, as Mycenae, Tiryns and Berbati will prove to have used clays readily distinguishable from each other. But if, by the end of the experiment. when material from all the chief Mycenaean and Minuan centres has in turn been examined, it emerges that, say, Knossian clay is not the same as the clays of the Argolid, that the vases of Messenia can be separated from those of N. Greece, that vases made in the island settlements of Melos and Rhodes are different again, and that the local clays of Cyprus and the Levaiit are distinguish- able from those of Crete and Greece, the experiment will have done far more than justify the time and trouble which has been devoted to it. The way will be open for the reconsideration of many intractable and critical problems of the Aegean Bronze Age.

11. Method and Interim Results BY A. E. BLIN-STOYLE AND E. E. RICHARDS

Experiments on other types of pottery (Richards 1960; Hartley & Richards. 1960, 1962) have shown that considerable similarities in composition may exist between the fabric of pots made from similar clay, probably at some fairly weil defined place and time.