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Pottery production and consumption in Early Iron Age Crete: The case of Thronos Kephala (ancient Sybrita) (Articolo in rivista)
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- Pottery production and consumption in Early Iron Age Crete: The case of Thronos Kephala (ancient Sybrita) (Articolo in rivista) (literal)
- Anno
- 2009-01-01T00:00:00+01:00 (literal)
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- Anna Lucia D'Agata; Marie-Claude Boileau (literal)
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- Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche; British School at Athens (oggi University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Philadelphia (USA). (literal)
- Titolo
- Pottery production and consumption in Early Iron Age Crete: The case of Thronos Kephala (ancient Sybrita) (literal)
- Abstract
- Recent years have seen a marked increase in interest in the Early Iron Age of
Crete (Fig. 1), focusing on sites which flourished in the centuries of the so called
Dark Ages through to the emergence of the city-states dating from the 8th century
BC onwards. Excavations at Knossos, Eleutherna, Thronos Kephala, and Kavousi,
and surveys at Vrokastro and elsewhere bear witness to this renewed interest.
Still, our understanding of regionalism within Crete in this period remains poor2,
partly because ceramic studies of Early Iron Age material have mostly concentrated
on the stylistic development of fine decorated wares from funerary contexts
as an aid to chronological studies. Local developments of, and interactions
between, sites and regions can be documented more precisely through the study
of pottery technology, production and circulation with the application of analytical
techniques3.
Here we present the first detailed assessment of Early Iron Age pottery production
and consumption from Thronos Kephala (ancient Sybrita). Using mainly ceramic
petrography, it sets out to establish the compositional reference fabric groups
for the local coarse, semi-fine and cooking pot productions, and to identify nonlocal
fabrics. Results of the integrated petrographic and typo-chronological data
shed light on issues of clay paste technology, diachronic patterns of local production
and consumption, provenance of non-local pottery and, more generally, on the
relationship between Thronos Kephala and the other communities of west-central
Crete. Greek-Italian excavations at the site of Thronos Kephala, generally identified
with Minoan su-ki-ri-ta and the forerunner of the Classical polis of Sybrita, have uncovered a settlement which was continuously occupied from the 12th to the
7th century BC4. The settlement (Fig. 2), situated on the summit of the hill of Kephala
on the south-western slopes of the Psiloritis and at the northern end of the valley of
Amari, was founded in LM IIIC Early, just after the collapse of the Late Bronze Age
system of autonomous polities, and was destroyed in the course of the 7th century
BC. The excavated area consists of three sectors: the north and the south plateaux,
and a central area close to the hilltop, linking the two plateaux. In the central area more than 40 pits dug in the bedrock have been unearthed. The remains of the
settlement include, on the north plateau, Building 1, 2, 3, and the large, and later,
Building B1; on the south plateau, Building A1. The pits constitute a defining feature
of the settlement on Kephala, unparalleled on such a scale anywhere else in
Crete. The central area, being occupied by the pits, remained substantially untouched
by later constructions up to the Roman period. The way in which the pits
were filled in indicates that they were the outcome of ritual behaviour practised
by the inhabitants of the Kephala uninterruptedly from the 12th to the 9th century
BC, and the awareness of their existence seems to have persisted throughout the
following centuries. To judge from the materials collected in the pits themselves
- mainly including pottery, animal bones, and organic remains - this behaviour
involved the careful burial of the remains of the preparation and consumption of
food, and to a lesser extent the manipulation of liquids. In other words we are
dealing with structured deposits reflecting specific deposition modalities. The
pits contained the remains of collective meals which took place on Kephala between
the 12th and the 9th century BC and which were invested with a ritual value.
These collective meals may be seen as the forerunner of the syssitia, one of the
most important institutions of the Cretan poleis in the Archaic period. The ceramic
material from the pits is domestic in nature, and includes fine, coarse and
kitchen ware. Being prevalently closed contexts, the ritual pits of the central area
also correspond to a sort of horizontal stratigraphic sequence ranging in time
from LM IIIC to late Protogeometric. The archaeological evidence from Thronos
Kephala includes numerous indications which show how during the Dark Ages
the embryo of practices which proved crucial for archaic Cretan society, such as
meals taken in common, was already to be found here. The investigation of this
site constitutes an integrated project for reconstructing the socio-economic processes
which during the Dark Ages transformed a small hilltop settlement in one
Cretan polis from the Archaic period5.
The questions addressed in this study deal essentially with issues of provenance
and technology of coarse-grained pottery. Thin-section petrography using a polarising
microscope was thus chosen as the most appropriate analytical technique.
The analysis was carried out at the Fitch Laboratory and following the methodology
proposed by Whitbread6. A total of 200 pottery samples were selected for thinsection
petrography, representing the range of macro-fabrics (Fig. 3), vessel types,
vessel size, typo-chronology and depositional contexts (Table 1) at Thronos Kephala.
Refiring tests were conducted so that variations in clay colour due to ancient
firing conditions were eliminated. A second phase of the project on the geochemistry
of 12 clays and 75 samples of semi-coarse to semi-fine wares by neutron activation
analysis is currently underway. (literal)
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