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Five Copper Axes from Greece

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 September 2013

W. W. Phelps ,
G. J. Varoufakis  and
R. E. Jones
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Extract

Early copper axes from mainland Greece, whether flat or shaft-hole, are rare. Only four are attributable with more or less certainty to the Final Neolithic period: two from Sesklo, one from Alepotrypa and one from Pevkakia. There is one from Crete that was found in a Late Neolithic level at Knossos. Three others might belong to Early Bronze I: a flat axe each from Gona and Marathon Cave, and a unique hammer-axe from Levadia. The three Mainland hoards, from Eutresis, Thebes, and Petralona, containing shaft-hole and flat axes, have been assigned to the latter half of the Early Bronze Age.

Type
Research Article
Information
Annual of the British School at Athens , Volume 74 , November 1979 , pp. 175 - 184
Copyright
Copyright © The Council, British School at Athens 1979

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References

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13 They are published here by kind permission of the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens.

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18 These are indicated on the drawing which was made in the course of a binocular microscopic examination of the axe by Miss Alexandra Christopoulou. She is preparing a thesis on the trace-wear analysis of Thessalian stone tools.

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24 Expanded blades with narrow butts are characteristic of the Italian Copper Age Remedello culture (e.g. BPI x pl. 6.2; xxvii pl. 1.2) and of the Yugoslav Copper Age culture in Bosnia-Herzegovina, but the proportion of butt to blade width is much less extreme in the Italian examples, and the published Yugoslav axes are all thinner, plano-convex in section and have curving, not straight, sides.

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35 Renfrew, op. cit. loc. cit.

36 Phelps, op. cit. 28 fig. 6, 31.

37 Renfrew, op. cit. 28 fig. 6, 31.

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