NESTOR: Celebrating the Work of Wise Jack Davis
XIXst International Aegean Conference/XXIe rencontre égéenne internationale
8-11 June 2026. American School of Classical Studies at Athens
ABSTRACTS
Abell Natalie, Theo Nash, Jami Baxley Craig, and Myrto Georgakopoulou†
Athanassopoulos Effie and Christian Cloke
Bejko Lorenc, Maria Grazia Amore, Skënder Aliu, and Helena Tomas
Brecoulaki Hariclia and Emily Egan
Brogan Tom and Eleanor J. Huffman
Broodbank Cyprian, Evangelia Kyriatzi, and Toby Wilkinson
Cadogan Gerald and Eleni Hatzaki
Cullen Tracey and Lauren Talalay
Efkleidou Kalliopi and Evi Gorogianni
Fitzsimons, Rodney D., Anna Belza, David Wilson, and Carol Hershenson
Gauss Walter, Jeremy Rutter, and Ioulia Tzounou
Gkouma Myrsini, Panagiotis Karkanas, and Walter Gauss
Halstead Paul and Valasia Isaakidou
Hasaki Eleni and Lauren Alberti
Kountouri Elena and Andreas Vlachopoulos
Lupack Susan, Barbora Weissova, Sarah James, Matthew Skuse, Leah Schiebel, and Panagiota Kasimi
Mantzourani Eleni and Giorgos Vavouranakis
McNamee Calla, Salvatore Vitale, Sharon Stocker, and Evangelia Malpani
Newhard Jim and Charleston Burton
Papadimitriou Nikolas, Iro Mathioudaki, Anthi Balitsari, Sylviane Déderix, and Robert Laffineur
Paschalidis Kostas and Katerina Voutsa
Putzolu Cristiano, Calla McNamee, and Sharon R. Stocker
Schepartz Lynne and Sari Miller-Antonio
Voutsaki Sofia and Nektarios Karadimas
Abell Natalie, Theo Nash, Jami Baxley Craig, and Myrto Georgakopoulou†
Bullets from Ayia Irini and their Possible Implications for the Military History of Modern Kea
Jack Caskey’s excavations at Kephala, Troullos, and Ayia Irini in northwestern Kea focused on clarifying the material culture and chronological sequence of the Neolithic and Bronze Age Cyclades. Material from later phases of the settlement at Ayia Irini, especially outside the long-lived shrine building called the Temple, has been less systematically examined and published. The Ayia Irini Metallurgy Project, co-directed by Natalie Abell and Myrto Georgakopoulou†, collected information about all metal and metallurgical artifacts found as part of Caskey’s excavations, including those from after the Bronze Age. One group of artifacts was quite unexpected—almost 20 lead objects that appear to represent to at least two types of bullets. These objects probably date to the modern or early modern period. In his notes and preliminary reports, Caskey surmised that the bullets might be connected with the activities of Lambros Katsonis in the Ayios Nikolaos Harbor, on which Ayia Irini is located. In this presentation, we summarize the characteristics of these objects and Caskey’s initial observations about them, analyze their distribution at the site, and evaluate if and how these objects may be linked with Katsonis’ exploits and other possible episodes of conflict in modern Kea.
Anastasiadou Maria
The Birth of Mycenaean Glyptic on the Greek Mainland in LH I-IIA
The earliest Late Bronze Age seals found on the Greek mainland are those discovered in the shaft graves of Mycenae, which exhibit Minoan shapes, iconography, and style. Several of these seals were likely imports from Crete, while others may have been produced on the Greek mainland by artisans trained in the Cretan tradition of seal engraving. The latter may be suggested by certain iconographic and stylistic features that have limited parallels in contemporaneous Cretan glyptic. Some seals from LH IIA contexts also display distinct traits, indicating that seal manufacturing on the Late Bronze Age mainland probably began in LH I and continued into LH IIA. The initiation of seal manufacturing on the Greek mainland during LH I would have provided sufficient time for the craft to advance to a level capable of producing works of the calibre of the Combat Agate found at Pylos by LH IIA. However, whether it did advance to this level is, at the moment, uncertain. Either way, the craft on the mainland developed under the strong cultural influence of Cretan seal engraving but evolved in a geographically distinct region, adapting to mainland tastes and developing its own stylistic idiosyncrasies. The resulting products appear iconographically and stylistically Minoan but should be understood as culturally Mycenaean.
Andreou Stelios
Rethinking Interactions in the Late Bronze Age Northern Aegean: Mobility, Contact and Variability in the Communities of Macedonia
This paper reconsiders interactions between Late Bronze Age communities in Macedonia, the Balkan hinterland, and the Mycenaean world by adopting a comparative, sub-regional approach that challenges views of Macedonia as a culturally uniform area. It examines regional cultural and social trajectories across the period, focusing on local processes and assessing how mobility and contact may have contributed to producing diverse social outcomes. Drawing on archaeological evidence at community and regional scales, the analysis explores the effects of interactions on habitation patterns, symbolic practices, and landscapes. In doing so, the paper reassesses Southern Aegean– and Balkan-centered models of cultural transmission and argues for a contextual approach that underscores variability and local agency in the Northern Aegean during the Late Bronze Age.
Athanassopoulos Effie and Christian Cloke
Landscape Archaeology as Long-Term History: Methodological Innovations and Generational Impact of the Kea, Nemea, and Pylos Surveys
Jack Davis’s contributions have transformed the ways we conduct archaeological fieldwork in Greece today. Through the success of the field projects that he devised and carried out with colleagues (John Cherry, James Wright, John Bennet, Susan Alcock, and others), regional survey has become an essential and widely adopted method of archaeological fieldwork. Intensive pedestrian survey relies on the innovative yet simple idea that by systematically recording surface remains, archaeologists can uncover significant regional patterns of historical change across time. The core principles of intensive survey, the diachronic perspective and interdisciplinary approach, provide insights into human-environmental interactions and landscape transformation. Developing methods to achieve these goals required persistence and experimentation. Here, we will explore several key innovations that were refined in a series of projects undertaken by Jack and colleagues in different locations: Kea, Nemea, and Pylos.
The Kea survey (Cherry, Davis & Mantzourani 1991) established the methodological template for intensive landscape archaeology in the Aegean. By emphasizing full coverage, systematic recording of visibility, and quantitative density mapping, it demonstrated how regional surveys could move beyond site-based discovery to reconstruct long-term patterns of land use across the entire landscape. The title of the Kea publication, Landscape Archaeology as Long-term History captured effectively the essence of this approach and provided a model of fieldwork that could be applied to other regions.
The Nemea Valley Archaeological Project (NVAP) (Cherry, Davis & Mantzourani 1996; Cherry et al. 1988) extended this approach by making the individual artifact the basic unit of analysis, thereby embedding “off-site” scatters into reconstructions of human activity rather than treating them as residual noise. NVAP also stressed geomorphology and soil history in interpreting artifact distributions, and maintained a diachronic scope that treated prehistoric, classical, and later periods with equal attention.
The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP) (Davis et al. 1997; Davis et al. 2001) systematized these principles further and incorporated state of the art technology. As part of the tract-based survey system, variations in visibility and present land-use were recorded digitally for every tract. Furthermore, databases were linked with a comprehensive GIS to produce artifact-density maps and spatial queries. Together, these projects show how the Kea survey’s innovations became the foundation for an evolving practice: from methodological experimentation (Kea) to analytical refinement (Nemea), to technological and organizational consolidation (Pylos).
Furthermore, by structuring survey as long-term landscape history, Jack and his colleagues encouraged inclusivity of “later” periods, empowering younger scholars to pursue and publish material and analyses of periods traditionally underrepresented—especially the Late Roman, Byzantine, and Early Modern eras. These contributions have not only filled gaps in regional histories but also reshaped the disciplinary map of Greek archaeology.
Bejko Lorenc, Maria Grazia Amore, Skënder Aliu, and Helena Tomas
Landscape Archaeology of the Upper Devoll Valley in Southeastern Albania
Korçë Basin Archaeological Project (KOBAS) has been a direct offspring of the Mallakastër Regional Archaeological Project (MRAP) co-directed by Jack Davis in late 1990s. It focuses on a large section of the upper Devoll valley in southeastern Albania and involves systematic field walking, site collection, environmental and ethnohistoric research. As most of the research in the area has been oriented towards single site investigations, KOBAS takes a regional approach to settlement pattern, land use, territorial organization of the upper Devoll in a diachronic perspective. This paper presents the main findings of the project, combining them with the data from previous excavations and more recent field surveys undertaken in the context of large development projects in the area. An assessment of the changing lanscape and the underlining cultural processes from the early prehistory to the modern times is also provided. Main factors influencing cultural and social change such as environment, mobility, exchange, conflict are also discussed.
Bennet John
The Tyranny of Text: Reflections on Interweaving Material, Textual and Visual Data in the Context of Regional Studies in the Aegean
In the year 1795 Wolf published his Prolegomenon. Just a century later, in 1893, Dörpfeld uncovered the Mycenaean walls at Hissarlik. The two dates mark two definite epochs in the development of the Homeric Question. Wolf gave the nineteenth century to the philologist; the archaeologists have given the twentieth to the historian. We are standing at the beginning of a new era, and the old problems are taking an entirely new focus.” (W Leaf, Homer & History 1915, 1).
This quotation, now well over a century old, reveals two prejudices: (1) that the archaeologist’s role is to recover ‘stuff’, for others to interpret, and (2) that interpretation takes place in the text-led environment of the historian, inspired by the Homeric text. Experience suggests that these prejudices are still present in the archaeology of the Aegean. For example, most Aegean prehistorians today have an academic base, not in a department of Archaeology, but in departments of Classics, or, less often, Art History, reflecting what Colin Renfrew characterised in 1980 as the ‘great divide’. In that environment an archaeologist can be regarded as a ‘technician’, not a ‘thinker’, the latter role being reserved for those who deal with the interpretative challenges of philology. This simplistic view ignores the many places within the Aegean world without texts, and of course much of prehistory, before written documents existed. This is not to deny the importance of texts in our understanding of the past. Indeed, one could argue that the decipherment of Linear B transformed our picture of the Aegean in the Late Bronze Age far more than Schliemann’s ‘reading’ of the Homeric epics against his discoveries at Troy, Mycenae, etc.
Regional studies, or archaeological survey, a practice in which Jack Davis has played a leading role, has enhanced our study of the Aegean past in all periods right up to the present. Many of those regions investigated using survey techniques fall outside the text-rich urban centres, which may be one reason why this area of archaeology has often been led by prehistorians. However, this observation does not mean that texts are irrelevant to the practice. In this paper I first of all reflect on the nature of textual data in comparison to those of material remains and what this comparison implies for deploying both in our interpretations of the past. Here I argue for a process of ‘translation’ and ‘reconciliation’ to overcome the qualitative differences in the two types of data. I then flesh these reflections out using two case-studies familiar to Jack Davis: the Late Bronze Age polity of Pylos and the same region in the second Ottoman period. I close with some thoughts on lessons learnt and implications for future research.
Blakolmer Fritz
The Mycenaean or Minoan Character of the Arts in the Shaft Grave Period in the Light of Recent Finds and Research
The long-lasting discussion of the origin of objects bearing iconography and originating from sepulchral contexts of the Shaft Grave period at different sites on the Greek mainland is anything but an outdated issue. For their attribution to an autochthonous Helladic (Mycenaean) character or a Minoan one (either as an import from Crete or produced in workshops at Greek mainland sites), the iconographical analysis of the highly individual objects and groups of objects provides significant insight into our assessment of the Shaft Grave period itself. Based on recent finds (for example, from the tomb of the Griffin Warrior at Pylos) and new research on older material (from Mycenae and other sites), this contribution aims at presenting an update of the iconographic character and possible origin of the figural and ornamental decoration of the following find groups: stone relief stelai, golden plates and diadems, decorated weapons, metal inlay work, rhyta and other vessels made of gold and silver as well as the earliest evidence of mural painting on the Mycenaean mainland. Furthermore, issues such as the thematic range of the seal images from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae and the meaning of a ‘warrior iconography’ will be reconsidered.
Brecoulaki Hariclia and Emily Egan
“Reed” the Room: A Recycled Wall-Painting Fragment from the Palace of Nestor
This paper examines an unusual wall-painting fragment recovered by Carl W. Blegen and Marion Rawson during their excavation of Room 39 of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos. The painting was found not on the walls or in the fill but rather embedded in the plaster matrix of a large chunk of flooring fallen from the palace’s second story. In 1969, Mabel Lang published the flooring fragment as evidence for her assertion that outmoded murals, once stripped from the palace’s walls, were recycled as building material. What interested Lang was the unusually large size of this fragment’s mural inclusions. For us, it is the iconography of the largest of those inclusions that is exciting: parts of a light-green reed and a dark-red dragonfly on a white ground that closely match elements in the well-known ‘Reed Fresco’ from Xeste 3 at Akrotiri. In this presentation, we explore this Pylian wall painting fragment in detail, offering the first in-depth accounting of its character as well as a discussion of its significance both at the Palace of Nestor and in the larger field of Aegean art.
Brogan Tom and Eleanor J. Huffman
The Study Center for East Crete: A Review of its First Three Decades
This paper honors Jack Davis’ long interest in the institutional history of American foundations in Greece exploring the creation and work of the INSTAP Study Center for East Crete. This American foundation opened its doors in July of 1997 serving originally as the base for American and Greek American excavations and surveys in the Lassithi region of Crete. With the addition of the Publication Team in 1999, the Study Center expanded its operation to include support for the wider community of Aegean prehistorians working in Greece and the wider eastern Mediterranean, thus mirroring the mission of another foundation, the Institute for Aegean Prehistory. We consider the scale, development and impact of these services during a 30-year period of rapid transformation in archaeological practice.
Broodbank Cyprian, Evangelia Kyriatzi, and Toby Wilkinson
Late Bronze Age Small-scale Farmers as Analytical Individuals: The Micro-dynamics of Ceramic production, Acquisition and Consumption among the Farmsteads of Second Palace Period Kythera
Our models of Aegean Bronze Age economics still tend to be broad-brush, and excessively palatially focused, despite clear evidence, not least from the palatial records themselves, that much of such activity lay outside the palatial and archival realms. Particularly obscure are the patterns and social underpinnings of the micro-dynamics of activity within and between smaller communities that must have sustained everyday life for many people living at the time. The intensive and quantitative study of pottery collected by the Kythera Island Project from a large sample of broadly contemporary Second Palace period farmstead sites offers an opportunity to explore this question, especially when combined with parallel study of the specialist production locations that provided for the island. These farmsteads are often only a few hundred metres apart and were probably occupied by family-scale groups related to each other, tiny demographic units of a few adults that in terms of decision-making can be likened to the concept of the ‘analytical individual’ identified by Charles Redman in 1977. Interestingly, our study of the pottery they acquired from the specialist producers (through mechanisms that are themselves unclear) reveals a remarkable amount of micro-variation in terms of fabric and stylistic preferences within the similar broad functional categories that comprise their overall assemblages. While some of this may relate to fine chronological distinctions associated with the lives of individual potters, minor distance-related differences in relative access, or issues of site formation and material survival, a notable amount seems to reflect small-scale social and cultural preferences, affiliations and distinctions between the farmsteads’ occupants, bringing us close to a glimpse into the lives of such people.
This paper remembers the unexpected arrival of Jack Davis and Shari Stocker to our base on Kythera at 3 am on a warm summer night in August 1998, luckily while our first Cretan-style pottery from the KIP survey was sitting on the drying racks, and its happy consequences.
Cadogan Gerald and Eleni Hatzaki
From Knossos with Love: to Pylos
The unveiling of commanding central buildings at Knossos in Crete and Pylos in Messenia is probably the key event of the first half of the 20th century for Aegean Bronze Age studies. Yet, while both were soon called Palaces, they differ in many aspects. These include their chronologies and lifecycles, architecture, planning and uses of rooms and spaces, whether secular or sanctified, their urban contexts and, probably, their functions and responsibilities, again whether secular or sanctified, in the land and society around them and even overseas. Concentrating on the attitudes of the original excavators, Minos Kalokairinos, Arthur Evans and Carl Blegen, we shall discuss how they interpreted their discoveries. How did Blegen cope with the often contradictory patterns of culture between the two grand buildings? How much did Evans influence Blegen in explaining Pylos? By dialogue between their publications we hope to offer some new perspectives on the so-called Palace of Minos and the so-called Palace of Nestor.
Cosmopoulos, Michael
Social Memory and the Homeric Topography of Messenia
This paper explores the interplay between social memory and poetic geography in the Homeric representation of Messenia, with particular focus on the kingdom of Nestor. Drawing on passages from the Iliad, notably the Catalogue of Ships and the Embassy to Achilles, it argues that the Homeric topography of Messenia reflects a memory of the Mycenaean administrative landscape, as recorded in the Linear B tablets from the Palace of Nestor. Although the specific toponyms differ, the structural echoes of the nine Hither and seven Further Provinces suggest that a vestige of palatial organization survived in oral tradition. The paper also examines how the visible remains of Mycenaean sites such as Iklaina and Ano Englianos may have served as mnemonic anchors for the transmission of these memories. Finally, it considers how the Homeric epics negotiated competing local traditions and evolving political realities, transforming lived landscapes into poetic ones. Through this case study, the paper sheds light on the broader mechanisms by which epic poetry functioned as a medium of social commemoration in early Greece.
Cullen Tracey and Lauren Talalay
Hitting the JackPot: A Curious Vessel from Neolithic Plakari
In 2014, excavations at Plakari on the southern coast of Euboea uncovered walls and finds dated to the Final Neolithic. The project was a synergasia between VU Amsterdam—represented in Greece by the Netherlands Institute at Athens—and the 11th Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities (now EFA). Work was codirected by Jan Paul Crielaard and the late Maria Kosma.
Iron Age and Classical occupation at Plakari caused considerable damage to underlying strata, and with one exception, the Neolithic pottery excavated was highly fragmentary and often out of context. In honor of Jack Davis, we have dubbed this exception our JackPot: a large, nearly complete coarse-ware jar that had been deliberately inverted and buried beside or possibly under the exterior wall of a modest FN structure. The structure rested on a terrace retained by a substantial perimeter wall. The pot had been placed on a large flat stone near the entrance to the building.
Alternative explanations for the placement of this vessel near the structure are explored. Is the vessel merely a well-preserved example of FN jars typical of domestic contexts? Or could it have been intended as an offering for prosperity and protection when the building was constructed? Was it designed as a ritual vessel, or repurposed for a new activity? Could it have originally held the bones of a newborn? At a minimum, the placement of the vessel upside down in association with architecture seems to have been a meaningful act—a ceremony writ small with domestic or ritual implications.
Dabney Mary K.
Problems in Interpreting Archaeological Survey Site Function
In this paper problems in interpreting archaeological survey site function are examined. The ways that certain artifact types have been used to identify special purpose sites are studied. The usefulness of analyzing artifact type distributions within survey sites for determining differences in intrasite activities is investigated. The benefits of considering topographical characteristics in the identification of site function are presented. Problems with predictive modeling of archaeological survey data that fail to consider site function are discussed.
Eder Birgitta
Kakovatos in Context: Tracing Early Mycenaean Networks
The systematic study of the finds from the Early Mycenaean tholos tombs at Kakovatos located near the coast of the Western Peloponnese, along with the results of the excavations in the associated architectural complex, sheds new and nuanced light on the connections maintained by the prominent group based at the site. The distribution of imported goods—such as glass, amethyst, lapis lazuli, and amber jewelry—clearly illustrates the site's integration into networks linking it with other major Early Mycenaean centers in the Peloponnese, particularly Pylos, as well as with regions further afield, including Crete. The analysis of the pottery reveals a similar but even more complex picture of far-reaching contacts that helped shaping the character of prominent Early Mycenaean settlements.
Efkleidou Kalliopi and Evi Gorogianni
Guarding the Bounty: Agricultural Harvests and Storerooms of Ayia Irini, Kea
This study discusses the economic foundations of the Late Bronze Age settlement of Ayia Irini on the island of Kea, focusing on its storage facilities and agricultural catchment. The paper focuses on the last phase of widespread habitation of the settlement, Period VII (LM IB-LH II), and offers a detailed analysis of storeroom N.18 in the Northeast Bastion. This storeroom contained a suite of high-capacity pithoi. Additional storage data from House A and “Greater” House C are examined, providing insights into intra-site economic disparities and provisioning patterns.
The evidence from the storage facilities of the settlement is correlated with the capacity of its agricultural catchment. The analysis builds on GIS-based simulations of minimal agricultural catchments, which take into consideration population estimates and per capita agricultural needs as well as energetic and topographic parameters which constrain agricultural practice. The structure of the models also takes into consideration legacy data (archaeological and ethnological) from two survey projects in the northern part of the island of Kea.
With this investigation, we aim to gain a better understanding of the scale, territorial control and management of the agricultural hinterland of Ayia Irini, allowing inferences about the subsistence autonomy of the settlement. We argue for the reconceptualization of Ayia Irini as a self-reliant and agriculturally wealthy community with links to wider Aegean networks. In discussing the human-landscape dynamics at Kea, we highlight key issues that need to be taken into consideration in broader debates on non-palatial economies, local production practices, and rural-urban interdependence in the Bronze Age Aegean.
Fitzsimons, Rodney D., Anna Belza, David Wilson, and Carol Hershenson
Water Management at Ayia Irini: A Diachronic View
Securing and protecting a supply of fresh water and disposing of excess and/or wastewater—two aspects of water management—are richly documented at the prehistoric settlement of Ayia Irini on Kea. Jack Davis, the honoree of this conference, wrote his dissertation on the Great Fortification Wall and his first book on Period V at Ayia Irini and he has played an important role in facilitating the publication of numerous other volumes in the Keos series for more than half a century. This paper discusses the evidence for the supply and drainage of water at prehistoric Ayia Irini throughout its history of occupation, from the first signs of human activity in the Final Neolithic (Period I) through the abandonment of the site as a settlement in Late Helladic IIIA2–IIIB (Period VIII); the management of water was thus a fundamental concern to its inhabitants.
Two successive sources of fresh water are documented diachronically Ayia Irini. The first was a spring in a deep bedrock cleft in the western area of the site, which was probably the main water source in the earliest periods of settlement during Period I (FN) and, after a long hiatus in occupation, in the initial re-settlement phase of Period IIa (EB II mature). This cleft was completely filled in and buried beneath a newly constructed road during Period IIb (the following phase of EB II); thereafter, the so-called Spring Chamber, just to the west of this cleft, became the main water source for the settlement. The Spring Chamber was periodically modified, cleaned out, and built around through successive periods of occupation in the Middle and Late Bronze Age, until it was finally abandoned, together with the rest of the settlement, in Period VIII (LH IIIA-IIIB).
Drains are also documented at Ayia Irini from the EBA onward. All were designed to control and drain excess rainwater from the summit of the site down the slopes of the settlement hill. Some drains were also positioned to protect the sources of safe drinking water from contamination by this run-off.
It is likely no coincidence that Ayia Irini ceased to be a site of habitation at roughly the same time that the Spring Chamber was filled in during LH IIIA2 late / LH IIIB early, after which the Temple was the only building in use. On a very fundamental level, then, the history of occupation at Ayia Irini was intimately connected with its water supply, the management of which was an ongoing communal concern.
Forsén Björn
Early Sanctuaries and Tribes in Southern Arcadia
Ever since the publication of de Polignac’s important book La Naissance de la cité grecque. Cultes, espace et société, VIIIe-VIIe siècles, 1984 (transl. into English as Cults, territory, and the origin of the Greek city-state in 1995) the study of Greek Early Iron Age and Archaic sanctuaries has been bedevilled by the concept of polis. De Polignac saw a combination between the emergence of the polis during the second half of the eighth century BC and the roughly contemporary strong increase of votive offerings in newly founded sanctuaries. Extra-urban sanctuaries he explained as marking the borders of the territories of the poleis.
During the last decades ever more sanctuaries have been revealed where cult activity began long before the eighth century BC and the emergence of poleis. Such sanctuaries, by Snodgrass called ethnos sanctuaries, were typically located at logical meeting places or landmarks, where people combined by kinship in tribes, thinly scattered over a large territory, would meet for seasonal gatherings and/or feasting. Poleis developed relatively late in southern Arcadia, at the same time as we know of several sanctuaries going back at least to the tenth century BC, in some cases even earlier. This gives us an excellent opportunity to discuss how these early sanctuaries developed from informal religious meeting places to sanctuaries administered by tribal states or alternatively poleis.
Galaty Michael
Applying Greek Survey Methods Outside of Greece: Part One, the Western Balkans
Jack Davis helped create the New Wave of regional surveys that swept Greece, beginning in the 1970s. In the late 1990s, he applied his methods in Albania through the Mallakastra Regional Archaeological Project (MRAP) and the Durrës Regional Archaeological Project (DRAP). Subsequently, Galaty and others expanded Greek-style survey coverage in Albania and Kosova, and elsewhere in the Western Balkans. This paper compiles and evaluates data from various Greek and West Balkan survey projects, an approach taken by Davis in a seminal paper published in Side-By-Side Survey (Alcock and Cherry, eds. 2004). These comparative data confirm the efficacy of Greek survey when applied in West Balkan contexts and demonstrate that differences in settlement patterns across regions and through time, as compared to Greece, are real, not the result of survey biases or hidden landscapes.
Gauss Walter, Jeremy Rutter, and Ioulia Tzounou
A Tale of Three Understudied Bronze Age Ceramic Stages at Corinth and Korakou
This paper presents the exiguous evidence collected over the past decade for three distinct Bronze Age phases at Corinth that have previously received only scant attention or in one case never before been recognized at the site: (1) an early stage of the Early Helladic (EH) III period, as yet represented in only one pure context; (2) the products of a highly idiosyncratic potter-and-painter of the terminal Late Helladic (LH) IIIC period represented by finds from four distinct contexts; (3) the first recognition of a terminal stage of EH II contemporary with Kolonna phase C on Aegina, including the first example of a “Lefkandi I” ceramic type from a well-stratified context in the Peloponnese. In addition, this paper will include the presentation of the first evidence for an EH II tiled-roof building at Korakou, from the excavations of Carl Blegen in 1915-16.
Gkouma Myrsini, Panagiotis Karkanas, and Walter Gauss
From Combustion to Construction: Fire Use and Spatial Organization in Late Helladic Aigeira
This paper investigates combustion features, activity surfaces, and site formation processes at the Mycenaean settlement of Aigeira (Achaea, Greece) using integrated micromorphological and geochemical analyses. The study identifies combustion features located in both open courtyards and enclosed spaces, whose layered deposits reveal repeated burning activities. Evidence from thin-section analysis shows a variety of ashy and burnt surfaces—often disturbed or reworked—preserved across different layers of the site. These surfaces contain charcoal, altered textures from heat exposure, plant and dung traces, and reused burnt material. Infrared analysis helps reconstruct the intensity and frequency of burning, showing a range from low to very high temperatures. The byproducts of these fires were often collected and reused to prepare or repair surfaces. Together, the micro-level evidence and burning patterns reveal complex, multi-phase processes involving everyday use, abandonment, and rebuilding. This integrated approach provides new insights into fire-related practices, domestic life, and maintenance of built spaces in the Late Helladic settlement at Aigeira.
Hale Chris
Potsherds from a Different Edge: Alternative North-South Connectivity in the Middle Bronze Age Aegean
A notable characteristic of Jack Davis’ scholarship has been its regional breadth, resulting in a formidable inter-regional perspective and a consistent engagement with questions of connectivity and identity. In particular, the routes along which moved objects, people, and ideas have often been of interest, such as in his early model of the “Western String” Cycladic islands, his exploration of the limits of minoanization with Evi Gorogianni, and with the ongoing consideration of the exotic finds from the new excavations at Pylos with Sharon Stocker and their team.
Southern Aegean networks continue to be examined in detail by Davis and his colleagues, generations of his students, and others. However, it remains comparatively unclear what lay beyond them. Cretan imports and evidence for ‘minoanization’ are nearly entirely absent north of the Corinthian Isthmus on the mainland, in the northern Aegean, and (with some important exceptions) are extremely rare north of Izmir in western Anatolia, despite several thriving maritime communities. Why this might have been the case is not yet properly understood. Moreover, there are several hints of variable links between these regions at different stages of the Middle and early Late Bronze Age, perhaps indicating a different network largely separate from the southern Aegean.
This paper summarizes the current evidence for central and northern Aegean connectivity during these periods, including northern Aegean pottery imports recently identified in central Greece through neutron activation analysis. Moreover, how central Greece was in turn connected to the southern Aegean will also be considered in light of recent scholarship, including via two more sites which were formative to Davis’ early career: Korakou in the Corinthia, and Ayia Irini on Kea.
Halstead Paul and Valasia Isaakidou
Τα αφεντικά πρόβατα της Κυράς Μαρίας
While studying animal bones from Blegen’s excavations at the Palace of Nestor, a chance encounter with Jack’s Khora neighbour (κυρά Μαρία) led to many welcome insights into small-scale farming and herding in the hills of central Messenia in the 1930s and 1940s. As a teenager, Maria had minded a flock of sheep that her father ran jointly with a wealthier neighbour. The neighbour had provided the capital (the flock), her father the labour (i.e. Maria) and the two parties shared the resulting lambs, milk and wool. As we subsequently appreciated, such ‘share-cropping’ of livestock was widespread in the recent Mediterranean. We will discuss the potential relevance of such arrangements for understanding of the Linear B livestock texts from Pylos and Knossos.
Hasaki Eleni and Lauren Alberti
Bull-Leaping Spectacles: Performance and Politics in Bronze Age Palaces
Bull leaping spectacles in the Bronze Age Aegean have been mostly addressed in terms of iconography, physical execution, and their spatial associations with the Minoan palatial courts. This paper aims to revisit these spectacles both in practical and political terms. Using ethnographic parallels from European and US bull sporting events and crowd capacity modeling, we reexamine the capacities of Minoan courts to infer how courts could have accommodated spectators, athletes, and animals. The logistics of sponsoring bull spectacles invite us to frame differently the significance of such events, to explore not simply their feasibility and locations but their intended spectators and the palatial agendas. Bull spectacles, organized at different scales, could have been used by the palatial elite to promote social cohesion with their local communities and consolidate alliances with elites at home and abroad. Thus, this paper shows how bull leaping spectacles functioned as an important form of political and social strategy.
Hernandez David
On the Origins of Bouthrotos
This paper re-examines the origins of Bouthrotos (Butrint, Albania), in view of recent archaeological research and new findings after the publication of my previous article, Bouthrotos (Butrint) in the Archaic and Classical Period: The Acropolis and Temple of Athena Polias (2017, Hesperia 86.2).
In the Archaic and Classical periods, Bouthrotos lay on the mainland of Epeiros, within the enclave (peraia) of Korkyra (Kerkyra/Corfu), the Corinthian colony founded in 734/3 BC. A temple, which bore a stone relief of a lion killing a bull on its architrave, dominated the summit of its acropolis, dating to the last quarter of the 6th century BC. The evidence for the dedication of the temple to Athena Polias, as well as for the temple’s architectural design and regional context, is examined, particularly in respect to contemporary structures on Korkyra and at the ancient city of Elaia in Epeiros.
By the end of the Archaic period, Bouthrotos emerged as a small, fortified polis, serving as an emporium for exchange between Korkyraians and Epeirotes. The excavated ceramics, which include Corinthian and Attic imports, vividly illustrate the emporium’s connection to its regional maritime trading network and affirm that Bouthrotos flourished as a seaport between c. 650-475 BC. However, apart from ceramics, fortification walls, and its distinctive temple, the evidence for other Archaic period structures is meagre, a circumstance which, apart from the lack of sepulchral finds, is not altogether different from well-known Archaic sites at Korkyra, Apollonia, Epidamnos, Ambrakia, Anaktorion, and Leukas. The paper explores how the Archaic Greek material culture of Bouthrotos is to be explained as a by-product of Korkyraian colonial urbanism in Epeiros.
Hruby Julie
Beyond the Survey Horizon: Demographic Resilience after the Collapse of the Palace of Nestor at Pylos
This paper reexamines the widely accepted view that Messenia experienced drastic depopulation following the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces. While archaeological surveys have long suggested a sharp decline in settlement, this study argues that methodological limitations and economic transformations have led to an overstatement of population loss. Early Iron Age ceramics—particularly undecorated, low-fired wares—are notoriously difficult to detect in field surveys; alternatively, or additionally, vessels are likely to have been produced in perishable materials. The reuse of Late Bronze Age ceramics, combined with diminished production and the scavenging of earlier sites, may have further obscured evidence of continued habitation. Additionally, pastoral nomadism and transitory lifeways—largely archaeologically invisible—may (or may not) have played a significant role in the post-palatial landscape. Taphonomic processes contribute to the underrepresentation of Messenian Early Iron Age occupation.
The paper draws on paleoethnobotanical, zooarchaeological, and isotopic data to argue for subsistence resilience. Demographic modeling suggests that even modest population growth until the Classical period would necessitate a larger Early Iron Age population than has previously been assumed. Evidence from tomb cult, later historical accounts, and Spartan subjugation of the Messenians further supports this view. The study ultimately argues for a reinterpretation of post-palatial Messenia not as a depopulated backwater but as a region experiencing complex economic and social transitions. It calls for refined survey methodologies and interdisciplinary approaches to reconstructing ancient demography.
Kilani Marwan
The Language of Luxury: Foreign Terms for Imported Goods in Mycenaean Sources
Archaeological evidence shows that Late Bronze Age Aegean polities were integrated into a wide-reaching trade network spanning the Eastern Mediterranean. Recent discoveries, such as those at Pylos, underscore the centrality of high-value items in these exchanges. Complementing the material record, linguistic data from the Linear B corpus provides important additional insights into this trade. In particular, several terms used in Linear B for luxury products are demonstrably non-Greek and non-Indo-European in origin, while also displaying clear parallels with words found in other Eastern Mediterranean and Levantine languages.
Much like the Amerindian loanwords that entered European languages during the early colonial period, or the global diffusion of words for ""tea"" along distinct trade routes, these foreign terms in Linear B function as linguistic markers of commercial interaction. As such, they help illuminate not only on the geographical scope of Mycenaean trade, but also on the wider network of peoples who contributed to and benefited from these exchanges.
This paper focuses on a selected group of such non-Greek terms for luxury products. The first part examines their etymology and origin, mapping the distribution of cognate or related forms across the Eastern Mediterranean. The second part contextualizes these findings within the socio-political and economic landscape of the Late Bronze Age. By combining linguistic analysis with archaeological and historical data, the study aims to reconstruct aspects of intercultural contact and economic entanglement in the Aegean and beyond. These lexical items, though few in number, serve as crucial indicators of the deep interconnectedness that characterized the Eastern Mediterranean during this formative period.
Kountouri Elena and Andreas Vlachopoulos
In the Shadow of the Palace. The Mycenaean cemetery at Volimidia (c. 1600-1050 BC)
The cemetery at Volimidia is located 4 km from the Palace of Nestor at Pylos and shares the fertile land with it. It consists of 35 rock-cut chamber tombs, most of which date to Late Helladic I period (c. 1600 BC), inaugurating this type of tomb in Mycenaean Greece. Moreover, the extent of the necropolis, the meticulous and distinctive tomb architecture with a short but wide dromos, sometimes with steps, a circular chamber in the shape of a beehive vault imitating a tholos tomb, and the finds highlight the character of the corresponding Mycenaean settlement. The cemetery was founded by a community that already had strong roots with the area and from which its members continued to make a living.
In the four centuries that followed, the community increased in population and flourished, attended all stages of the course that led to the formation of the palatial center of Pylos and lived in the shadow of the political and economic events associated with its peak (Late Helladic IIIA-B periods), until the moment of its destruction (c. 1200 BC). It is of special importance to mention that the use of the necropolis diminished during the Late Helladic IIIB period, compared to the immediately preceding period, suggesting demographic shifts and possibly migrations to a settlement closer to the palace at Pylos/Englianos. However, while the palace was deserted, the cemetery was used sporadically in Late Helladic IIIC, continuing until the end of the Mycenaean era to be an important nucleous of “life” in the region of Pylos.
In any case, in the early ceramics of the tombs (Late Helladic I and II periods), the relationships and contacts between this region and northern Triphylia (Kakovatos, Makrisia, Samiko), whether indirect or direct, are evident sharing a common decorative and stylistic cultural horizon with these early “hegemonies.” Influences from Crete via Kythera are limited. The ceramics of the Late Helladic IIIA-B periods include characteristic shapes, mostly emphasizing closed vessels such as stirrup jars, threehandled jars, alabastra, and feeding bottles, the latter being particularly popular in total in Messenia. Connections with Elis, Achaea, Laconia, and especially the Argolid are evident in the pottery, while local idiosyncrasies and Minoan influences on shapes and decorative motifs are creatively assimilated, influencing the regional ceramic production. The number of metal objects from the tombs is relatively small, and jewelry mainly consists of beads of common shapes made of glass. The few seals lack originality, while among the other finds, a significant number of stone and bronze arrowheads are represented. These, demonstrate a community of farmers, herders, and/or craftsmen without apparent elements of social stratification and wealth differentiation. Although they had limited access to commercial networks and maintained a conservative lifestyle, their integration into the network of settlements controlled by the palace at Pylos/Englianos seems unquestionable.
In the above framework, our paper will trace the long course of the Volimidia cemetery over time compared to the nearby burial sites, identify the elements of the contacts that the grave goods and burial customs echo, and reconstruct the relationships and bonds that the local community had created with the nearby palace, in an attempt at a historical reading of the data documented by the excavation of Spyridon Marinatos.
Kramer Jeff
All of Blegen’s Men: The Representation of Workers at the UC Excavations at Troy
Carl W. Blegen wrapped the University of Cincinnati Expedition to the Troad in mid-July of 1938, and he began his inaugural excavation at Ano Englianos in early April of 1939, a mere eight months afterward. Numerous differences existed between the Trojan and Pylian projects, but both had two common features: one, the use of local workers, and two, virtually ignoring the contributions of those workers in official publications.
In this paper, I explore the roles of the workers at Troy, especially the last season in 1938, and at Pylos, specifically the 1939 season. Moreover, I examine Blegen’s relationships with the workers through the representation of those workers in writings and photographs. My sources are primarily archival, and include workers’ payrolls, excavation accounts, and Blegen’s director’s notebooks as well as photographs and correspondence. My aim is to expand discussions of these excavations to include often-forgotten but essential personnel – the diggers themselves
LaFayette Hogue Shannon
The Palace of Nestor Main Building from the Trenches
In the Palace of Nestor Main Building, during the major campaign from 1953 to 1956 six trench supervisors oversaw the excavation of the rooms that surround the Megaron: Emmett Bennett, Robert Buck, Rolfe Hubbe, William Taylour, Demetrios Theocharis, and Marion Rawson, who supervised more than half of the spaces (68%). Their distinct recording practices and observations preserved in their trench notebooks, housed in the Blegen Archives at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, provide both useful data and unique challenges for a review of the stratigraphy in the peripheral rooms of the Main Building. This paper presents highlights from each trench supervisor and demonstrates the tremendous contributions made by Rawson to our understanding of the building.
Laffineur Robert
Some Reflections on Nestor’s Ceremonial Fleet
Rediscovered in an unpublished collection of painted plaster fragments from Blegen’s Pylos excavations identified in the early 2000s, the Naval Scene from Hall 64 is “… surely one of the most exciting and unexpected discoveries in Aegean art in recent years” (H. BRECOULAKI, J.L. DAVIS and S.R. STOCKER eds, Mycenaean Wall Painting in Context. New Discoveries and Old Finds Reconsidered, 2015, p. 261). The systematic examination and study of these fragments allowed to reconstruct the scene, to interpret it, and to specify its original location on the upper part of the northwestern wall of the Hall, contributing to a better understanding of the whole iconographic program of the room. The paper will focus on these images of long boats, on their dating and on their use.
The Pylos ships have almost identical equivalents in Aegean wall painting, especially on the miniature Fleet fresco on the south wall of room 5 in the West House at Akrotiri on Thera and on the miniature Ships scene from the Northeast Bastion at Ayia Irini on Keos. These examples, however, are dated from periods — LC I/LM IA — that are older than the Pylos images which belong to LH IIIB, and than a painted plaster fragment with an image of a similar ship recently found at Iklaina, some kilometers to the southeast of the Palace of Nestor, dated to LH IIIA/early LH IIIB (BRECOULAKI et al. eds, fig. 2, p. 252).
Looking at the reconstructions by R.J. Roberston and by E.C. Egan, the elongated and crescent-shaped profile of the hulls, the presence of a main cabin in the centre, the modes of propulsion and driving, the emblematic symbolic iconography on the hull are really similar, and possibly the type of rigging as well. Clear signs that influences and contacts between the Western Cyclades and the Western Greek mainland have persisted during more than three centuries, and that navigation in the Aegean used very similar types of vessels in Cycladic early Late Bronze Age and in palatial Late Helladic times.
As far as the shape and mode of propulsion are concerned, the tradition could go back as far as to EC II date with engraved images of long boats on ‘frying pans’ and jars from the Syros cemeteries (on these, see M. MARTHARI’S paper at the 2024 HYDOR conference in Amsterdam [Aegaeum 50, 2025]). And regarding the symbolic decoration of the hulls, sherds of MH III/LH I date from Iolkos with zigzag double lines are to be referred to (M. WEDDE, Towards a Hermeneutics of Aegean Bronze Age Ship Imagery [2000], nos 545-546). Crete does not appear to have followed these influences and to have known this unusually long persistence. Images of long boats are not attested in LM iconography, except on seals. It should not be forgotten, however, that parallel long shipsheds of LM IIIA date have been found at the harbour of Kommos, probably serving for the storage of long vessels during non-sailing seasons, and that two-dimensional equivalents of such shelter constructions could be identified on the miniature wall paintings of Ayia Irini on Keos (L. MORGAN, Keos XI, 2020, p. 135-137). An additional indication of continuous influences and contacts through centuries between the Western Cycladic islands, possibly Crete, and the “Western String.”
Regarding the use of these long vessels, it should first be remembered that the ships mentioned in the Iliad are sometimes said to be decorated with reliefs representing animals or divinities chosen to protect the ship and its crew, or as symbols of power, in connection with combat activities on sea. The decorative motifs seen on the hulls of the long Aegean boats in the wall paintings mentioned above, on the other hand, appear to refer rather to a cult context highlighting the power of the sea as a source of life and fertility (marine creatures such as dolphins and argonauts) and as a promise of endless renewal of movement and speed (spirals or zigzag lines and flying birds), all qualities that deserve to be attributed to boats used in marine festivities. This seems to be confirmed on the Akrotiri Fleet fresco. The use of paddling to set these ships in motion — with the exception of the small ship in front of the departure city — is indeed far less efficient for long boats used in combat, since paddles do not rest on the gunwale and thus don’t provide leverage contrary to oars, not to mention that they impose an extremely leaning position for the paddlers on boats with a high hull, causing a great discomfort, well translated by the painter, with the head as the only visible element above the gunwale. Paddling, however, is not attested on wall paintings from other sites.
Loy Michael
A GIS-archival approach to locating the Vayenas Grave Circle at Pylos
Some monuments —however reconstructed— have left large, visible traces on the landscape of ancient Pylos, with Tholos IV and the Palace of Nestor in particular forming the core of what can be visited as the modern-day tourist site. Others have neither physical traces nor even a brown tourist sign to indicate their general location. One such structure is the Vayenas Grave Circle. Located south of the Palace, this cluster of four pit graves, surrounded by a semicircular peribolos wall, was excavated by Lord William Taylour in 1957. The remains of at least 27 individuals were found here, deposited during a period of intensive use alongside pottery and other objects dated between the Middle Helladic period and LHIIIA1. The superstructure of the grave circle was only two courses high and 60cm thick: nothing of this wall survives today, and any visitor to the site would be hard-pressed to identify where exactly Taylour had dug.
This paper aims to locate the Vayenas graves in GIS as precisely as possible, using a combination of Taylour’s field books, site photography, and new drone imagery. A detailed reading of Taylour’s notes also allows for the ‘rebuilding’ of the Vayenas excavation in a 3D GIS environment. The purpose of this exercise is to restore the ancient structure to its landscape context, to situate it within the broader framework of both the mid-twentieth-century and present-day excavations.
Lupack Susan, Barbora Weissova, Sarah James, Matthew Skuse, Leah Schiebel, and Panagiota Kasimi
Mycenaeans in the Perachora Landscape
“The Late Helladic fragments present no feature of intrinsic interest” is the somewhat distressing commentary provided by Payne and Dunbabin on the Mycenaean sherds unearthed during the 1930s excavations at the Sanctuary of Hera Akraia in the Perachora Peninsula. The sherds are described as having been found in the “Geometric Deposit” – “in the middle and lower levels, with geometric and sometimes with Early Helladic,” which is also somewhat distressing. Among the catalogued sherds, though, are a figurine head, stirrup jars, and kylikes. Thus, a Mycenaean presence at the sanctuary is documented, but its nature and extent are not clear from the evidence recognized at the time. This is unfortunate given that in recent decades evidence for continuity from the Bronze Age into the Early Iron Age has been steadily accumulating.
One of the aims of the Perachora Peninsula Archaeological Project has been to provide regional context for the Bronze Age material found within the Heraion. A Mycenaean chamber tomb cemetery (with very interesting Roman re-use) near the sanctuary has been published by Panagiota Kasimi (2015), and through our intensive pedestrian and Lidar surveys we have discovered a multi-period settlement that may be the habitation of those that buried their dead there. Bronze Age material has also been found at several areas that we surveyed, including Asprokampos, Aremada, and south of modern-day Perachora. We are thus able at least to discern the wide spread of Mycenaean habitation in the Perachora Peninsula and map how it prefigures the settlements of the historical Greek periods.
Magno Laura
From Objects to Sediments: A Micromorphology Study of Pebble Surfaces at Sissi (Crete)
Our understanding of early Mycenaean funerary practice and mortuary behavior has been greatly advanced by the recent work of Jack Davis, together with Sharon Stocker and their team, through the new excavations at Pylos. In particular, in considering the ‘Griffin Warrior’ and his burial assemblage, he has explored the concept of identity formation through objects discussing how the adoption of specific symbolism helped shape new ideologies during the early Late Bronze Age.
However, when considering cultural sediments as material culture, micromorphology can also provide significant insight into identity formation as it might be expressed through behavior, practice, and interaction with the landscape. This paper considers a case study from the Minoan cemetery of Sissi on Crete, and shifts the focus of attention from objects to sediments. Among the different types of earth-made surfaces identified in the cemetery area and studied with micromorphology, pebble surfaces were used during the Prepalatial period as well as in areas used during the Neopalatial period, implying continuity of practices and behaviour through time. The use of pebbles in ritually charged places was a relatively common behavior throughout the Aegean Bronze Age, including on the mainland, yet this phenomenon has never been discussed with an interdisciplinary approach.
The analysis of these surfaces provided information on technological knowhow, construction methods, and building patterns, allowing the identification of repetitive actions and intentional choices of materials and techniques. Through an interdisciplinary theoretical approach, this paper will present new data on the construction of pebble surfaces, explore the significance of the behavioral patterns expressed through the use of pebbles, and consider whether this choice of material might be representative of specific group beliefs and identity.
Malapani Evangelia
Finds of the Protogeometric Period in the Mycenaean Cemetery at Antheia-Hellinika, Messenia
This paper presents evidence for the later (mostly Protogeometric) use of the Mycenaean cemetery at Antheia, at the top of Hellinika ridge, approximately 10 kilometres, north of Kalamata, in southeastern Messenia. This evidence comprises surface material and a burial in the dromos of Tomb Hellinika 6 (with a preliminary analysis of the human skeletal remains), plus finds and pottery from the fill of the burial chambers of the cemetery. Primarily, the aim of the paper is to follow the Late Bronze Age-Early Iron Age transition with the help of ceramic finds and to show the contribution of Antheia necropolis to this transitional phase. Another aim of the paper is to present the various pottery shapes found in the Mycenaean tombs in order to discuss the characteristic of the Protogeometric period in Antheia region, which in historic period is known as Thouria. Mycenaean Antheia is identified by modern scholars with the Leuktron of the Linear B tablets, which may have been located in the re-u-ko-to-ro area of the Further Provance of the kingdom of Pylos.
Mantzourani Eleni and Giorgos Vavouranakis
Wild Versus Domesticated Fauna in Prehistoric Cyprus: Iconography and the Zooarchaeological Record
The aim of this paper is the examination and discussion of wild fauna depicted on different art media in Cyprus during the long period from the pre-Neolithic to the end of the Late Bronze Age. The investigation includes artifacts and images from pottery, figurines, metal, gold and ivory work, seals and other, by chronological order. Contrasts are drawn to similar images of domesticated fauna. Moreover, references are made to the zooarchaeological record in an attempt to identify as many wild species as possible. Finally, the significance of such representations is explored in regard to the prehistoric societies of Cyprus.
Marthari Marisa
Swallows and Fleets: Iconographic Correlations between Akrotiri, Thera, and Pylos, and Transmission of Artistic Ideas in the Aegean
This study explores the iconographic similarities between the frescoes and pictorial pottery of the LC I/LM IA town of Akrotiri on Thera and the frescoes, seals, and other artifacts from the Grave of the Griffin Warrior, the tholos tombs of Pylos, and the Palace of Nestor—whether contemporary with or later than those at Akrotiri.
Through a comparative analysis of themes and symbols, including fleets and checkers, swallows and birds of prey, and the sun symbol, the study highlights the transfer and development of artistic and religious ideas across the Aegean during the Late Bronze Age and argues for their origin in an initial center, namely Minoan Crete, primarily Knossos.
Special emphasis is placed on the significance of these themes and motifs as indicators of cultural exchange, transmission, and identity, including the further movement of certain ideas from the Cyclades to the Greek mainland. The research aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of the multidimensional communication between island and mainland centers within the broader Aegean context of the Late Bronze Age.
McNamee Calla, Salvatore Vitale, Sharon Stocker, and Evangelia Malpani
Archaeological Research and Heritage Preservation. A Case Study Illustrating the Benefits of Land Use Mapping to Rescue Excavation at the Site of Romanou, Southwestern Messenia
This paper presents the results of a preliminary assessment of land use at the site of Romanou in western Messenia. The work was conducted in the winter of 2015 when archaeological testing of 32 trenches by Evangelia Malapani of the Ephorate of Antiquities of Messenia identified a complex cultural landscape. To better assess the materials present, their distribution, and the future needs for archaeological rescue excavations and protection, a combined approach was developed to rapidly assess the spatial distribution of archaeological evidence from different temporal periods. The study employed interval quantification of the subsurface finds exposed during the testing phase of site mitigation. ArcGIS software was then used to produce density maps for material types and temporal periods.
The spatial mapping indicated multiple periods of land use, ranging from settlement to burial functions and dating from the Early Helladic (EH) II through the Roman period. Artifact density was greatest for the EH II occupation which also extended across a large portion of the study area. Material type distribution, especially obsidian and slate, were found to correlate with the EH II ceramic data. Later systematic rescue excavation in the area corroborated the initial landscape assessments demonstrating the usefulness of this approach to archaeological mitigation.
Morgan Lyvia
Heroic and Mythic Action: Warriors, Hunters, Lions and Griffins
The phenomenal discovery in 2015 of the Griffin Warrior Grave at Pylos by Jack Davis and Sharon Stocker, followed by their exemplary ongoing publications, opened a new window on the Aegean Bronze Age. Amongst the numerous remarkable finds from the grave, two particularly stand out: the Combat Agate and the ivory pyxis lid displaying a combat between a lion and a griffin. In theme, these two, with their contrasting protagonists, are parallel expressions of power and conflict. How each expresses its message is defined by the disposition of the protagonists. In representational art, the relative positions, directionality and postures of bodies act as gestures communicating meaning within the structure of the spatial field. This paper explores this principle through formal analysis of these two outstanding objects, along with related images in glyptic art, ivories, and other media.
Nakassis Dimitri
Ὄπως ἡμεῖς περίπου: Modern Analogies and Analogical arguments in Tsountas
It is well-established that Christos Tsountas – certainly the most influential scholar of Greek prehistory (Davis 2022, 8) – identified certain practices in Greek prehistory with modern Greek ‘survivals,’ and that these identifications formed part of his broader argument for the Hellenism of prehistoric periods in Greece. For example, the presence of a mirror in the male burial at Vapheio is interpreted by Tsountas a sign that the deceased was “a genuine Hellene” since “even the rustic and the shepherd in Greece still habitually carries a little looking-glass in his belt” (Tsountas and Manatt 1897, 165; cf. Tsountas 1893, 59–60). Less well-examined, however, is Tsountas’s use of modern practices as analogies, often tacitly: for example, Tsountas’s argument that chamber tomb clusters (systades) at Mycenae corresponded to residential cores organized around kinship draws on the widespread existence of such modern settlements in the Peloponnese and elsewhere. Tsountas’s use of modern analogies is not explicitly theorized, but it is nevertheless highly sophisticated, drawing from the then-emerging field of Greek folk studies (laographia). The adoption of this methodology and its extensive use throughout Tsountas’s work demonstrates that his work was not simply arguing for the prehistory of Hellenism; his entire methodological framework achieved this aim, by interpreting the prehistoric past through the lens of the laographic present.
Davis, J. 2022. A Greek State in Formation: The Origins of Civilization in Mycenaean Pylos, Oakland.
Tsountas, C. 1893. Μυκῆναι καὶ Μυκηναῖος Πολιτισμὸς, Athens.
Tsountas, C., and J. I. Manatt. 1897. The Mycenaean Age: A Study of the Monuments and Culture of Pre-Homeric Greece, London.
Newhard Jim and Charleston Burton
Developing Cross-Comparative Frameworks for Land Use Histories. Northwestern Kea in Context
Regional survey is a principal technique for investigating long-term land use and social change. In an effort to uncover broader, interregional patterns and historical narratives, studies have attempted to combine datasets from smaller regional surveys. However, these efforts are often problematic due to the variety of collection methods used within each region. In addition, these approaches typically focus on changes in the quantity of activity over time, often not exploring other factors, such as continuity and abandonment, in the cross-comparative analyses.
Recently, an approach that considers deviations in data collection methods and normalizes patterns across regions has been proposed. In testing the viability of this approach, survey data from four projects in the northeastern Peloponnese were analyzed using aoristic sum functions, placing them within the framework of the Adaptive Cycle for assessing regional and cross-regional patterns of social change.
In honor of Davis’ early contributions to the issues of cross-regional comparability, the landscape history of northwestern Kea, as provided by the survey under the combined direction of Cherry, Davis and Mantzourani, will be integrated within this system. The study provides an opportunity to observe long-term history in a cross-comparative format and an opportunity to evaluate the method with an example spatially distant from the initial test cases.
Niemeier Wolf
The master of the Combat Agate from Pylos
As the fortunate excavators of the Combat Agate, Sharon Stocker and Jack Davis, aptly noted, the seal is a unique masterpiece of Minoan art with an extraordinary naturalistic representation of human anatomy and bodily movement unparalleled in the Aegean Bronze Age and only known from much later periods. In my paper, I follow this path further and argue that the Master of the Combat Agate must have conducted thorough anatomical studies and worked with living models.
Oddo Emilia
Methodological Questions in the Publication of the Knossian Northwest Treasure House
Jack Davis never shied away from asking hard questions concerning archaeological practice. Honing on his teachings, this paper aims at addressing a hard question: is every archaeological find worth publishing? What about legacy excavations? And what would the criteria be behind any possible answer to these questions? It is all too common for modern archaeologists to have to handle old excavations, so much so that legacy archaeology and its methodology has become its own branch of investigation. Inevitably, old excavations present methodological problems often quite difficult to disentangle; they in turn can provide rewarding experiences that reveals new data, fresh looks at the excavation, and deeper understanding of archaeological practice and its history.
While I subscribe to the helpfulness of legacy data, in this paper, I focus on the treacherous path to find a working methodology to study and publish a building that…does not seem to have anything actually worth saying: the Northwest Treasure House at Knossos. Despite its bronze hoard, which warranted it the attractive name of Treasure House, the building’s history, excavation, and succinct publication by Arthur Evans in Palace of Minos has profoundly affected modern research, even more than other buildings at Knossos. In particular, this case study questions the possibility for modern researchers to successfully approach the data, link it to the archive, and produce useful results. If that is true, then what are we to do with this building? Should it be documented? If so, how? And what methodological value would there be in its modern publication?"
Palaima Tom
Testing First Principles in Mycenology: Epistemology, Palaeography and Textual Interpretation
The field of Mycenology, stricto sensu, is approaching its 75th birthday if marked by Michael Ventris’s BBC broadcast of July 1, 1952. The decipherment was a done deal for sober-minded scholars once Chadwick and Ventris published “Evidence” in the 1953 JHS. The first edition of Documents in Mycenaean Greek (Docs) in 1956 set rigorous standards, especially speculative restraint. Early editions of the texts from Knossos, Pylos, Mycenae and Thebes had caution about readings and clarity in reasoning to interpretations of individual words and texts and thematic subject areas of interest to prehistorians, linguists and classicists. Homeric studies loomed large as a beneficiary of the evidence in the texts and a tool for testing the reasoning involved.
Studies in Mycenaean Inscriptions and Dialect for twenty years served as a L’Année Philologique and, in combination with Nestor, kept scholars well-informed regarding research both underway and completed and ideas put forward and theories advanced on the meanings of single words and on macro views of all aspects of Aegean culture upon which these peculiar texts have had a bearing. SMID also was continued, one new and one old year annually, by PASP until money and graduate student work hours ran out.
Meanwhile seminal works appeared like Ebbe Vilborg’s A Tentative Grammar of Mycenaean Greek (1960)—notice the caution in the title̛; Cornelis Ruijgh’s Tabellae Mycenenses selectae (1962); Anna Morpurgo Davies’ Mycenaeae Graecitatis Lexicon (1963); and Ruijgh’s mind-blowingly comprehensive, detailed, brilliant and cautious Études sur la grammaire et le vocabulaire du grec mycénien (Amsterdam, 1967) of which the masterful Yves Duhoux wrote everlastingly accurately in his necrology for Ruijgh, “dont nul mycénologue ne peut se passer” Minos 37-38 (2002-2003) 449-445.
Nestor provided not only a bibliography, but a forum for exchanges of ideas or information urgently needed or in need of examination and discussion before being formally published. It also provided a forum for humor that I have tried to carry on in the pages of the Aegaeum conference volumes and other scholarly forums including Nestor, sometimes with negative results when a spoof is taken to be a truth.
Ventris and Chadwick, Docs2 (1973) and Stefan Hiller and Oswald Panagl, Die frühgriechischen Texte aus mykenischer Zeit (1976) helped us see the lay of the land. They guided me in my graduate-school study of Linear B. They also were viewed, especially by English-speaking outsiders, as the definitive word—somewhat dangerously.
In 1985 and 1993, the two volumes of Francisco Aura Jorro’s Diccionario Micénico were landmarks whereby one could trace the history of interpretation of all Linear B ‘words’.
There followed in the third millennium (2000 onward), vital handbooks and compendia.
Among these the three volumes of Y. Duhoux and Anna Morpurgo Davies eds., A Companion to Linear B. Mycenaean Greek Texts and Their World (2008, 2022, 2014); Maurizio del Freo and Massimo Perna eds., Manuale di epigrafia micenea: introduzione allo studio dei testi in lineare B (2016, 2nd ed. 2019) Vols. 1 and 2; Alberto Bernabé y Eugenio R. Luján, Introducción al griego micénico. Gramática, selección de textos y glosario (2006 and 2020) and finally John Killen ed., The New Documents in Mycenaean Greek (2024) vols. 1 and 2 stand out. New Docs is a collaborative compendium using the same format and approach as the original Docs and Docs2. Its gestation was so long that the closing bibliography, with a few exceptions extending 2015-2017, covers scholarship through 2014. An important scholarly convenience would have been to give the date of submission and final substantial editing of the chapters. This is done only for J.P. Olivier’s on Syllabic Scripts of the Aegean complete through 2007.
Francisco Aura Jorro, Alberto Bernabé, Eugenio R. Lujàn, Juan Piquero, and Carlos Varias García, Diccionario Griego-Espanñol Volume Anejo VII: Suplemento al Diccionario Micénico (DMic.Supl. 2020) has incorporated words in newly discovered texts and new readings in transcriptions, but it has not re-presented the current lexicon. Yet some help is offered by Juan Piquero Rodríguez, El léxico del griego micénico. Index Graecitatis; Étude et mise à jour de la bibliographie (2019).
Finally, the co-founding of MASt in fall 2019 was instigated by a seminar offered by Tom Palaima in November at the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies. This inspired a team of scholars that is still led by Rachele Pierini, and includes Greg Nagy, Leonard Muellner, Roger Woodard, Brent Vine and Tom Palaima, to create and continue to offer this wonderful forum for the open exchange of ideas among scholars with widely varying training and interests.
https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/mast-seminar-reports/
https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/the-mast-project/
https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/the-mast-board/
The first MASt to be published on-line was: https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/mast-summer-seminar-2020-friday-june-26-summaries-of-presentations-and-discussion/
MASt summer seminars for Early Career Researchers have been particularly fruitful in widening the perspectives of young scholars in diverse specializations on Aegean prehistory and related fields.
2022: https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/mast-seminar-summer-2022-friday-july-8/
2024: https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/mast-summer-2024-seminar-report/
2025: https://continuum.fas.harvard.edu/summer-2025-mast-seminar-friday-june-27/
The MASt seminar on January 23, 2026 with Jim Wright as main speaker and orchestrator discussed the site of Kommos and how its history and function fit in with Minoan and Mycenaean palatial history and with other topics like (1) Aegean contacts with surrounding cultures and regions, (2) the Mycenaeanization of Crete and (3) early and later historical use of the site was extraordinarily fruitful. Serious attention was paid to (4) foreign contact and influences.
Even this dog-trot overview with my few critical comments will indicate that the field of Linear B studies is in some difficulty in presenting to the outside world—whether to classically trained archaeologists like Jack Davis or other scholars who need to know what is what in all the thematic areas of study into which most of the above synthetic volumes are organized—the degree of probability or certainty with which fundamental ‘facts’ are put forward. Sometimes it seems to me that we are writing for ourselves in the here and now.
In my paper, I will discuss a few key examples where knowledge of the epigraphy and palaeography of the texts and the influence of other fields of specialization like linguistics or Homeric studies is key. I will argue that the essential research principle that was drilled into me from my undergraduate days onwards:
go back through the scholarship to see how even what we take to be established ‘facts’ came into being
is rarely followed. This has had serious epistemological consequences for what we think we know, from our textual documentation, about the protohistoric Aegean and what progress we have made into the past. The reasons this has happened are, except in rare cases, not connected with any noticeable unilateral or willful character flaws of the scholars involved.
Papadimitriou Nikolas, Iro Mathioudaki, Anthi Balitsari, Sylviane Déderix, and Robert Laffineur
Thorikos and the Cyclades in the Mid-2nd Millennium BCE: The Western String from an Attic Perspective (J. Servais’ excavations, 1963-1977)
In 1979, Jack Davis introduced the notion of the “Western String”, a network of exchanges between Crete, the Western Cyclades and Mainland Greece, which was established at the MBA-LBA transition and was aimed – among others – to supply Crete with metals from Laurion. Since then, several studies have explored the nature of the network, shedding light on the role of Keos, Melos and Thera. By contrast, the role of Laurion is still only indirectly attested by the results of Lead Isotope Analysis of bronze, silver and lead objects of that period from across the Aegean.
In this paper, we discuss the material evidence available at the site of Thorikos for exchanges with the Cyclades (and Crete) in the MH III-LH IIA period. In particular, we discuss ceramic imports from Keos, Melos and Thera, metallurgical finds with parallels in Keos and Crete, and other artifacts excavated by J. Servais in the settlement and cemetery of prehistoric Thorikos.
The presentation is based on the results of the research project “Filling gaps in prehistoric Thorikos” by the Belgian School at Athens.
Papazoglou-Manioudaki Lena
The House of the Bronzes at Mygdalia, near Patras, in Achaea. The architecture of the local elites in the early Mycenaean world.
Mygdalia belongs to the group of Mycenaean settlements that were founded and rose to local prominence in the Early Mycenaean period. Substantial architectural remains and floor deposits help us understand this little known period in Western Achaea.
The work on the so called House of the Bronzes is still in progress but its lay –out already challenges our perception of the early Mycenaean period in Achaea. It is a large, rectangular, and elongated two-storey building, more than 20 m in length, following the NE/SW axis and 11 m in width. It is supported by a massive enclosure/ retaining wall along its SW side. Its contents have remained undisturbed, so we have, fallen from the upper floor, a hoard of bronzes and other minor artefacts, along with almost intact pottery, in a destruction level of LH IIIA1/early LH IIIA2 date. Built in the LH II period, it is contemporary to the tholos tomb excavated on the west slope of Mygdalia hill. Its complex architectural plan has no parallels in Achaea and reveals the level of sophistication the Mycenaean settlement of Mygdalia has reached in the Early Mycenaean period.
Parkinson Bill
Applying Greek Survey Methods Outside of Greece: Part Two, The Carpathian Basin
Having cut my teeth on Aegean survey archaeology as a student of Jack Davis’ on the Pylos Regional Archaeological Project in the early 1990s, I learned how much valuable regional and micro-regional information about prehistoric sites could be gleaned from non-invasive, surface investigations. When I started to work in the Carpathian Basin, I was surprised to learn that, despite a long history of regional surface survey dating back to the 1950s (i.e., Magyár Régészeti Topográfiája [Archaeological Topography of Hungary]), many of the research techniques that had become commonplace in Aegean survey projects (e.g., tract walking, gridded vacuum collection, geophysical remote sensing) were not widely employed prior to excavation. When my colleague, Attila Gyucha (University of Georgia) and I started to apply these techniques at prehistoric sites on the Great Hungarian Plain, it quickly became clear that many preconceived notions about prehistoric settlement organization were incorrect. Having rewritten our understanding of Neolithic, Copper Age, and Bronze Age social organization, these non-invasive techniques are now widely used as a precursor to excavation throughout the region.
Paschalidis Kostas and Katerina Voutsa
American Indian Hunters at Athens: The Fascinating Chronicle of an Unknown Exchange of Artefacts between the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Hellenic National Archaeological Museum in the Interwar Period
In 2015, the authors of this paper received an email from Jack Davis. One of his students had discovered evidence of an unknown exchange. In particular a collection of Greek antiquities held by the Cincinnati Art Museum seemed to have been donated by the National Archaeological Museum, Athens in exchange for American antiquities in 1931. Following this enquiry, we did some research in the storeroom of the National Archaeological Museum's Prehistoric Collection and located a cardboard box of significant importance. The box contained ancient stone weapons and tools wrapped in clippings from the 9 February 1931 issue of the Cincinnati Enquirer. These included axes, hammers and other stone weapons and tools which were used by Native Americans in North America between the 8th millennium BCE and the heyday of the city of Cahokia. Also included in the same consignment were probably three terracotta vases from Arizona and New Mexico, made in the 19th century CE by the Hopi and Zuni tribes.
As it turned out in May 1931, this box containing American Indian antiquities arrived at the Port of Piraeus having been sent as a gift from the Cincinnati Art Museum to the Greek state. The following year, the National Archaeological Museum donated, in return, ancient Greek vases to the Cincinnati Art Museum. Negotiations for this exchange were facilitated by the renowned American archaeologist Carl Blegen, who was professor at the University of Cincinnati. Such interstate exchanges were common during the interwar period and had both diplomatic and educational purposes. However, the American antiquities that arrived in Athens were not displayed as it was planned and their catalogue has not been traced to this day.
In 2023, Jack and Sharon Stocker visited the National Archaeological Museum and examined the box's contents. Thanks to their efforts and those of other colleagues in Greece and the USA, we were able to trace the material's provenance, identify their types and chronology, acquire the necessary permits from the descendant Pueblos and exhibit the precious content of the 1931 carboard box with the stories of the American Indian hunters in the center of Athens.
Pojani Iris
New Discovery of the Circuit Wall: Insights into the Boundaries of Archaic and Hellenistic Epidamnos-Dyrrhachion
The paper presents the preliminary results of rescue excavations carried out at the former Eftali Koçi school plot in Durrës (January 2021; February–March 2022) under the Albanian Ministry of Culture and the National Institute of Cultural Heritage. The site, situated on low ground at the foot of the Daute hills and within a dense archaeological landscape near the Artemision votive deposit and known necropoleis, was investigated prior to planned school reconstruction. An open-area urban excavation strategy was applied across two main sectors (A/B) with high-precision surveying (electronic theodolite), drone orthophotography and digital terrain modelling, and XRF analysis in the laboratory.
In Sector 1 a part of east–west wall complex was excavated and documented. The structure measures c. 22.8 m long and 4.30 m wide, built as a double-faced wall with an emplecton core seated in a purpose-dug foundation trench. The south facing comprises better-dressed limestone blocks, the north of sandstone, conglomerate and limestone of more variable size; up to four courses were recorded. Pottery and small finds from stratigraphic units adjacent to the wall span the late Archaic through Hellenistic and later periods, with a strong Hellenistic presence; materials include local ceramics (Currila clay), imported Corinthian wares, tiles, loom weights, figurines, glass perfume flasks and faience beads.
Sector 2 preserves a later, roughly co-linear phase: an isodomic limestone wall (opus quadratum) overlain by a brick superstructure, evidence for a bricked-up entrance, and a probable doorway base with dovetail mortises suggesting hinged doors. Two concrete-and-brick features to the north may relate to earlier concrete installations, aqueduct piers or gateway elements.
Two primary interpretations are proposed: the wall complex formed part of an urban defensive circuit separating urban and suburban zones, or it served as a temenos/limiting wall delimiting sacred precinct(s) (possibly connected to the nearby Artemision). The discoveries refine our understanding of pre-Roman Epidamnos–Dyrrachion’s territorial limits, defensive architecture and sacred topography. Recommendations to preserve the remains in situ, adjust building plans, provide separate visitor access and create an on-site educational display are presented. The excavations significantly enrich the archaeological map of Durrës and warrant further targeted study.
Putzolu Cristiano, Calla McNamee, and Sharon R. Stocker
From Sketches to 3D models: The Benefits of Low-cost LiDAR Sensors for Documenting Archaeological Stratigraphies
This paper presents an integrated approach for documenting geospatial and excavation data developed by the PONEX archaeological project. It utilizes handheld camera photogrammetry and lidar to provide detailed, fine-grained data that can be collected efficiently and economically. The approach employed has evolved during the continued excavation of the tholos tombs discovered by the University of Cincinnati in 2018 and is particularly effective for documenting archaeological architecture.
When dealing with architecture that has regularly been reconstructed and has undergone anthropogenic and post-depositional disturbance, it is especially difficult to understand and contextualize the formation history. Photogrammetry has become a regular tool used to address these difficulties. While photogrammetry provides 3D data that can be curated and revisited, it is time consuming, it requires the capacity to store large amounts of data, and it is often only completed when highly significant contexts have been identified. Spatial information that exists between significant contexts, however, can also provide relevant information, which is unfortunately often lost through the excavation process.
To address these problems, we rely on the frequent collection of low cost lidar data to capture smaller scale changes throughout the architectural stratigraphy. The streamlined process we employ involves four steps: 1) cleaning of the archaeological surface, 2) collecting lidar data, 3) georeferencing of the 3D lidar model in cloud compare using absolute reference points, and 4) exporting of the lidar model as an orthophoto and a digital elevation model. Like traditional photogrammetry models, the models created can be used to extract provenience data for individual architectural elements, as well as cross sections and other forms of 3D data. Our approach enables reconstruction in the digital environment of both the environmental stratigraphy and the archaeological decisions of the excavator while being less time consuming and data heavy than traditional camera photogrammetry.
Runnels Curtis
Schliemann Turns Over a New Leaf
Schliemann’s first attempt at publication of his excavations at Hisarlik was bold. Ever the entrepreneur and innovator, he used a radical format of a narrative text paired with a large number of original photographic prints pasted into a small number of copies of an unwieldy album. It was among the first archaeological reports to be illustrated with original photographs, but like many innovative ideas it did not work out as planned. Schliemann was dissatisfied with the quality of the illustrations and the publication was neither popular nor a commercial success. He did not repeat the experiment, and—as he did in his business ventures and his personal life—when something failed he tried something else. In 1875, Schliemann adopted a new format for publishing archaeological evidence pioneered by Sir John Evans in his, Stone Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments of Great Britain (1872). Schliemann modelled his next report, Troy and Its Remains (1875) on Evan’s book and it became the model for Schliemann’s subsequent publications. This new format helped to establish Schliemann’s popularity amongst readers at all levels, perhaps securing his reputation as “the emblematic archaeologist of all time” (D. Traill, 1995, Schliemann of Troy, p.306).
Ruscillo Deborah
The Anatomy of a Boar’s Tusk Helmet: Identifying the Chaîne Opératoire of a Mycenaean Warrior Status Symbol through Experimental Archaeology
Sacher Jennifer
From Corinth to the Grave of the Griffin Warrior: Hesperia and the Publication of Prehistoric Greece
The American School of Classical Studies established the journal Hesperia in 1932. Articles examining the prehistory of Greece began to appear early on, representing an important period not as widely published as its historical counterpart. This paper traces the history of the publication of prehistoric studies across the span of Hesperia's 95 years, a journey that takes us from Corinth in the 1930s to Pylos in the present decade. A look at this data not only provides a history of archaeology as it developed from the earlier 20th century to the present, it also reveals the development of methodologies, areas of academic interest, and modes of scholarly presentation relevant to prehistoric Aegean studies. Through the context of Hesperia, these trends also illustrate how the ASCSA has played a role in the publication of prehistoric Greece as the journal transitioned from a scholarly outlet focusing exclusively on the work of the School to one that today also presents studies from projects and scholars unaffiliated with the organization.
Schepartz Lynne and Sari Miller-Antonio
Challenges and Rewards of Restudying Human Skeletal Collections from Archaeological Contexts in Greece
Greece has a long history of human skeletal biology research, with initial studies conducted over one hundred years ago. Due to methodological advances in skeletal biology, the archaeological sciences and DNA analyses, interest in re-studying skeletal collections is rapidly increasing. Conceptual frameworks have evolved from typological descriptions of cranial shape to nuanced perspectives of life history and population dynamics. Broader regional and temporal syntheses are now possible. These developments raise concerns about research permits for studies on materials that may be published and thus viewed as well-studied. Collection managers or individuals granting permission may not be fully informed about the importance of restudy or the direct value of destructive analyses. Skeletal biologists need to provide explicit arguments that their studies are designed to potentially answer new questions and to verify and expand on prior results.
For their work to be of greatest impact across disciplines, scholars undertaking re-studies of collections should present their results with an appreciation of prior analyses that discusses why their results differ. It may be that older results reflect some errors of analysis or observation, but it is important to contextualize them in terms of past limitations in methodology, technology, sampling strategies, or incorporation of archaeological context.
This study explores the issues relating to re-study of collections in Greece using examples from prehistoric and later populations. The application of new technologies and methodologies to older skeletal collections adds an expanded dimension to hypothesis-driven projects. For example, genetic data can offer a complementary component to archaeological studies by refining ideas about population movements and population diversity or homgeneity. Similarly, the incorporation of cranial, dental and post-cranial discrete traits can reflect shared ancestry. Taphonomic assessments can be used to evaluate the processes involved in burial disturbances and broader contexts for pathological analyses.
Schon Robert
Promoting Regional Authority at Pylos: Soft Power and the Palace of Nestor
Traditionally, state power has been modeled as coercive. However, the use of force can only achieve so much, and is very costly. Without the general consent of the governed, states built solely on coercion risk precipitous collapse. As a counterbalance to force, state authorities employ methods of soft power, such as providing communal services, economic stimulus, and promoting practices that create social cohesion. In this paper, I explore such aspects of governance at the Palace of Nestor. My material evidence consists of drinking vessels discovered by archaeological survey projects throughout Messenia. Specifically, I model the spread of social drinking reflected by these vessels from the LHI to LHIII period using distributional and network analyses. While archaeologists of the Aegean have documented the practice of social drinking, the political ramifications behind its widespread adoption have not been thoroughly explored. This case study reveals how a social practice once reserved for a limited group, spread throughout the LHIII polity along with the political reach of the Palace of Nestor. I argue that by emulating practices established by palatial elites and their ancestors, the people of the Pylian State acknowledged palatial sovereignty. As a secondary effect, this model also helps us better understand how the palace reduced transaction costs, which are an unmeasured burden on economic activity. Thus, the spread of social drinking, driven in part by the palace, can be seen as a form of economic stimulus. The goal of this endeavor is to build upon Jack Davis’s intellectual legacy of research into the origins and growth of palatial influence at Pylos.
Shelmerdine Cynthia
A Fresh Look at Mycenaean Perfumes
A lot of research has been done on Mycenaean perfumed oil since I worked on that topic in the early 1980s (C.W. Shelmerdine, The Perfume Industry of Mycenaean Pylos, 1985). Archaeological discoveries have added to our knowledge about both aromatic ingredients and the manufacturing process. Moreover, restudy of the Linear B tablets from Pylos (E.L. Bennett, Jr., J.L. Melena, D. Nakassis, J.-P. Olivier and T.G. Palaima, The Palace of Nestor at Pylos in Western Messenia IV: The Inscribed Documents, 2025) has resulted in changing the ascription of some relevant documents to scribal hands. These changes may have implications for our understanding of how this Pylian industry was administered. I would like to take this opportunity to honor Jack Davis by revisiting the topic of Mycenaean perfumery, based on the current state of the evidence.
Shelton Kim and Lynne Kvapil
Beyond the Scepter: Prehistory in the Nemea Valley
This paper explores our evolving understanding of Nemea, including the Nemea Valley and Tsoungiza, in its regional context. The Nemea Valley lies between two sites with diverging trajectories. The cemetery at Aidonia has produced evidence that the people of this region were, early in the Late Bronze Age, well connected beyond the Phliasian Plain and had access to high status goods and significant wealth. The identification of a substantial and possibly fortified settlement echoes the prominence of the tombs and their occupants. And yet, over the course of the Late Bronze Age, Aidonia appears to lose prominence to the emerging power of Mycenae in the Argolid Plain, while Tsoungiza strengthened its ties to the south. We examine the Nemea region in juxtaposition to the changing power dynamic between these two sites over the course of the Late Bronze Age through the integration of newly published material on Tsoungiza, data from excavations in the Sanctuary of Zeus at Nemea, and unpublished material from the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project: Archaeological Survey. We focus on three periods of transition: from the Middle to Late Bronze Age (1700-1550 BCE), the Early to Later Mycenaean period (1550-1450 BCE), and the post-palatial period (1200-1100 BCE). A synthesis of these data shows that the region transitions from an independent region at the intersection of emerging polities to one that operated as more than merely a hinterland but a region that continued beyond the sphere of the Argolid palaces.
Sutton Susan Buck
Field Notes: Observations on Jack’s Role in Bridging Disciplines
This paper exploits the double meaning of field by reflecting on changes in disciplinary thinking (one type of field) that have resulted from working side-by-side in on-the-ground research settings (the other type). More specifically, the paper reflects on my 50-year anthropological-archaeological conversation with Jack Davis and the changes in my understanding of contemporary Greek life that have resulted. From our first meeting in 1974 when Jack was a new member of the American School of Classical Studies and I was beginning my dissertation on modern Greek urbanization, we have carried out a wide-ranging, unscripted discussion that has not only enabled cultural anthropology and archaeology to speak more fully to each other, but has also suggested the possibility of a unified Greek studies.
These discussions arose from Jack’s unusual openness to multiple frames of reference, which persuaded me to cross the disciplinary divide between modern and ancient Greek studies that existed when we began. At that time, most cultural anthropologists steered clear of Greek antiquity in order to establish the importance of modern Greece in its own right. I had already completed two field studies with no mention of the ancient past when Jack invited me onto the Keos Project. What is most remarkable, he invited me as a cultural anthropologist, not an ethnoarchaeologist. I was to explore settlement patterns on Keos today, not look for remnants of long-standing technologies. Jack was completely open on what I would study and how I would do it. What I found, however, was given the same weight as the sherds and blocks encountered by field walkers.
A similar invitation brought us together again on the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project. Inspired by Runnels, Forbes, and other pioneers, we continued to explore how our two disciplines might reverberate on the Greek landscape. These projects eventually ended, but the conversations did not. Even now, as members of the Gennadius Board of Overseers, Jack and I deliberate and advance the role of post-Antique studies at the ASCSA.
In short, this paper identifies key – often unexpected – revelations that emerged from such conversations and peregrinations. For example, realizing that most modern Greek villages are products of the last 150 years (a survey result) fundamentally changes how we think about village social dynamics, both past and present, in ways that challenge assumptions, change disciplinary frames of reference, and go far beyond my small piece of modern Greek anthropology.
Thaler Ulrich
The Gridlocked Boar? Arrest & Movement & the Courtly Hunt
Celebrating its 75th birthday but a few months after the honouree of the 21st Aegean Conference, H. Groenewegen-Frankfort’s “Arrest and Movement” has recently been hailed as an exemplary ‘athematic’ study of Aegean iconography, i.e. one that emphasizes, as a number of current essays seek to do, aspects of an image – such as stylistic or compositional structure – which are considered more readily accessible to a modern etic viewer than pictorial content, emic meaning and intra-cultural context. By contrast, the central principle which Groenewegen-Frankfort identified in Minoan pictorial art, an interest in the ‘essence’ rather than the effect of motion which she termed “absolute mobility in organic forms” and held to result in a unique conceptualisation of space, has attracted far less recent interest. This may be related to the fact that notions of Minoan-Mycenaean dichotomies, which pervade at least parts of her argument, have been heavily and justly criticized since the turn of the millennium, although they still hold greater currency – arguably with good reason – in iconographic studies than in other fields of Aegean archaeology.
Against this background, the present paper seeks to use Groenewegen-Frankfort’s athematic reading of Minoan iconography to throw light on a distinctly Mycenaean iconographic theme, i.e. the hunt, and specifically on the Tiryns Hunt Frieze, an exemplary representation of this theme as best illustrated by the exceptional closeness of its well-known Orchomenian parallel. Particular attention will be given to the depiction of boars caught in nets. The flying gallop displayed by these beasts can be seen as the “most Cretan of inventions” and a characteristic expression of ‘absolute mobility’ familiar from ‘self-contained’ depictions of wildlife where it “means speed but not flight” and “is hardly ever related to a hunting event” (Groenewegen-Frankfort). Here, however, the motif of the flying gallop is not only embedded in and even central to a larger composition depicting a hunt, but juxtaposed to – or rather: superimposed by – the representation of the net as a rigid grid incised over the painted animal. It is difficult to escape the notion of an imposition of human cultural order over wild un-tamed nature, even if we need not term the former ‘Mycenaean’ or identify the depiction of the latter as ‘Minoan’, nor appeal to perennial notions of domus versus agrios. But it is worth exploring how such an ‘imposition of culture’ relates to the connection of hunt scenes sensu stricto to more sedate and processional elements of Mycenaean depictions of the hunt as a social event, such as the female charioteers from Tiryns or the tripod carriers from Pylos, which it seems plausible to relate, within an emic cultural context, to notions of courtly culturedness. We may even consider the architectural context of such palatial mural compositions, where the movement of courtly agents was itself set against grids incised in plaster in the lavishly painted floors of central rooms of the palaces and may, on (specific) occasion(s), have been guided by these. In both Mycenaean mural art and its spatial setting, the balance between arrest and movement did not swing towards ‘absolute mobility’.
Tsiolaki Efthymia
Surveying Messenia: Challenges and Opportunities of Working with Legacy Surface Survey Data
For more than half a century, archaeological surface survey has shaped scholarly understanding of prehistoric settlement in Messenia. The University of Minnesota Messenia Expedition (UMME) of the 1950s-1960s produced the first region-wide synthesis of prehistoric occupation. The Pylos Regional Archaeological Project (PRAP), directed by Jack Davis in the 1990s, applied intensive pedestrian survey methods to the landscape surrounding the Palace of Nestor, revealing a dynamic and complex record of human activity. This paper brings UMME and PRAP into dialogue to explore both the challenges and the productive potential of working with legacy survey data. Treating Messenia as a palimpsest of archaeological research, as much as of past human activity, and recognizing the distinct aims and scales of UMME and PRAP, this paper argues that our understanding of prehistoric Messenia emerges through the accumulation of successive survey projects. This comparison highlights how methodological choices shape what we can know, while also showing how earlier data remain essential for re-examining the landscape and later work may extend insights across the wider region. By approaching UMME and PRAP together as an archive of accumulated archaeological knowledge, this paper emphasizes the enduring value of legacy survey datasets for understanding prehistoric landscapes, evolving methodologies, and the ways archaeological knowledge is preserved, reinterpreted, and extended across generations of research.
Tzonou Ioulia
Jack Davis and Korakou: How Did Mycenaean Corinth Become Wealthy?
I offer this contribution to Jack Davis who welcomed me in Cincinnati and taught me how to research and think critically about the Aegean Bronze Age and its people. As Jerry Lalonde put it, by being Davis’ “daughter”, I was Caskey’s “granddaughter” and Blegen’s “great-granddaughter”, and, thus, investigating further Korakou and in turn Mycenaean Corinth is a duty and a challenge. In the summers of 1977-1978 Jack worked with Blegen’s meticulously excavated pottery and notes, examined 1200 sherds from Korakou in the Old Museum in Corinth and produced an article (1979) that changed the way we imagine the beginning of the Late Bronze Age in terms of pottery types developed and used. Partly because of Jack’s dedication to the site, Malcolm Wiener vowed to protect the sacred land.
Korakou played a vital role in the accumulation of wealth in Mycenaean Corinth. The presentation I offer is an account of maritime interactions and overland exchange based on artifact distributions and influences using Corinth and Korakou as the center of a network. Through Korakou, Corinthian elites exploited and supervised local segments within a wider system of long-distance routes involving people and materials from the Perachora peninsula, Aegina’s industry, sites in Central Greece, the Argolid, the Cyclades, Crete, Egypt, the Near East and Beth Shan, as far as Mesopotamia to the east, southern and central Adriatic Italy to the west, and Hungary to the north.
Corinth’s place in the political geography of LBA Greece and the Mediterranean must be redefined proposing a fresh hypothesis against Davis’ and Cherry’s (2001) argumentation. A tholos tomb, Cyclopean walls on Acrocorinth and a recently excavated sprawling settlement on the terraces to the north tell a story of power and control. The harbour at Korakou was the nexus through which trade routes were managed for Corinth’s benefit. A ruling center in Corinth controlled and opened up these routes connecting resources, producers and consumers and distributing everyday objects along with exotic prestige goods. Korakou was there for the needs of a thriving Corinth, a connecting and necessary link between wealthy and powerful neighbours.
Vitale Salvatore
Resetting the Mycenaean Palaces: A Plea for the Reconsideration of Cultural and Social Variation in the States of Mainland Greece, circa 1375 to 1175 B.C.E.
This paper critically reviews the current data set concerning the formation processes, formal developments, and political trajectories of the Mycenaean palaces. Its aim is to reconsider our interpretative frameworks, stimulate new questions, and provide fresh information about the state level societies of mainland Greece, circa 1375 to 1175 B.C.E.
It is commonly accepted that the Palatial phase of Mycenaean civilization was a period of increasing cultural, social, and material uniformity across mainland Greece and the broader Aegean. Combined with the “international” status ascribed to Ahhiyawa in the Hittite documents, this growth in homogeneity has been interpreted as evidence for the existence of a politically unified Mycenaean empire, which, under Argive leadership, operated from the late 15th to the early 12th century B.C.E. Among the different aspects of the so-called Mycenaean koine, monumental architecture has played an important role, with similarities among the megara of Mycenae, Tiryns, and Pylos considered as proof for the occurrence of the abovementioned empire.
The results of this research provide a different and more complex overall picture. Indeed, a refined chronological analysis of the construction and destruction deposits defining the timelines of the Mycenaean palaces indicates that, in addition to shared trends, each region of mainland Greece also followed distinct trajectories. Specifically, four factors suggest that the political geography of mainland Greece during the 14th and 13th centuries B.C.E. reflects individual though interconnected polities. The first is the occurrence of both standardization and variations in the plan of Mycenaean royal buildings of Late Helladic (LH) IIIA2 and LH IIIB. This is best exemplified by the fact that, outside the Argolid, the developed form of the Palatial megaron established at Mycenae and Tiryns is attested only at Pylos; at the latter site, however, significant differences in the circulation patterns around the Throne Room are noticeable, when compared to the northeast Peloponnese. The second factor is the continuous increase of regionalism in the consumption patterns of the most iconic new pottery shapes manufactured in the Argolid during the 13th century B.C.E. This process concerns (sometimes dramatic) differences in the geographical and quantitative distribution of patterned kylikes and deep bowls across the Mycenaean palaces and other centers in the Argolid, the southern Peloponnese, central Greece, and the wider Aegean. The third element is represented by the different chronological trajectories that marked the collapse of the Mycenaean palaces and Palatial centers of mainland Greece. Indeed, current research demonstrates the existence of four distinct horizons respectively dating to LH IIIB1 Late (Iklaina and Ayios Vasileios, in addition to Knossos and Chania on Crete), LH IIIB2 Early (Midea, Gla, and, perhaps, Orchomenos), LH IIIB2 Late (Mycenae, Tiryns, and Thebes), and LH IIIC Early 1 (Pylos, Teichos Dymaion, Athens, and Dimini). The fourth and final element is the growing evidence for political tensions among Mycenaean Palatial centers, including at different times such sites as Pylos and Iklaina, Mycenae and Tiryns, and Thebes and Orchomenos/Gla.
Combined these four factors indicate that current data can hardly be reconciled with the monolithic narrative of a unified, Argive based, state dominating the Aegean from LH IIB-LH IIIA1 up until the LH IIIB-LH IIIC transition. Instead, if advances must be made in our comprehension of Mycenaean state level societies, our interpretative compass must be reset to new standards, where norm and variation are equally scrutinized through a germane bottom-up contextual approach to material evidence.
Vogeikoff-Brogan Natalia
From the Cold War to Classical Studies: John McCloy and the Ford Foundation's Funding of the Athenian Agora
In November 1965, the Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the American School of Classical Studies, Ward Canaday, announced a $1 million grant from the Ford Foundation for five further years of excavation in the Athenian Agora, provided that the Greek Government would expropriate the necessary land. It has been described as “the largest single grant in American archaeological history.”
This paper examines the pivotal role of John McCloy (1895-1989), a trustee and treasurer of the ASCSA Board of Trustees for twenty-five years (1954-1980) and Chairman of the Ford Foundation for a decade (1955-1965), in securing this grant, a landmark moment for archaeological funding at the Ford Foundation, and a case study in the influence of powerful individuals on philanthropic giving.
A prominent lawyer, financier, and influential figure in U.S. foreign policy (serving as an adviser to eight U.S. presidents), McCloy's career highlights the interconnectedness of political and corporate elites with philanthropic foundations, particularly during the Cold War. (His close ties with the CIA have been a subject of discussion among historians, raising questions about potential links between intelligence operations and philanthropic endeavors in the 1950-1960s.)
Research in the Archives of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens (ASCSA) reveals that the School’s courting of the Ford Foundation began as early as 1955. Despite repeated visits from Ford Foundation officers, the School's applications in 1955-1957 were rejected owing to the Foundation's limited scope but also to the lack of focus in the School’s proposal.
Nevertheless, the gradual expansion of the Foundation’s interests beyond cultural exchanges between America and Europe, coupled with McCloy’s influence on the Foundation’s Board, paved the way for the grant to the Agora Excavations in 1965. According to the Foundation, its grant reflected “the symbolic value of the Agora as a center from which concepts of democracy emerged to shape the course of Western civilization,” a value that aligned with its evolving mission statement.
Voutsaki Sofia and Nektarios Karadimas
Agios Vasileios, Laconia: First Thoughts on the Rise and Fall of a Mycenaean Palatial Centre
The Late Bronze Age palace at Agios Vasileios near Xirokambi in Laconia is widely regarded one of the most important archaeological discoveries of recent decades. In this paper, we would like to offer some first thoughts on the early stages and the final destruction of this significant palatial centre, since only a small part of the Agios Vasileios site has been excavated and studied thus far. Our presentation will be based on two sectors of the Agios Vasileios excavations: First, the pre-palatial (MH III/LH I - LH IIB) North Cemetery, located north of the settlement, and, second, part of the LH IIIA2-B palace (Buildings D and E and the South and West Stoae), situated on the southeastern slope of the hill. Additionally, we will draw on insights gained from the surface survey and geophysical exploration of the Agios Vasileios hill which were carried out between 2015 and 2018. We will address the following questions: What can the investigations so far tell us about the foundation and growth of the Agios Vasileios settlement? When and how was the palatial complex in Agios Vasileios destroyed, and when was the site abandoned? How did the rise and fall of Agios Vasileios affect the political landscape of Late Bronze Age Laconia? Our aim is to shed light on this important site and to initiate a dialogue about different forms of organisation and divergent political trajectories in the Mycenaean world.
Whitelaw Todd
A Tally of Two "Cities": The Island Towns of Ayia Irini and Phylakopi in Comparative Perspective
As two of the most thoroughly excavated sites dating to the Aegean later Bronze Age, Phylakopi on Melos and Ayia Irini on Keos, with central buildings, shrines, fortifications and densely packed houses, appear to represent prehistoric Aegean urbanism in microcosm. In characteristics and scale, they are most directly comparable to the small towns that served as second-order centres in the larger-scale settlement systems on Crete and the Greek mainland, and more particularly those towns that served as primary centres of smaller polities. Both island communities almost certainly were the principal centres on their islands, economically and politically independent of any larger polities. This comparative study will consider the demography, social composition and economic character of the two communities, explore their characteristics within the wider spectrum of LBA communities in the southern Aegean, and consider to what degree, if any, they should be considered urban.
Wright Jim
Two Treasures from the Archives: The works of James Ferguson at the ASCSA and his association with Heinrich Schliemann
Throughout most of the 19th century James Ferguson (1808-1886) was a leading architectural historian who published works spanned from 1845 to 1884. With an early interest in ancient architecture that developed from his upbringing in India, he devoted his life to accurate survey and rendering of the architecture of South Asia, the Near East including the Holy Lands, and Greece and Italy. He was especially noted for his comprehensive handbooks of architecture around the world. Correspondence in the Gennadius archives between Schliemann and Ferguson sheds light on their relationship. I. Gennadius purchased Ferguson’s reconstructions of the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos and of the Temple of Artemis at Ephesos. Between 2013 and 2016 these were restored and remounted. This paper publishes high resolution images of them.
Zangger Eberhard
Celestial Symbolism and Lunisolar Timekeeping in Bronze Age Cultures
For nearly two centuries, the symbolic program of the Hittite rock sanctuary at Yazılıkaya, near the former capital Ḫattuša, remained poorly understood. Recent interdisciplinary research – combining archaeology, philology, and astronomy – suggests that the sanctuary reflects a sophisticated model of the cosmos as imagined by the Hittites around 1230 BCE.
More than 90 reliefs arranged within the site depict a procession of deities organized along cosmological lines. These figures represent a tripartite universe – earth, sky, and underworld – regulated by perpetual cycles of renewal. Celestial phenomena such as lunar phases and solar transitions are not only symbolically encoded but appear to have been structurally operationalized. In particular, the sequence of deities in Chamber A appears to have functioned as a lunisolar calendar capable of synchronizing lunar months with the solar year.
The sanctuary’s iconography incorporates elements from Babylonian, Hurrian, Egyptian, and Anatolian traditions, situating Yazılıkaya within a wider framework of cultural exchange, particularly during a phase of diplomatic closeness between Hatti and Egypt. Features such as the winged sun disk and references to undying northern constellations suggest a cosmology anchored in the axis mundi and the circumpolar sky.
Yazılıkaya may thus help bridge a chronological and conceptual gap between Mesopotamian cosmology and the astronomical traditions of Classical Greece. It also provides a broader interpretive context for other enigmatic monuments and artifacts –including Eflatunpınar, the ivory plaque of Megiddo, and the goblet of ʿAin Sâmiya – which may now be seen as part of a shared Bronze Age cosmological tradition.
Zafeiriadis Paschalis
Separate Ways (But Not Worlds Apart): Southern Euboea in Cycladic Prehistoric Context
The strategic position of southern Euboea along prehistoric maritime and land routes, linking the central and northern mainland with the Cyclades, and its potential role as an intra-Cycladic seafaring hub, offers a compelling framework for exploring the interplay between local and regional trajectories in the prehistoric Aegean. Both southern Euboea and the Cyclades witnessed the emergence of permanent settlements during the Late Neolithic, with southern Euboea frequently identified as a critical steppingstone for the colonization of the islands. Throughout the FN and much of the EBA, the material culture of southern Euboea exhibits such strong affinities with that of the Cyclades that it appears Cycladic in character. By contrast, later prehistoric periods reveal divergent trajectories, with the two areas following distinct pathways despite their geographic proximity and environmental similarities.
This paper adopts a comparative lens, integrating archaeological data from southern Euboea and the Cyclades (i.e., settlement patterns and material culture) to examine diachronic patterns of change and adaptation. It investigates how communities in southern Euboea navigated shifting regional conditions, simultaneously responding to and interacting with regional networks and broader socio-cultural developments. By reflecting on the insular and mainland dynamics of southern Euboea, the paper highlights the interconnected yet distinct ways in which local prehistoric communities negotiated insularity, connectivity, and regional integration within a complex and evolving Aegean world.
Work in progress.
Work in progress.
Work in progress.
