The Wider Island of Pelops

Studies on Prehistoric Aegean Pottery in Honour of Professor Christopher Mee

David Michael Smith, William G. Cavanagh, Angelos Papadopoulos, David Michael Smith, William G. Cavanagh, Angelos Papadopoulos

• Publisher: Archaeopress Archaeology
• Year: 2023
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781803273297
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The Wider Island of Pelops explores the myriad ways in which pottery was created, utilized, and experienced in the prehistoric Aegean, across a period of more than 4000 years between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age transition. Pottery is capable both of creating bonds and creating barriers. It serves as a sociocultural call and response, marking similarity and difference, collectivism and individualism, knowledge, and the absence of knowledge. Contextually-bound, it embodies identities, memories and multiple histories. It reflects choice and reinforces orthodoxy; a product of change, and a driver of it, that both creates and curates understanding of the world. Necessity and commodity, at times anachronistic, and at others, avant-garde, it is subversive and slavish, innovative and derivative; visible always, and never without value.The seventeen papers collected here provide a diachronic perspective on the value of pottery in marking and mediating cross-scale sociocultural discourse; in framing and facilitating the transmission of knowledge and meaning; in driving economies; in the preservation of memory, in the practice of cult; and, in more recent times, as a vector in the dialogue of imperialism: at once introducing key themes in the study of Aegean pottery, and providing a snapshot of recent archaeological work in Greece.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Contents Page
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• List of Abbreviations
• Professor Christopher Mee (1950-2013)
• The Late-Final Neolithic and Early Helladic I Pottery from Midea in the Argolid: Continuity and Change
• Kouphovouno and the Cyclades: A Note
• A Submerged EH II Settlement at Lambayanna in the Argolid: The Preliminary Results of the 2015 Survey1
• Tradition, Transition, and the Impact of the New in Neolithic Greece
• Final Neolithic and Early Helladic Pottery from Geraki
• Understanding Mycenae
• Localism and Interconnectivity in a Post-Palatial Laconian Maritime Landscape (Late Helladic IIIC to Submycenaean/Early Protogeometric)1
• Similarities and Differences between Korakou and Kolonna in the Early and Middle Bronze Ages
• The Ceramic Assemblage of Leska on Kythera
• Regional Diversities or Occupational Gap?
• Attica during the Final Neolithic and the Early Bronze Age: Regional Ceramic Traditions and Connections with Neighbouring Areas
• The Study of Mycenaean Pottery from Cyprus: A Short Story of the 1895 British Museum Excavations at Site D, Kourion1
• Filling a Gap: First Steps in the Discovery of Early Helladic III Laconia
• Ceramic Surprises from LH IIIC Aigeira
• Coarse Labours Long Continued: Cooking Vessels, Culinary Technology and Prehistoric Foodways at Phylakopi, Melos1
• Ritual Pyres in Minoan Peak Sanctuaries. Reality and Popular Myths