The Wider Island of Pelops : Studies on Prehistoric Aegean Pottery in Honour of Professor Christopher Mee
ISBN: 9781803273297
Platform/Publisher: Ebook Central / Archaeopress
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Limited; Download: 7 Days at a Time
Subjects: Fine Arts;

The Wider Island of Pelops explores the myriad ways in which pottery was created, utilized, and experienced in the prehistoric Aegean, across a period of more than 4000 years between the Middle Neolithic and the Early Iron Age transition. Pottery is capable both of creating bonds and creating barriers. It serves as a sociocultural call and response, marking similarity and difference, collectivism and individualism, knowledge, and the absence of knowledge. Contextually-bound, it embodies identities, memories and multiple histories. It reflects choice and reinforces orthodoxy; a product of change, and a driver of it, that both creates and curates understanding of the world. Necessity and commodity, at times anachronistic, and at others, avant-garde, it is subversive and slavish, innovative and derivative; visible always, and never without value.

The seventeen papers collected here provide a diachronic perspective on the value of pottery in marking and mediating cross-scale sociocultural discourse; in framing and facilitating the transmission of knowledge and meaning; in driving economies; in the preservation of memory, in the practice of cult; and, in more recent times, as a vector in the dialogue of imperialism: at once introducing key themes in the study of Aegean pottery, and providing a snapshot of recent archaeological work in Greece.

David Michael Smith holds a doctorate in Aegean Prehistory from the University of Liverpool, where he is a post-doctoral research associate. Author of Pocket Museum: Greece (Thames & Hudson), his analysis of Bronze Age pottery and metalwork from the Cycladic site of Phylakopi, Melos, is currently in press. He is currently preparing the publication of pottery from Keros and Dhaskalio, as well as the results of excavation at the site of Olynthos in Macedonia.

William G. Cavanagh is Professor Emeritus of Aegean Archaeology and co-director of the Centre for Spartan and Peloponnesian Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is co-director of excavations at the Laconian site of Kouphovouno, Laconia, and has previously co-directed the Laconia Survey and Laconia Rural Sites project. His research focuses on Laconian archaeology, the archaeology of death and mathematical applications in archaeology. He is currently preparing the publication of excavations at Kouphovouno and Pavlopetri.

Angelos Papadopoulos holds a doctorate in archaeology from the University of Liverpool and teaches at College Year in Athens and the Open University of Cyprus. His research is focused on various aspects of iconography, trade and warfare in the Bronze Age Mediterranean and the Eastern Mediterranean. Angelos is an active field archaeologist and is currently working towards the publication of the prehistoric cemetery of Kissonerga-Ammoudia in Cyprus and ceramic material from Tell el-Hesi, Israel.

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