The Trade of Pictorial Pottery in the 12th Century B.C.E.: New Data from Ancient Eleon, Boeotia (15 min)

Presenters

Ben Watts-Wooldridge, University of Victoria

Abstract

The Greek-Canadian excavations at Eleon in eastern Boeotia have brought to light a large corpus of LH IIIC (12th century B.C.E.) pottery. This paper presents for the first time the 38 pictorial vessels recovered from the 2011–2018 excavations. While previous scholarship has considered pictorial assemblages from disparate sites such as Lefkandi, Mycenae, and Tiryns, these studies have traditionally concentrated on the iconographic elements of the vessels. The present study contributes to the study of Mycenaean pictorial pottery by integrating a macroscopic study of the fabrics with an analysis of the iconographic scenes to consider their production, trade, and consumption.

Recent petrographic and neutron activation analyses on a selection of sherds from Eleon have identified both local and nonlocal fabric groups present in Eleon’s ceramic repertoire. These results informed my own macroscopic study of the fabrics carried out during the 2023 field season, which identified 11 fabric groups represented among the pictorial corpus. While some of these fabrics were matched to local Boeotian clays, well over 50 percent of the vessels can be attributed to external production centers. The largest single group, represented by macrofabric BP and assigned a Euboean provenance, included 22 of the 38 pictorial vessels.

Integration of the macroscopic fabric analysis and iconography revealed that chariot scenes were limited to Euboean workshops, whereas more generic depictions of fish or birds emerged from local workshops. My research supports the recent suggestion that a limited number of centers produced chariot kraters and raises new questions about the relationship between the palatial workshops of the Argolid and the postpalatial workshops of Euboea.