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Art and Archaeology

This volume results from a session at the Archaeological Institute of America’s 2003 Annual Meeting honouring the substantial contribution of Philip Betancourt to the field of Aegean prehistory. It contains 6 papers, among them an overview by Malcolm Wiener, as well as a preface by Jim Muhly, a biography of the honorand and a selected bibliography of his work. Betancourt has written extensively on Minoan pottery over the past 25 years or so, in the process contributing to some significant changes in its study, notably the combination of traditional typological analysis with scientific study of pottery fabrics and surface treatments. This integrated approach reduces the risk of ‘scientific’ data being isolated from their archaeological contexts, still the fate of much archaeometry. It also allows for the development of arguments concerning the social role of pottery in production and consumption practices, as is rightly stressed in Wiener’s overview section ‘Pots and Polities’. This is where recent studies in Minoan pottery could be justifiably claimed to have had some broader impact, and is presumably one reason why non-specialists might choose to cast their eye over this volume. However, as this volume shows, there is still some way to go until Betancourt’s vision is more fully realised. While all the material contributions to this volume contain something of interest to the Minoan pottery specialist, it is the paper of Day, Relaki and Faber that delivers most in the terms outlined above. They examine technological choices in clay paste preparation and decorative techniques over the long-term, viewing such choices in terms of social practices. They conduct sustained and integrated ceramic analysis, utilising a broad suite of scientific techniques, to provide both important technological details and evidence of regional exchange (the paper is twice as long as any other contribution – about 30 per cent of the volume in fact). They succeed in identifying a very long-lived technological tradition in the Mesara plain of south-central Crete, one that not only spans one thousand years but which also cross-cuts the emergence of the palaces, usually considered to be a revolutionary moment in the development of craft specialisation. One gains the very real sense of a regional pottery tradition as a socially active entity; and their interpretations rely fundamentally on an integrated approach. This paper is the first in the volume after the overview by Wiener. The four papers that follow showcase different aspects of the more orthodox approach in Minoan pottery studies. The contributions dealing respectively with the Kamares cave (van de Moortel) and Pera Galenoi (Banou and Tsivilika) elegantly highlight the usefulness of pottery typology in establishing the chronology, regional connections and function of individual sites. Christakis’s paper illustrates the utility of comparing a single ceramic category – in his case the large storage jar or ‘pithos’ – across space (settlements throughout Crete) and time (Protoand Neo-palatial periods). Rutter’s paper takes not a single category but a single type, a form of burnished jug argued to be imported from south-western Anatolia, and uses it to speculate as to the nature of inter-regional political connections in the Final and Post-palatial periods. These four papers are representative of the status quo in Minoan pottery studies in two ways. First, they do not integrate scientific analysis; this is particularly striking in the papers of Christakis and Rutter, which engage with themes of regional and interregional interactions without using physico-chemical analysis to help establish either provenance or details of technological practices. Secondly, they deal only obliquely with the relationship of ‘pottery and society’, the title of the volume. These twin features are no small hurdles, but the paper of Day, Relaki and Faber shows how they can be surmounted. That only one of five papers (i.e. discounting Wiener’s overview paper) manages to pull this off says something about the continuing difficulties in achieving a satisfactory integration of archaeological and ‘scientific’ data, a much broader issue to which Muhly alludes in the preface. Thus this volume, despite its limited length and hence inevitable biases (e.g. skewed towards studies in central Crete), is uncannily representative of the state of play: largely traditional, but with some indication of what it is that makes Minoan pottery studies an exciting and in some cases ground-breaking area. Philip Betancourt might feel justifiably proud of his role in fostering the advances evident in this volume, but also acutely aware of the huge amount of work that lies ahead in exploring the diverse links between Minoan pottery and Minoan society. CARL KNAPPETT University of Toronto carl.knappett@utoronto.ca