Ben Watts-Wooldridge

Topic

The Production, Trade, and Consumption of Pictorial Pottery in Late Helladic IIIC

Department of Greek and Roman Studies

Date & location

• Monday, August 12, 2024
• 10:00 A.M.
• Clearihue Building, Room B007

Examining Committee

Supervisory Committee

• Dr. Trevor Van Damme, Department of Greek and Roman Studies, University of Victoria (Supervisor)
• Dr. Brendan Burke, Department of Greek and Roman Studies, UVic (Member)

External Examiner

• Dr. Evanthia Baboula, Department of Art History and Visual Studies, UVic

Chair of Oral Examination

• Dr. Patrick Dunae, Department of History, UVic

Abstract

Following the collapse of the Mycenaean palatial administrations, communities across Late Bronze Age Greece continued to maintain and establish interregional contacts and local seats of authority. The developments and innovations of this period were accompanied by the revival of Mycenaean pictorial style pottery. This decorative style employed figural motifs on vessels primarily intended for use in commensal social activity and was produced and traded across mainland Greece. Its study thus prompts consideration of regionalism, social ideology, and exchange in the post-collapse period: the present thesis examines the 12^th century BCE rise of the pictorial style in the context of these themes.

I utilize the pictorial style pottery from the post-palatial settlement of Eleon in Eastern Boeotia as a primary case study. Among the large corpus of LH IIIC ceramics unearthed at the site is included a sizable and unpublished body of pictorial style pottery comprising 50 fragmentary vessels decorated with a variety of figural motifs. This positions Eleon’s pictorial corpus as one of the largest in Post-palatial Greece, inferior in number only to the published collections from Mycenae, Tiryns, and Lefkandi. While these repertoires of pictorial pottery have been discussed at length in the literature, scholarship has traditionally concentrated primarily on the iconographic elements of the vessels without considering the significance of their production and distribution. Drawing on previously published neutron activation analysis conducted on ceramic materials from Eleon, this thesis presents the results of a macroscopic fabric study that allows for attribution of provenance to the pictorial style pottery from the site.

The integration of the macroscopic fabric study and iconographic analysis attests to a high degree of interregional exchange of pictorial style pottery following the collapse of the palaces. Euboean workshops are shown to be the exclusive source of chariot and horse iconography consumed in LH IIIC Boeotia, supporting the recent suggestion that a limited number of centers produced chariot kraters. Stylistic continuity and reflections of palatial iconography in the pictorial art of post-palatial communities is also suggested to be indicative of a relationship between workshops of the pre- and post-collapse periods.

A close contextual study attests to the domestic nature of pictorial pottery consumption in commensal social activity of the 12^th century BCE. The site of Eleon additionally provides evidence for the probable use of pictorial style pottery in a ritual context, one of the only instances of such consumption. The use of figure-decorated pottery in such contexts, combined with the presence of iconographic elements which recall the palatial past, is argued to reflect the intentional employment of the pictorial style in constructing a sense of collective memory.