Kommos II: The Final Neolithic Through Middle Minoan III Pottery

This book is the first to be published in a series of volumes that will bring the expertise of archaeologists and other scholars to bear on the interpretation of the Minoan and Greek site at Kommos. A seaside town, Kommos provides rich information on domestic architecture, the daily life and economy of a coastal people, and ceramic sequences, which, thanks to the long and undisturbed stratigraphy, are already playing a fundamental role in defining ceramic chronology here and elsewhere in Crete. Kommos also functioned as the harbor town of inland Phaistos. Illuminating its prosperity and commercial role in the Aegean are monumental buildings south of the town and foreign, imported pottery from a widespread area: Egypt, the Near East, and even from the area of Italy. In a second major era of use, long after the Minoans left, Kommos served as the location for a Greek Sanctuary with a series of temples, interesting votive offerings, evidence for ritual activity, and, again, foreign contacts. The basic publication of the Final Neolithic, Early Minoan, and Middle Minoan pottery from the site, Volume II of Kommos presents the pottery from the first decade of excavation. Only small quantities of pottery were found from the period before Middle Minoan IB, but a continuous sequence exists from MM IB until Transitional MM III/LM IA, providing the first stratigraphic evidence for the complete sequence of pottery styles from these periods in southern Crete.