Obsidian to the Greeks was no more than a semi-precious stone, black and shiny, suitable for mirrors or exotic ornaments. But to their predecessors in the Aegean through five millenia it was an important raw material for the manufacture of tools and weapons. Sharper and more abundant than flint, more easily worked and cheaper than copper, it was not displaced entirely even by the use of bronze, which was always an expensive material, there being no source of tin in the Aegean. Only when knowledge of iron-working was brought to the Aegean coasts did obsidian fall from its position as an important raw material to that of a curiosity.

Huge quantities of obsidian are to be found lying about the surface of most prehistoric sites in south Greece—any farmer or shepherd will tell of the ‘little razors’ to be found on his land. But its occurrence in nature is very unusual since it is found exclusively in regions of recent volcanic activity, and then only when certain conditions exist, such as a high silica content in the lava of the volcano. Every single piece found in mainland Greece had to be imported from overseas, a process implying competent geological knowledge, skill in sailing and navigation, and perhaps social organization, to a considerable degree. It is the earliest trade in the world for which we have concrete evidence.

Interest in the prehistory of the Cyclades may fairly be said to have been awakened in the middle of the nineteenth century when travellers like Walpole or Fiedler were intrigued by what we now regard as one of the characteristic products of ECII times in the Cyclades—the marble folded-arm figurines whose harmony, balance, and economy of artistic expression appeal so much to the admirers of twentieth-century artists such as Mondrian or Modigliani. Reports of other prehistoric material from the Cyclades soon followed from J. T. Bent, U. Köhler, and F. Dümmler, whilst more systematic explorations began with the work of Edgar in Pelos, and Atkinson and others at Phylakopi on Melos.

A question of broad economic and social significance is the extent to which farming in prehistoric times, and perhaps even in historical times, was characterised by cultivation on a small scale and with intensive methods. Archaeobotanically, a distinction may be possible between intensive and extensive cultivation on the basis of the weed seeds associated with ancient grain samples. To this end, an ecological study was carried out in central Ewia of the weeds of winter-sown pulses grown both intensively in gardens and extensively in fields. The recorded weed flora was demonstrably influenced by relevant husbandry variables, such as method of tillage (with hoe or plough), weeding, manuring and soil organic content. The closest correspondence, however, was with the size, type and location of cultivated plots, suggesting that the weed flora was determined by a combination of these husbandry variables. In conclusion, the potential is briefly discussed of disentangling these variables for application in an archacobotanical context.

The excavations described here were undertaken for the purpose of obtaining a fuller knowledge of the nature of the Neolithic settlement site which lies below the Minoan palace of Knossos.

The presence of this settlement site was originally recognized by Sir Arthur Evans very soon after he began work at Knossos at the beginning of the century. His numerous soundings established that it was of considerable size, covering the whole of the hill of Kephala below the palace and the surrounding houses (an area of at least 11 acres), and that it must have endured for a long period, since the depth of deposit attained to nearly 10 metres in places. A pottery sequence was worked out by Mackenzie on the basis of the soundings carried out up to 1904, and this was subsequently adopted in essentials by Evans in the final publication. It has subsequently been refined and modified by Dr. A. Furness (Mrs. Ozanne), using Evans's material in the Stratigraphical Museum, in a paper which she published in this journal in 1953.

This investigation into the compositions of Minoan and Mycenaean pottery fabrics was carried out in Oxford at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art by permission of the Director, Dr. E. T. Hall. Mrs. E. E. Richards, co-author of this report, was in charge of the investigation, latterly with the assistance of Mrs. A. Millett. The potential importance of the work undertaken was first suggested by Mr. M. S. F. Hood, then Director of the British School at Athens. Mr. Hood has maintained lively interest in the investigation, and has made many valuable suggestions about the course it should take, as well as providing much of the sherd material. In this connexion we are greatly indebted to Dr. J. Papadimitriou, Director-General of Antiquities in Greece, for granting the necessary export permits. We are also grateful to Mr. M. R. Popham, for scraping selected sherds in the Herakleion Museum and in the Stratigraphical Museum at Knossos, and to Dr. N. Platon, then Ephor of Antiquities in Crete, for allowing this to be done. Sherds from Thebes in the University Museum, Reading, were loaned by Mrs. A. N. Ure; the Rev. Dr. A. J. Arkell provided a set of Mycenaean sherds from Tell el Amarna from the collections in University College, London. Fragments from Rhodes were given by the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum through the kindness of Mr. D. E. L. Haynes and Mr. R. A. Higgins. Other sherds were provided from the reserve collection in the Ashmolean Museum. The sherds tested in the course of the investigation are now housed in the Ashmolean, with the exception of the group from Thebes (Reading).

The pottery found in the Roman urban villa at Knossos (the Villa Dionysos), excavated in 1935 by R. W. Hutchinson and in several post-war seasons by Prof. M. R. E. Gough, is described. The circumstances and context of the discoveries are described, together with a general account of the types of fabric. Many examples are illustrated by drawings, and a full catalogue description is given of them, amphorae being treated separately. The bulk of the material is second century A.D. in date (part of the villa being destroyed in A.D. 170–80, other parts collapsing and being abandoned in the second quarter or middle of the third century A.D.).

The site of Karphi, comprising Karphi proper, Mikre and Megale Koprana, was discovered, like most prehistoric sites in Crete, by Sir Arthur Evans. In June 1896 he visited Lasithi and cleared one of the tombs at Ta Mnemata (see below, page 101). With his usual generosity, he lent the writers the diary of his travels, which contained, besides other valuable information, an admirable sketch plan of the surface remains on Karphi and the Kopranas.

In 1935 Miss Money-Coutts and J. D. S. Pendlebury ascended from Kera to the West. The impression then gained from the sherds on the surface of the city site was that it was of Late Minoan date, an excusable mistake, as will be seen from the finds.

Nearly ninety years ago students of Attic topography recorded the remains of an ancient house set on one of the southernmost ridges of the Hymettus range, a short distance below a cave sanctuary of Pan and not very far from the village of Vari in south-west Attica. The surface traces suggested an isolated country house, well planned and well built; it offered an instructive comparison with the Dema House near Ano Liosia in north-western Attica and this encouraged the excavators of the latter site to investigate further. Work on the southern site has now added another example, a noteworthy and fairly well-preserved example, to the short list of ancient Attic country houses known, explored, and published. For lack of a convenient topographical name we propose to call this site the Vari Cave House, or for brevity's sake in this report, the Vari House.

This paper attempts to provide new insights into the nature of Greek society in the Dark Ages (1100–700 B.C.). It re-examines the relationship between the archaeological evidence and the institutions and practices described in the Homeric poems. The archaeological evidence indicates that there were marked regional differences in settlement pattern, burial customs and pottery traditions. This must, it is argued, reflect profound regional differences in social organisation. Ethnographic analogies are used to make sense of some of these regional patterns. Two of the larger and more stable communities in Dark Age Greece, Athens and Knossos, are subjected to detailed scrutiny. A close contextual analysis of the relationship between pot style and mortuary representations in these two sites reveal two patterns which are divergent rather than convergent. In Athens burial customs and later pot style appear to be part of an age and sex linked symbolic system. In Knossos however, there is no clear patterning, either in pot style or mortuary representations. Instead there is a continuum of variation. Such fundamental differences cannot be accomodated within the concept of a uniform ‘Homeric Society’. It is suggested here that the institutions and practices described in Homer only operated at an inter-regional level.

The absolute chronology for the Early Bronze Age of Central and Northern Europe, including that for the Wessex culture of southern Britain, is not yet reliably established. This point was emphasized by V. Gordon Childe in his Retrospect, and the following words were indeed the very last which he wrote. Speaking of ‘the urgency of establishing a reliable chronology’, he stated: ‘a great deal of the argument depends on a precise date for the beginning of Unétice, that is at best very slightly the most probable out of perfectly possible guesses ranging over five centuries’.

At that time the basis for the absolute chronology of the Early Bronze Age was, as it largely remains today, a framework of synchronous links built up across Europe to the Mycenaean world of the Aegean Late Bronze Age. The assumption was made—and Childe stressed that it was an assumption—that European development and chronology were to be viewed in terms of ‘the irradation of European barbarism by Oriental civilisation’. Possible links for the European Early Bronze Age with Mycenae and indeed the Near East were eagerly sought in an attempt to build up a coherent chronology founded on this assumption.

Traces of fortifications around the area apparently once occupied by the city of Old Smyrna were observed by Louis Fauvel, and our first detailed description of them is that of Prokesch von Osten, who accompanied him there on a second visit in 1825. As we shall see later, it seems likely, though proof is no longer possible, that most of the circuit wall around the tell, as well as that on the low spur to the west of it on which the modern village now stands, as described by Prokesch, may have belonged to the defences of the classical city. Nothing today survives of these above ground, owing to extensive stone-plundering in the interval; and it is to be feared that the fate of much of this rather exposed classical enceinte has been to provide masonry either for the houses of the modern village or for the terrace walls which today encircle the tell.

The plundering of this outermost circuit probably left the earlier ones inside it rather more exposed to view. I have not been able to verify which of the city walls it was that was photographed by Keil in 1911, but when Franz and Helene Miltner excavated here in 1930 a part of the late-seventh-century B.C. circuit was visible on the east side of the city. Here they cleared about 80 metres of its face, for the most part to no great depth, then picked up its line again with a small probe some 20 metres farther north. Two further small trenches seem to have located more of this late-seventh-century wall-line south-south-west of their long cut, in addition to traces of yet other circuits. Besides this they report sinking two shafts into the mound dominating the north-west corner of the tell and making two small probes in occupation levels within the city itself.

The term ‘Island Marble’ was coined by G. R. Lepsius in 1890. In a first flush of enthusiasm for the recently developed technique of cutting thin sections of rocks for microscopic examination, he claimed to distinguish various Attic and other marbles of mainland Greece, Parian and Naxian marble, and a residual category, ‘Inselmarmor’.

Obviously the ability to determine the place of origin of the raw material, by examination of a specimen of marble, would be of very great value to the archaeologist. With a long series of Classical sculptures from Greece, Lepsius claimed to do this, and became the first of a line of scholars describing marble as ‘Pentelic’, ‘Hymettan’, ‘Parian’, ‘Naxian’, or ‘Island’, usually on the sole basis of visual examination. Prehistorians also have sought to identify as Cycladic figurines and other objects of marble found in contexts outside the Cyclades, purely on the grounds of the material used.

The geological basis for such an identification seems today highly doubtful, and since the question is of considerable relevance to Cycladic prehistory, as well as of more general interest in later periods, we decided to make a systematic, if limited, study of the problem.

This study was part of the work of the Cambridge-Bradford expedition to Boeotia. It gathers information on wild vegetation as part of the environment of, and resources available to, human activities. It is concerned with vegetation, with the structure, maintenance, and history of plant communities, rather than with flora, with individual plant species as such. The survey extends beyond the area of the archaeological survey (Mavromati), a highly cultivated area; in order to search for plant communities of a more nearly natural kind, this botanical study includes a much wider area covering almost the whole of the modern Boeotia (and beyond) from Mt. Parnassos to Chalkis. The land, geology, and soils are described as the essential context for the vegetation. Factors affecting modern vegetation are analysed, and the historical and archaeological evidence is discussed. It is concluded that, contrary to the general assumption, prehistoric Boeotia was a semi-arid land, both in classical and late Turkish times. The main features were very much as they are now, but this was not necessarily constant.

The method of spanning or roofing spaces by means of corbelling has recommended itself quite widely to primitive peoples. It has been recognized in a number of prehistoric cultures: the megalithic tombs of Copper Age Iberia, tombs such as Maes Howe, Orkney and Newgrange, Co. Meath, in the British Isles, as well as several tombs in Brittany, employ the method. The Sacred Wells of the Nuragic Culture in Sardinia were also roofed with corbelled domes. In these west European examples the gap spanned by corbelling tends to be relatively small, two or three metres, and the slope of the corbelling conservative. The point is demonstrated clearly by the ‘tholos tombs’ of Iberia; the greatest distance of their chambers is covered by a single slab, and their walls are corbelled out only a relatively short distance. The technique was by no means limited to the illiterate communities of prehistoric Europe. Relatively modern examples have been reported from the south of France and from Italy, where the technique is used for roofing buildings which are not covered by the earthen mounds found over the megalithic tombs. The Egyptians of the Old Kingdom used a steep and narrow corbelling to roof the passages and chambers of, for example, the Bent Pyramid of Sneferu, and the Great Pyramid of Kheops at Giza. However the skill and daring of the Mycenaean engineers who commonly spanned distances of eight metres, and in the largest tombs over fourteen, is unmatched in the history of the technique. Indeed only the invention of the true dome enabled larger spaces to be bridged without internal supports. As the Mycenaean tholos tombs illustrate the technique at its most perfect, they provide an especially appropriate example from which to examine the principles of corbelled structures.

In 1951 the late N. M. Kontoleon carried out a small excavation beside the church of Agioi Anargyroi, some 200 yards west of the main square of modern Chios town. In the wall of an undated tomb linked physically but not chronologically with an also undated basilica he discovered an inscription which, with his usual generosity, he allowed W. G. F. to copy, squeeze, and photograph in 1952. Unfortunately Kontoleon did not find time to give more than a partial publication and brief discussion of the text before his death, but Th. Sarikakis has now published the whole with a commentary and this has been followed by the extensive and (as always) illuminating comments of J. and L. Robert and the fuller treatment of L. Moretti (see bibliography below). In view, however, of the importance of the document, we feel it may be useful to present a somewhat corrected version (the result of frequent contemplation by W.G.F. between 1952 and 1967 and a thorough re-examination by P.S.D. in 1979), along with some detailed commentary and arguments about its date and immediate context. We should like to thank A. P. Stephanou, the former director of the Archaeological Museum in Chios, for his constant patience and kindness, and his successor, Miss A. Zacharou, for more recent help. Both, we are sure, would approve our dedication of this note to the memory of Kontoleon.

This article presents the first ever full edition of the fragments of one of the most important documents of ancient Greek religion, the sacrificial calendar of Athens as it was inscribed on stone as part of the revision of Athenian Law in 410/9–405/4 and 403/2–400/399 BC. All these fragments, where they survive, are in Athens (the Agora and Epigraphical Museums). The edition contains many new readings, restorations and interpretative points (in particular the identification of festivals). In addition to a line-by-line commentary, a translation is included and there are explanatory notes on linguistic features, animal and non-animal items listed in the calendar and payments to priests and other officials.

This article presents results obtained through detailed stylistic analysis of a body of EM I–EM II A pottery at Knossos in association with a programme of petrographic analysis and scanning electron microscopy. From the Knossian ceramic assemblage, four specific ware groups were chosen for this study on the basis of shape, decoration, and fabric: fine painted, fine grey, painted semi-fine to coarse, and slipped and burnished. It is argued here, on stylistic grounds and on the basis of petrographic analysis, that these groups were imported to Knossos from south central Crete. In addition, scanning electron microscopy characterizes the technology of production of the Mesara imports, and demonstrates the use of oxidation–reduction–oxidation techniques to produce black in this early period. The Mesara imports at EM II A Knossos mark the first sizeable exchange of pottery at this site in Minoan times. They suggest that in central Crete by EM II A there may have been an inter-regional distribution of a broad range of pottery types from various specialized production centres.

Analyses are given of the clay composition of kiln waste from some production sites, and of excavated sherds of some distinctive wares, as a contribution to a possible archive aimed at localizing the origins of different classes of pottery found in archaeological contexts, and at clarifying trade patterns.

The paper discusses the process of crop production and consumption; that is, methods of cultivating, processing of harvested crops for storage and consumption, and patterns of crop storage. Evidence for storage from prehistoric sites in various parts of Greece is considered.

This paper surveys farming practices and their associated administrative structures in Mycenaean Greece, and outlines the kinds of changes which might have occurred in regional farming systems during the dark ages. It is postulated that the underlying subsistence basis of Greek agriculture remained substantially the same, although the structural position of élites in regional agrarian economies (as well as the constitution of élite groups) may have changed considerably. The type and degree of changes that occurred during the dark ages in any particular region seem to correlate with their earlier relationships to Mycenaean palace centres.