This excavation of a Late Bronze Age town on the island of Mochlos in northeastern Crete includes the House of the Metal Merchant (with two large bronze hoards) and 13 other structures. Each building is described with its stratigraphy, architecture, small finds, ecofactual materials, function, and room use. This is a two volume set. Volume 1 contains the text and Volume 2 contains the Concordance, Tables, Figures, and Plates.

The 27 papers in this volume harken to the themes that Jeffrey Soles has influenced during his illustrious career in Aegean Bronze Age archaeology: ancestry, burial customs, religion, trade, jewelry, the development of the Minoan settlement of Mochlos in eastern Crete, and the rise and fall of the Minoan civilization.

Robert Koehl has long considered processions to have played an integral role in Aegean Bronze Age societies. Papers concentrate mainly on evidence from Crete, the Cyclades and the Greek mainland, with additional perspectives from abroad, these geographic divisions forming the basic outline of this volume.

The University of Pennsylvania owns the largest collection of Minoan artifacts outside of Europe. The objects were acquired legally from the nation of Crete after it became independent from the Ottoman Empire and before its request was accepted to become a part of Greece, whose laws forbade such gifts to institutions that had sponsored archaeological expeditions. This third volume about the Cretan Collection in the Penn Museum presents the Minoan metal artifacts. They provide primary evidence for the early history of metallurgy in southeastern Europe during the second millennium B.C. This is a rich and varied assemblage of objects, with a large number of different classes. It is especially rich in items from the preliminary stages of metalwork (including oxhide ingot fragments, cut preliminary strips, and small cast strips used as early stages in the manufacture of artifacts). The study using modern techniques of examination-including scientific analyses-both documents the museum's holdings and provides new information on Minoan metalworking. Two important metallurgical techniques are documented: eutectic bonding of silver-capped rivets on daggers and "casting on" repairs to an existing object, which has not been noted previously in Minoan metalwork. The assemblage is remarkable for the light its objects shed on the history of technology.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Writing from Invention to Decipherment contains a wealth of global scholarship on ancient writing systems from China, Mesopotamia, Central America, and the Mediterranean, to more recent newly created scripts such as the Rongorongo from Easter Island, the Caroline Island scripts, as well as the alphabet. The aim is to dig into the foundations of writing, showcasing the complexities and varieties of scripts, from their invention to the potential decipherment of poorly understood scripts. The volume offers state-of-the-art research on undeciphered scripts from the Aegean (as for example, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A) or not completely deciphered (as for example Maya) scripts. From a methodological perspective, these contributions lay out how and why writing was invented, who used it, and to what ends. Here writing is presented as a multi-modal cultural phenomenon, that intersects and transcends neat discipline boundaries, within an inclusive approach bridging archaeology, linguistics, epigraphy, and cognitive studies.

The mid second millennium BC material record of the southern Aegean shows evidence of strong Cretan influence. This phenomenon has traditionally been seen in terms of ‘Minoanisation’, but the nature and degree of Cretan influence, and the process/processes by which it was spread and adopted, have been widely debated. This new study addresses the question of ‘Minoanisation’ through a study of the adoption of Cretan technologies in the wider southern Aegean: principally, weaving technology. By the early Late Bronze Age, Cretan-style discoid loom weights had appeared at a number of settlements across the southern Aegean. In most cases, this represents not only the adoption of a particular type of loom weight, but also the introduction of a new weaving technology: the use of the warp-weighted loom. The evidence for, and the implications of, the adoption of this new technology is examined. Drawing upon recent advances in textile experimental archaeology, the types of textiles that are likely to have been produced at a range of sites both on Crete itself and in the wider southern Aegean are discussed, and the likely nature and scale of textile production at the various settlements is assessed. A consideration of the evidence for the timing and extent of the adoption of Cretan weaving technology in the light of additional evidence for the adoption of other Cretan technologies is used to gain insight into the potential social and economic strategies engaged in by various groups across the southern Aegean, as well as the motivations that may have driven the adoption and adaptation of Cretan cultural traits and accompanying behaviors. By examining how technological skills and techniques are learned and considering possible mechanisms for the transmission of such technical knowledge and know-how, new perspectives can be proposed concerning the processes through which Cretan techniques were taken up and imitated abroad.

The results of excavations carried out at two Late Minoan III sites at Mochlos in eastern Crete are presented. The stratigraphy and architecture of a total of 31 tombs and 11 houses are discussed together with a complete list of artifacts, ecofacts, and skeletal remains from each context. The cemetery remains mirror the settlement remains, and the conclusions discuss how the two sites reflect each other. Rarely in Crete are a settlement and its cemetery both preserved, and it is extremely fortunate to be able to excavate both.

The aim of this volume is to present an overview of current trends and individual methodological attempts towards arriving at an adequate understanding of Minoan, Cycladic, and Mycenaean iconography.

This book is a study of the house tombs of Crete based on a reexamination of the extant remains at the cemeteries of Gournia and Mochlos. Excavated in the beginning of the century by Harriet Boyd Hawes (Gournia) and Richard B. Seager (Mochlos), the cemeteries underwent cleaning operations in 1971, 1972, and 1976. These later investigations resulted in a more thorough understanding of the sites; actual-state plans and sections of the tombs and over-all maps of the cemeteries were produced. Chapters I and II present the excavations of the cemeteries of Gournia and Mochlos. A description of the cemetery as a whole unit is followed by a discussion of each tomb that includes bibliography, a description of location and excavation, a description of architecture, information about burials and chronology, and a catalogue of new and reexamined finds. Chapter III is a catalogue of all known tombs of this type in Crete. These two sections are tied together by the architectural discussion in Chapter IV. Chapter V, Offerings and Shrines, and Chapter VI, Burials and Social Ranking, explore the uses of house tombs and their significance in the religious and political life of early Greece. The volume has a comprehensive index, map and plans of the sites, line drawings of many of the catalogued objects, and photographs of the tombs and found objects.

This publication presents the archaeological evidence from two associated Minoan sites situated at Apesokari in the Mesara Plain of South-Central Crete, Tholos Tomb A and the neighboring free-standing domestic complex on Vigla Hill. It thoroughly reconstructs the natural and social landscape of this Cretan community from the late Prepalatial to the early Neopalatial periods through its interdisciplinary character; this includes photogrammetric two- and three-dimensional models of the architectural remains, viewshed analysis of both monuments and of the earlier Tholos Tomb B, as well as A-DNA and stable isotope analysis of the bones. The study of the burial dataset provides insights into the social construction of collective memory and identity by the burying social group, whereas the habitational deposits from the building on Vigla hill establish the longevity and function of the site as a node of the southern Mesara communication and exchange networks.