"Submycenaean" and LH IIIC Domestic Deposits in Athens

Abstract

by an overlapping of diagnostic shapes and decoration. Although few graves provide similar evidence for the contemporary use of old and new types, the hundreds of grave groups from the Agora, the Kerameikos, and elsewhere in Athens may for the most part be equated with one or another of the major phases seen in the wells: there is no phase, Protogeometric through Geometric, when the garbage of the living and the graves of the recently dead did not exist side-by-side. Proceeding backward, the number of Submycenaean graves in or near Athens approaches 150. Some of these appear to be the immediate predecessors of the earliest Protogeometric graves, still others may have been furnished by conservative members of the early Protogeometric community. The earliest Protogeometric wells in the Agora, too, contain enough Submycenaean types to suggest that some, e.g. monochrome skyphoi, were still in current production. But in general, the distinction between grave, or ritual, and domestic forms permits minimal comparison between the graves and wells. This is even truer when one examines still earlier domestic deposits in an attempt to isolate and define a phase parallel with the bulk of the Submycenaean graves. Three deposits from the American Excavations are chronologically intermediate between the earliest Protogeometric wells and the latest published LH IIIC deposits in Athens (Agora XIII, 261-62). Two are small, probably from wells, one near the Classical Tholos, the other on the east side of the Agora by the Antonine Monopteros; they are the earliest of the post-LH IIIB wells in this area. The third, a very large deposit that unfortunately contains earlier material going back to the Neolithic period, lay high on the Acropolis northwest slopes just east of the Paved Court behind the Klepsydra; it is the latest of the wells on the North Slope prior to the sixth century B.C. This last has already been mar halled as evidence for the history of Athens in the tw lfth century B.C. (e.g. Sp. Iakovides, 'H