Bells of fairly small size were known across ancient Greece from the Archaic period onwards, both in bronze and terracotta. They are found in sanctuaries, graves and, more rarely, in houses, and served a variety of purposes, both practical and more abstract, in daily life and ritual, and in both male and female contexts. Archaeological, iconographical and literary sources attest to their use as votive offerings in ritual and funerary contexts, as signalling instruments for town-guards, as amulets for children and women as well as, in South Italy, in a Dionysiac context. A use as animal (notably horse) bells, however, was not widespread before the later Roman period. The bells' origins lie in the ancient Near East and Caucasian area, from where they found their way especially to Archaic Samos and Cyprus and later to mainland Greece. Here, the largest known find complex of bronze and terracotta bells, mostly of Classical date, comes from the old British excavations in the sanctuary of Athena on the Spartan acropolis and is published here for the first time. Spartan bells are distinctive in shape yet related particularly to other Lakonian and Boiotian bells as well as earlier bells from Samos. At Sparta, as elsewhere, the connotation of the bells' bronze sound as magical, protective, purificatory and apotropaic was central to their use, although specific functions varied according to place, time, and occasion.

Seven bun type, one slab type, and 44 oxhide type Late Bronze Age ingots found in the Aegean region, Crete and Mainland Greece have been analysed for their chemical content (twelve elements) by atomic absorption spectroscopy. The results show that the ingots contain variable amounts of oxygen as copper(I) oxide. The oxhide ingots are made of purer copper, the bun type are of relatively pure copper and bronze, while the slab type is bronze. The oxhide ingots from Crete may have a different origin from those found in the Aegean and in Mainland Greece because they have a different chemical composition. The metallographic examination of twenty ingots, three of bun and seventeen of oxhide type, revealed that they have been cast in open moulds, followed by slow cooling. Microanalyses of inclusions in fifteen ingots revealed the presence of copper(I) sulphide, copper(I) oxide, copper-iron and copper-iron-sulphur and their origin is discussed. Hardness measurements on fourteen ingots of various types revealed that they are somewhat harder for a cast object than control alloys and likely explanations are given.

Part 1 (Driessen) discusses the evidence in the Linear B tablets for a military organization and the use of mercenaries at Mycenaean Knossos. First, the Pylian evidence for foreign troops is discussed. At Knossos, there is also evidence for relatively large groups of men who may be of non-Cretan origin in the Linear B tablets. It is asked whether these may be foreigners, as in the Pylian tablets, who rendered military service in return for fiefs of land. It is suggested that eqeta were military commanders responsible for groups of men and specific geographical areas. Keseno are identified as ‘foreign warriors’ who were of lower rank than eqeta, namely mercenaries in the service of the Mycenaean wanaka of Knossos.

Part 2 (Macdonald) reviews the latest evidence for warrior burials in LM II–IIIA2. The term is confined to burials with swords, since they are more likely to have had a purely military function as well as being the weapon of prestige. The evidence for a major Knossian workshop which produced the finest ‘horned’ and ‘cruciform’ swords and one-piece spearheads is discussed. An examination of the different Knossian cemeteries leads to the possible identification of traditional Minoan burial grounds on Upper Gypsadhes and at Mavro Spelio, while the Zapher Papoura and Sellopoulo cemeteries may be those of the LM IIIA Mycenaean community. The concept of a military aristocracy is reviewed, and rejected in favour of an interpretation which sees the Knossian warrior burials as representing ‘officers’ of different ranks in the Palace military organization drawn from different levels of society. Finally, it is proposed that the lack of uniformity of sword-types and the absence of warrior burials in the Knossos area after LM IIIA2, represent the demise of the Knossian workshop and the end of the military organization.

The excavations of the Cambridge Keros Project at early bronze age Dhaskalio and Dhaskalio Kavos on the Cycladic Island of Keros during the 2006 and 2007 seasons are described. They were directed by Colin Renfrew with Olga Philaniotou as Associate Director and Neil Brodie and Giorgos Gavalas as Assistant Directors. The site of Dhaskalio Kavos is well-known for the extensive looting which took place there during the 1950's. Rescue excavations by Christos Doumas in 1963 and by Photeini Zapheiropoulou in 1967, and a project in 1987, directed by Renfrew, Doumas and Lila Marangou, defined the extent of the looted ‘special deposit’, assigned to the early bronze age Keros-Syros culture (Early Bronze II). At the beginning of the 2006 field season a separate and unlooted special deposit was located at the southern end of the Kavos site (the ‘Special Deposit South’). Its excavation yielded thousands of fragments of marble vessels and potsherds, and hundreds of broken marble figurines. These had been deliberately broken elsewhere, brought to the site and deposited there in what appears to be a ritual context. Work on the Special Deposit South continued in 2007, and excavations on the extensive Early Cycladic settlement on the small (200 metre) but precipitous island of Dhaskalio were initiated. Well preserved building remains were uncovered with abundant Early Cycladic domestic materials.

Dhaskalio island may now be recognised as a major settlement of the Keros-Syros culture (c. 2800 to 2300 BC). Kavos, immediately opposite on Keros itself, is confirmed as the locus for two separate areas of structured deposition of high status materials, brought from a wide range of sources in the Cyclades and possibly beyond, apparently already in fragmentary condition, and placed there in a series of prestations for which a ritual context may safely be inferred. Dhaskalio Kavos may now be claimed as the first major symbolic centre of the early Aegean.

The School's decision to undertake work in the island of Chios was made possible by the generosity of an anonymous donor. The work was placed under my direction, and in the first year (1952) excavations were carried out on a limited scale during three weeks of June on the Kofinà ridge in Chios town, while soundings were made on an Early Bronze Age site at Emporio near Pyrgi on the south coast of the island, where work has since continued.

The site of Kofinà was chosen because Archaic sherds on the surface raised a hope that it might be possible to uncover something of the Archaic city there. As it turned out, the Kofinà area was on the very edge of the ancient city, as of the modern town. The excavations at Kofinà were begun by myself, assisted by Mr. J. K. Anderson, and after the first ten days they were continued and completed by Mr. Anderson and Mr. R. V. Nicholls. The results of the excavations are here published in full by Mr. Anderson.

The single ceramic phase of the Aegean Early Bronze Age known as the ‘Kastri group’ has been dated by scholars either to an early phase of EB 3 or to the late phase of EB 2. However, careful examination of the contextual associations of the characteristic pottery of this group in the Cycladic islands and the mainland, and detailed analysis of the ceramic forms and features first appearing in this phase, show the ‘Kastri group’ pottery to occur, as a rule, with forms of EB 2. It is also shown that either this pottery itself, or certain forms with which it occurs, present features heralding EB 3. It is thus proposed that the ‘Kastri group’ constitutes a transitional phase of apparently short duration, intermediate between EB 2 and 3, overlapping in date with both the last stages of the former and the early stages of the latter and ‘bridging’ these two periods.

In 1973, after an interval of many years, the British School at Athens returned to Sparta to resume work in an area with which it had been associated since early in the present century. The site chosen was the Mycenaean settlement at the Menelaion, briefly investigated by R. M. Dawkins in 1910. Full seasons of excavation were completed in each of the years 1973–6, and 1980. A cleaning season was undertaken in 1977, while supplementary excavations were made in the autumns of 1977 and 1978. Several brief preliminary accounts of this work have appeared, while one or two objects of particular intrinsic interest have been published in detail.

For the time being, at least, the excavation of the prehistoric site at the Menelaion is at an end. Though work on the preparation of the final report is well advanced, it will be some time before this can be published, and the many classes of pottery and other objects can be made generally available.

The aim of this paper is to provide an account of neolithic and bronze age settlement in one part of Macedonia: the geographical unit which is defined by the rivers Aliakmon and Axios. The choice of the area as the focus of investigation has been suggested by the hypothesis that geographical zones may form a historical basis for human activity, and cultural zones be identified accordingly with distinct physiographic units. The area selected for research is one such unit forming consecutive basins which are divided into valley systems by means of mountain ranges.

The existing archaeological data combined with the results of personal research and original fieldwork are assembled in order to outline the development of human settlement in this part of Macedonia. The catalogue contains ninety six sites. The study involves an attempt to evaluate the nature of prehistoric habitation in a regional context, a study which presupposed some examination of all reported sites, and some study of the history of the landscape. The main issues discussed are the character of habitation patterns and settlement distribution and continuity by period. Finally the specific settlement patterns of the area are compared with patterns observed in neighbouring regions.

A pilot project was carried out to assess the frequency of surviving fingerprints on Early Minoan pottery and to assess the quality of the prints. Two pottery assemblages, from the Ayia Kyriaki tholos and Myrtos Fournou Korifi settlement, were examined. Almost fifty sherds/vessels (out of nearly 20,000) were found to carry a total of 154 prints, but the majority were of poor quality. Of the thirty clear prints, however, fourteen had five or more ridge characteristics, including one example with as many as twelve. It is suggested that kiln assemblages might yield both more and better preserved prints.

Contexts recently excavated by the BSA in the Roman stoa at Sparta contain pottery dating from the 12th to early 14th centuries. The bulk of the material dates to the first half of the 13th cent., and demonstrates that certain styles of pottery decoration, once considered to be mainly 12th-cent. in date, continue in currency much longer. These contexts show that Champlevé (Morgan's ‘Incised ware’) decorated with animal motives in the tondo are companion pieces of Glaze Painted (Morgan's ‘Green and Brown Painted group V’) and late Slip Painted wares. The descriptively (but confusingly) named ‘Protogeometric’ style of plainware decoration is also one that remains in currency. Cooking-vessels are almost exclusively handmade, in a very coarse fabric evocative of so-called ‘Slavic’ pottery of the 7th cent., with which it may well be confused. Table amphoras (stamnia) and small pithoi are often decorated with a distinctive incised decoration, making handles and body sherds of this usually nondescript and conservative shape particularly identifiable and diagnostic.

This paper covers the remaining districts of Laconia which have not been described in the last Annual, as well as the islands of Kythera and Antikythera. We include a Chronological Table, Distribution Maps, and a short summary. Abbreviations used are the same as for Part I.

Gythion and Cranae:

So far no prehistoric remains have been discovered on the acropolis at Gythion, although the south and east terraces are covered with classical and Roman pottery. On the island of Cranae, however (Plate 18a), obsidian is plentiful, and recently a considerable quantity of L.H. III sherds (of rather poor quality) has been found. The island measures about 300 metres east to west and 100 metres north to south, and the prehistoric settlement seems to have occupied about half of this area. There is now very little depth of soil, except in the vicinity of the small Turkish fort in the centre (Plate 18a). The amount of Mycenaean pottery indicates a fairly important site, such as the Homeric story of the flight of Paris and Helen from here might lead us to expect (Il. iii. 443–6). It is likely that there was also some E.H. occupation, since some of the coarse ware appears to be handmade.

This article deals with the inscriptional and literary evidence for the ethne of Epirus and Upper Macedonia. It is argued that the term ethnos was used not of a rural settlement but of both nomadic and settled groups of persons, each of which believed itself to be of common racial descent. Both areas were exceptionally well suited in terrain and in climate to the practice of transhumant pastoralism by small nomadic or semi-nomadic ‘companies’.

Macroscopic Fabric Analysis, the systematic study and description of ceramic fabrics with the aid of a handlens and other simple equipment, has grown in importance along with systematic archaeological survey. Microscopic Fabric Analysis, or ceramic petrology, is better known, but more expensive and time-consuming. Using examples drawn from Sphakia Survey material, the authors show that Macroscopic Fabric Analysis of large pottery collections with a high proportion of coarse ware sherds, when combined with targeted microscopic analysis, provides detailed, reliable information on crucial topics such as chronology, in this case from FN/EM I–Turkish; function (cooking, transport, storage, and beehives); and regional interaction. The authors also discuss issues connected with publication, including the use of electronic publications such as the Sphakia Survey website, and the rigorous comparison of individual fabrics, and they make a case for adopting standard ceramic terminology.

The site of ancient Knossos, which lies near the present village of Makryteichos, about four miles inland from Candia, is shut in by higher hills in three directions. Somewhat South however of the scanty remains of the Roman City, the ground gradually rises into a rounded hill generally known as Kephala or in its fuller form τοῦ Τσελεβῆ ἡ Κεφάλα—“the Squire's Knoll,” from the fact that it belonged to a local Bey or landowner whose country house stands by the stream below. This hill lies at the confluence of a tributary stream with the ancient Kairatos (now, Κατσαμπᾶς), and descends somewhat steeply towards these channels on the South and East.

The large double cavern situated to south-west of, and about 500 feet higher than Psychro, avillage of the upland Lasithi plain in Crete, has long been known to contain early votive objects (Plate IX. 1). The discovery was made by peasants about 1883, who were in the habit of housing goats and pigeons there, and in 1886 the noise of it brought to the spot Professor F. Halbherr in company with Dr. J. Hazzidakis. Their mission was to recover as many objects as possible from the peasants' hands, but also in the event they dug over about two square metres of the embanked terrace before the cave in the hope of finding remains of an altar. After their departure the peasants continued to burrow from time to time among the boulders in the upper cave, and to find bronzes, many of which were bought by Mr. A. J. Evans in 1894. In 1895 the latter, with Mr. J. L. Myres, visited the spot, and the same explorer, returning in 1896 and finding in Psychro a piece of an inscribed libation table, made a sinking into the deposit under the north wall of the upper grot, where the table had been found, and unearthed some objects. In 1897 came Mons. J. Demargne, of the French School at Athens, and boring under the south-western wall, found a second piece of a libation table, uninscribed.

The date of the first contact of the Greeks with the Western Mediterranean is very difficult to determine from literary sources. It is as old as the Theogony and probably as old as the Odyssey; but there is, as yet, no general agreement as to the date of either of these sources. Many historians still assume that it began, if not with the foundation of the Greek colonies in Sicily, at least with that of Cumae. These colonies, they maintain, were planted solely as a means of solving the problem of over-population in old Greece, in areas suitable for the production of corn, and without commercial intent. Whence came the necessary geographical knowledge and how the sites were chosen is seldom clearly stated, if it is stated at all. We are left with vague suggestions such as a preliminary expedition of exploration or ‘Traditional Survival’ of geographical knowledge based on Minoan, Mycenaean and Nostoi voyages, any explanation, in fact, that will save the historian from the natural assumption that the western colonies were planted in areas previously reached by Greek commercial enterprise.

Despite the amount of textual material surviving from classical Greece, our knowledge of the household has remained limited because of the selectivity and orientation of those texts. In this paper, archaeological remains of late 5th- to late 4th-cent. houses are explored in order to shed light on aspects of domestic relations that recur most frequently in the sources: the relationship between male and female household members, and the way in which this was reinforced through the organization of the domestic environment. The traditional picture of a house divided into male and female areas is an over-simplification of a complex pattern of social relationships. A broader approach focuses on interaction between men and women, rather than on women's activity in isolation. The resultant, more detailed model for gender relations offers a glimpse of variability through space and time in how relationships were expressed spatially, and suggests the possibility of differences in the relationships themselves at different levels of the social hierarchy.

Pausanias' date (371) for the foundation/synoikism of the federal Arkadian capital, Megalopolis, is preferable to Diodorus' (368). But the process was spread over several years, beginning soon after the Battle of Leuktra. Diodorus' source here was not Ephorus but the ‘chronographic source’ from which Diodorus derived other material about city-foundations, synoikisms etc. The ‘battle’, after which Diodorus says the city was founded, may in the chronographer have been Leuktra itself rather than the ‘Tearless Battle’ of 368. There are no good military or political objections to the suggested dating, which avoids the need to postulate two Arcadian federalists called Proxenos, both active and prominent at much the same time.

This catalogue is offered as a tribute to the great British epigraphist to whom this volume is dedicated. Since it consists chiefly of inscribed bases which have lost their sculpture, it may serve as a kind of appendix to studies of archaic Attic funeral monuments, in particular to the two monumental works by Dr. G. M. A. Richter, Kouroi and Archaic Attic Gravestones. I have listed the inscriptions, where possible, under the area of Attica whence each is known, or thought, to have come, and added brief lists of any archaic sculpture which is certainly or possibly (a) from these areas and (b) funerary. Obviously, many inclusions in both lists may be wrong. Stones stray as far as cats or pigeons do, and have no homing instincts. Some of the sculptures listed may have been dedications. But it seemed advisable to risk including the unlawful rather than excluding the lawful, provided that the uncertainties were made clear. Even after one has allowed for all the probabilities of error, the statistics produced from these combined lists yield some general conclusions that are not without interest. They are discussed at the end of the lists.

In the past it has often been assumed that, although rental of real estate in Classical Greece was relatively common, sales of such property were not. This article challenges that assumption by looking in detail at a small group of inscriptions from Olynthos in the Chalkidiki, which date to the first half of the fourth century and record transactions involving houses in the city. By analysing these documents in conjunction with their archaeological contexts, it becomes evident that there was a systematic set of criteria by which such properties were valued, and that a premium was placed upon larger houses and those located close to the agora, at the centre of the social and political life of the city. This adds a new dimension to the emerging picture of the increasing use of the house as a symbol of personal prestige during the fourth century. The limited evidence available from Athens and the Attic deme centres suggests that Attic town houses had a comparable range of values and that a similar shared concept of value may therefore have been operating. It thus seems that in the case of town houses, at least, sufficient properties were changing hands for potential purchasers to have a shared concept of their value, and this may indicate that families moved between different areas of a settlement, or between different settlements.